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    Barker Woo
    Barker Woo
    Barker Woo
    Ebook82 pages1 hour

    Barker Woo

    By Peter Englebright

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    An up and coming post-rock art band tangles with supernatural forces.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFirewood Books
    Release dateJul 26, 2015
    ISBN9781513056746
    Barker Woo

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      Book preview

      Barker Woo - Peter Englebright

      Chapter One

      Barker Woo are a post-rock art band. The group is made up of four members.

      Dean Rusk and Claire Walker are childhood sweethearts. Together they learned to play guitar, formed various bands and fell in love. Claire joined Dean’s family tree and became Mrs Claire Rusk at the age of twenty. She plays lead guitar and sings. Her voice is unspectacular, but it does what it needs to do to get the words out to the audience. No one has ever confused her with a great singer, but her voice has an attractive creakiness to it. Technically weak and not overly tuneful, but packed with a distinct personality of its own. People in general like it more than they dislike it. Her husband Dean Rusk plays lead and rhythm guitar, as well as the occasional bit of keyboard when needed.

      They fell in with Milly Patch and Odette Piper. They were the rhythm section of a lesbian jazz band called the Worthwhile Jazz Trio. Rebecca Worthy was the third member. She played piano. The Trio broke up over personality clashes with Rebecca. The result was a bass player and a drummer in a committed lesbian relationship, but with no one to make their music worth listening to.

      Dean and Claire had just started at college when they asked around for any musicians who might be interested in playing with them.

      A friend of a friend brought them to each other’s attention.

      It was not exactly a match made in heaven. More a match that worked well enough. They were collectively the most advanced and competent musicians attending the college. They all recognised they were better together than apart. So they decided to describe any awkward musical abrasiveness or incompatibility as interesting and unconventional. It is debatable how much their post-rock artistic direction was by actual choice and not by default.

      Dean and Claire insisted on Milly using an electric bass instead of her preferred upright. They liked jazz, but they didn’t want to push that side of the band too far. Milly compromised and agreed to swap between upright for the quieter sections (most of it) and the electric for the rockier parts (not that much). The downside was that she has to stand on stage beside her upright while the electric dangles around her neck all evening. She also plays the very occasional bit of keyboards. Technically Dean is the better keyboard player, so she’s usually only required to play them when he’s too busy on guitar.

      Odette is a dainty little thing. She always plays the drums in a dress in order to confound preconceptions of what a lesbian drummer should look like. She also uses this as an excuse not to develop any arm muscle. As a jazz drummer in a post-rock band she’s rarely called upon to hammer the skins with brute force for any sustained length of time. She also contributes the occasional backing vocal in her shrill little-girl singing voice.

      She has a black and white yin-yang tattoo on her upper left arm. They joke she needs to be replaced as soon as possible as she’s letting down the band’s intellectual reputation with such a clichéd tattoo.

      ––––––––

      They played the local scene. Made an impact. The music was spiky. A lot of it was difficult and obtuse. Yet there were enough sweet melodic bits to make it worth the effort to learn to like it. They stayed just the right side of infuriating.

      They covered a few songs in rehearsals but they were never a cover band. Their instrumentation and quirks were too odd to fit anyone else’s music comfortably. They were almost under obligation to come up with their own material. One look at them and you just knew their originals were going to be far better than any covers they might be able to play.

      Claire is a stop-start writer. She could write and arrange a whole song in half an hour. Unfortunately that would only happen once in a while. Fast but slow.

      Dean is good at ornamenting his wife’s music. Never enough to claim a writing credit, but he has an instinct for adding new things to what’s already there.

      Like most drummers, Odette doesn’t write.

      Milly was the most prolific. The results were usually fine. They just paled next to Claire’s songs. Put it this way, Claire wrote the singles and the highlight album tracks. Milly wrote the minor tracks and the filler.

      Milly’s songs made up the bulk of Barker Woo’s set at the beginning. Then, as Claire added each new song to the repertoire, Milly would have to drop one of her own. By the time they got signed to their record contract Milly was lucky to have two songs still being played live. On record it was a given that she would only get one or two slots per album. Her prolific writing has slowed to a trickle as it’s just not needed anymore.

      Overall Milly couldn’t complain as she was a professional musician earning a solid living. The pressure and hard work of keeping the band afloat was resting on someone else’s shoulders. A situation that’s not without its own stresses, but still one that’s less nerve wracking than Claire’s position.

      It never occurred to anyone for Claire, Dean and Milly to write together.

      ––––––––

      The coven has been reconvened. Tomorrow they start a short two week victory lap of mid-sized clubs. The intention of this low pressure tour is hopefully to spark some creative thinking for writing album number two. Also it will help pay the recording studio bills.

      The first album was released over a year ago. Its chart life and promotional possibilities have been spent. It attracted a decent amount of attention, many good to bad reviews and respectable sales for an underground art band. So it’s a case of taking the applause one last time before they self-destruct

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