| Paul "Legs" Barrett | |
|---|---|
Paul 'Legs' Barrett in his office |
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | Paul Francis Barrett |
| Born | 14 December 1940 |
| Origin | Blackwood, Wales |
| Occupations | Rock and Roll music manager and agent, author |
| Years active | 1958 - present date |
| Associated acts | Shakin' Stevens and the Sunsets, Dave Edmunds, Wee Willie Harris, Bill Haley and the Comets, The Jets, Matchbox, Crazy Cavan and the Rhythm Rockers, Screaming Jay Hawkins, Linda Gail Lewis. |
| Website | [1] |
Paul Franklyn "Legs" Barrett (born 14 December 1940 in Blackwood, Monmouthshire) is the UK's best known agent and manager of 1950s style Rock and Roll artistes, an author and previously a singer and film actor. He is married to Lorraine Barrett, the former Welsh Assembly Commissioner and Assembly Member for the Cardiff South and Penarth constituency.
Barrett is probably best known as the discoverer, mentor and first manager of the singer now known as Shakin' Stevens during the 1960s and 1970s, but has also represented and promoted many more of the genre's greats during a long and varied career.
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Barrett was born in Blackwood, Monmouthshire in 1940 but moved to Penarth, 4 miles from Cardiff, at a young age, where he has lived ever since apart from a short period in London during 1960. His father was a brass moulder and his mother was a housewife and author. His parents named him Paul after Paul Robeson the black American Marxist Communist and Francis after Sir Francis Drake. However Barrett always disliked his middle name and formally changed it in 1961 to Franklyn because he preferred the name and admired Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He reached well over six feet tall by his mid teens and earned the nickname "Legs" due to his height and slim build, a nickname that has stayed with him all his life.
He was educated at Cogan School, King's College, Cardiff and Victoria Road School, Penarth. Barrett attended Kings College at the same time as Colin McCormack, later recognised as one of the UK's most renowned Shakespearean actors, and they became close friends. On leaving secondary school in 1956 Barrett bounced in and out of dozens of mundane and undemanding jobs including photographer's assistant, market barrow-boy, door-to-door salesman, council labourer, brewery worker, warehouseman, plastics-moulder, potato-packer, railway-signalman, shop assistant, grassmower, hospital porter and hotel receptionist.
During the 1950s he developed a passion for American rock and roll music that has never left him. In his spare time he started acting as agent and manager for Penarth's first rock group, the Backbeats, and began promoting the teenage dances at the local venue, the Paget Rooms, that would continue until the early 1980s when health and safety issues, coupled with alcoholic drinks and smoking bans, virtually closed the venue to dances and concerts. During the 1960s Barrett's promotions ran regularly under names such as "The Penarth Poll Winners' Concert", "Midsummer Night's Madness" and the "Annual Christmas Rock and Roll Extravaganza". Barrett was active in promoting events during the annual Penarth Holiday Fortnight each July.
A staunch supporter of disgraced American Rock and Roll DJ Alan Freed, Barrett also organised well attended film nights at the Paget Rooms, featuring 1950s classics like The Girl Can't Help It and Rock, Rock, Rock. He also opened a specialist rock and roll record shop on Glebe Street, that specialised in importing 1950s classic records from the US, that became known countrywide as the best source of the genre in the UK.
With his entrepreneurial eye always on trends, Barrett decided to cash in on the 1960s psychedelic movement in British music and the Backbeats briefly shifted to performing as the 'flower power'-style "Earl Fuggle and the Electric Poets" with Barrett himself taking the persona of Earl Fuggle on lead vocals. The idea developed further into a performance group named "The 98% Mom and Apple Pie West Coast Rock and Roll Band" that featured former Backbeats' David "Batman" Goddard on bass, Cyril "Sid" Petherick on guitar and Robert "Rockin' Louis" Llewellyn on drums with additional musicians, psychedelic painter "Gerald the Artist", nude female dancers and circus performers in a multimedia experience that shared London bills such as the Roundhouse with bands like Soft Machine, Hawkwind and Pink Floyd.
A keen fan of the Backbeats was a teenager from Cardiff, named Michael Barratt, who frequently hopped on stage at the Paget Rooms to perform a guest vocal with the band and pestered Rockin' Louie for singing and dancing tips and, soon enough, Michael was being referred to as 'Rockin' Louie II'.[1] By the mid 1960s however, Michael had formed his own rock band with school friends. Originally named the Olympics, then the Cossacks, they finally decided to call themselves the Denims, by which point they found themselves as a support act to Michael's heroes, the Backbeats. Eventually, when the Denims fell apart, Michael wasted no time in forming a new group named the Rebels.
It was the Rebels that Paul Barrett reluctantly went to see after a recommendation early in 1969. Although distinctly unimpressed with the band itself, Barrett saw something in their young singer who, only a few years earlier, had been hanging around looking for ideas from the Backbeats. He offered to manage Michael on two conditions: firstly, he would have to ditch his group and, secondly, he must find himself an exciting new stage name. Barratt, agreeing to both suggestions, promptly left the Rebels and then, inspired either by the memory of an old school friend playing bat and ball or maybe even an eccentric local roadsweeper, Michael Barratt rechristened himself Shakin' Stevens.[2]
Barrett would manage Shakin' Stevens and the Sunsets until 1977, even appearing on stage with them and adding his distinctive bass vocals to the show. As soon as Shaky began rehearsals for Elvis!-The Musical, the Sunsets pressed on with their alternate plan to have Rockin' Louie as their frontman, until Stevens was free from his commitment to the show. This worked fine until one night at the Rock Garden, London when an audience became disappointed by the non-appearance of Shakin' Stevens (as well as the crazy Sunset's pianist Ace Skudder who had inexplicably also failed to turn up for the gig) and nearly rioted. The venue's management apparently used this as a reason to negotiate a rebate from Paul Barrett, a suggestion which nearly ended in a violent confrontation.[1]
The Sunsets persisted for a few more years with Barrett arranging mildly successful tours of the Netherlands and Ireland for them as well as countless one night gigs all over the UK. Barrett also negotiated Rockin' Louie’s recording of an album titled ‘It Will Stand’ for Charly records that became a minor seller in European markets and a minor hit in the Southern US states, becoming part of the developing 'Beach Music' scene and also benefitting from a 1950s vintage black rock ’n’ roll revival dance trend. When Louie finally decided to leave the Sunsets and reform the Backbeats, with Sid Petherick and Dave Goddard, Barrett decided the time had arrived to sever his association with the Sunsets. It was several years later before the Sunsets started performing again with original members, but with no further association with Barrett.
After Stevens signed a new management deal with music industry doyenne Freya Miller in 1979 and went on to national and international success, Barrett became embroiled in a seemingly endless litigation for twenty years over unpaid royalties from several albums that had been written and produced under his guidance, but later rereleased to commercial success. In 1993 after 16 years of backwards and forwards negotiations Barrett's sense of injustice at monies owed came to fruition. As a result, Shakin' Stevens found himself in Cardiff High Court alongside record producer Dave Edmunds facing charges of non-payment of royalties from former Sunsets Rockin' Louie, Carl Petersen, Steve Percy and Paul Dolan. The prosecution claimed that the former band members were due a share of royalties which Shaky and his management had received from the reissue of the album A Legend in the early 1980s. The judge agreed and, while the unpaid royalties only amounted to around £70,000 to be divided amongst all of them, the court costs ended up costing Shaky and Dave Edmunds £500,000.[2]
While Shaky was willing to call a truce after that court case, Paul Barrett was still seething from the non-payment of royalties from the I'm No J.D. and Rockin' And Shakin' albums. As a result, Barrett reissued both albums on a single CD in 2005 under the uncompromising title of How To Be Awarded Two Gold Records And Not Be Paid A Penny In Royalties, complete with sleeve notes issuing a challenge to both Sony and Universal (who now officially own the rights to the two records) to sue him if they believed their rights had been breached. Neither conglomerate have yet to accept the challenge.
Ever since first managing Shakin' Stevens in 1969, Barrett has continued to be a professional agent, manager and promoter of 1950s style rock and roll artists including Wee Willie Harris, Bill Haley's original Comets, the Jets, Matchbox, Crazy Cavan and the Rhythm Rockers and Linda Gail Lewis (sister of all time rock great Jerry Lee Lewis). He has promoted and organised weekend long rock and roll themed events and major concerts all over the UK and on mainland Europe. Paul Barrett Rock and Roll Enterprises is now recognised as the principal agency for the genre.
Barrett's spoken and bass vocals were featured on several early Shakin' Stevens and the Sunsets albums, on tracks such as "Oh Baby" and "At the Hop", he also spoke the commentary on the track "Superstar". The album "I'm no J.D." was re-released as "Shakin' Stevens and the Sunsets" in the 1980s and was awarded a Gold Record. Barrett also sang live on stage with the band, adding his vocals to the Sunset's mix.
Since the 1970s Barrett has regularly appeared as an extra in several feature films, the most notable being his major featured appearance as the "Table Monster" in the kitsch horror film 'Bloody New Year' (aka Horror Hotel (UK), aka Time Warp Terror (US)) [3] directed by cult film-maker Norman J.Warren. Barrett was also featured in the rock 'n' roll movie Blue Suede Shoes and appeared in the 1987 TV drama mini-series Sins that starred Joan Collins.
During the 1980s Barrett collaborated with Hilary Heywood in writing the book "Shakin' Stevens and the Sunsets" published by Star Books and W.H. Allen (London). ISBN 0-352-31274-2. Barrett originally wanted to call the book "Rocky Road Blues - The Story of a Rock 'n' Roll Band". However the book was subsequently renamed and heavily promoted as a pop biography, becoming a short-lived best seller. Barrett's book was more a humorous 'warts and all' tale of many behind-the-spotlights events during the band's history and quite different to the several other official biographies.
Barrett had been a committed socialist and communist through most of his formative years and studied Marxist, Leninist and Trotskyist doctrines. A later supporter of the "pre-New Labour" Labour Party he met and married fellow socialist Lorraine Barrett (née Booth, born 18 March 1950) in 1972 and they have two children, a son, Lincoln Barrett, also known as drum and bass DJ High Contrast and a daughter, Shelley Miranda, who has appeared in many television programmes and starred as 'Mandy' in BBC Wales cult comedy series 'Satellite City'. Shelley is married to the former Australian actor Richard Norton. Barratt's wife Lorraine is the former Labour Co-operative Member of the Welsh Assembly for Cardiff South and Penarth from 1999 to 2011 and an Assembly Commissioner from 2007 to 2011.
The "Rock 'n' Roll Corner" in Penarth's Windsor Arms pub has been dedicated to Barrett and features photographs and memorabilia from his long and varied career.