The Best Record You’ve Never Heard: Little Barrie recommend an overlooked Liverpool gem from 2005
On their sixth album, Gravity Freeze, the enigmatic Little Barrie returned with a psychedelic sound that could easily serve as the backdrop to a night drive through the agave dust roads on the far outskirts of Guadalajara.
Groovy, sleek, and sparse, the album poignantly became the first released solely under the band’s own name since the death of drummer Virgil Howe in September 2017. In some ways, that made it seem like a return, but in truth, when you’re as forward-moving and eclectic as the Nottingham group have always been, a ‘return’ would be a misnomer.
Gravity Freeze saw them plunge into a swampy mire of their own liberally assorted influences and deploying them sparsely for a sound that leaves more space than an open road, combining the scope of Can and the cinematic twang of Duane Eddy and Link Wray. Yet, there are also textures of something a little closer home in the mix too, which Barrie Cadogan revealed when we asked him to highlight an album that has flown under the radar of even keen musos undeservedly.
Edgar Jones brought English beat music back to the fore in 1994 when he founded the Stairs alongside Ged Lynn and Paul Maguire. Since then, he has never stopped with reinvention, endlessly collaborating and expanding his project portfolio. With that kind of outlook on art, it can be easy for some of your finest works to get lost in the whirl, and Soothing Music for Stray Cats from 2005 is one of those LPs.
With that in mind, Cadogan shines a light on how he discovered it and why it still matters over 20 years later. There are flourishes of it to be heard in the laidback coolness of Gravity Freeze’s psychedelic splurge, too.
Little Barrie on Soothing Music for Stray Cats by Edgar ‘Jones’ Jones:
Barrie Cadogan: “I’m going to talk a little bit about the album Soothing Music for Stray Cats by Edgar ‘Jones’ Jones. I think I first heard about the album from a magazine review. It could have been Mojo. And I was a fan of the Stairs [Jones’ first band] anyway, I’d bought the mono 12-inches when they came out in the early ’90s and just loved Edgar’s spirit and his commitment to what he loved and his musicianship, so I was keen to hear what he was doing. And what I heard was just fascinating.”
“I remember going to HMV on Oxford Street, buying the album on CD and taking it home. The first thing that struck me was the sound. The mood, the feel. It was just incredible. I remember thinking, ‘My God, this guy’s making this music now and making it sound and feel like this’.”
“The beauty of the playing, the spirit, and the feel were really different from what I’d heard before. I knew Edgar from the Stairs, which were much more rooted in Freakbeat R&B and beat-group influences, but this album took you somewhere else entirely. It sounded like nothing else I knew was happening at the time, it really created its own world.”
“At the same time, in our band, we were messing around with four-track machines to make demos as we liked the rawness of it, but nothing we did sounded anything like this. There was one track on our first album that was about 80% done on a four-track cassette portastudio before we took it to Edwyn Collins’ studio and overdubbed a couple of extra bits. Listening to Edgar’s record made me start to think, ‘Maybe we can make something interesting ourselves’.”
“What really stood out was hearing somebody so committed to creating music that mattered to them and making it beautiful, regardless of commerciality or box ticking for A&R. That appealed to me because I was already feeling disconnected from a lot of modern record production, especially with guitar bands. A lot of it sounded very high-quality from a technical standpoint, but also quite bland and not soulful.”
“This record had a mood and an atmosphere that pulled you into its world. It felt personal, distinctive, and completely authentic. More than anything, it showed that you could follow your own instincts, make music on your own terms, and create something timeless without chasing whatever was fashionable at the time. That was incredibly inspiring to me and had a lasting impact on how I thought about music and recording.”
Cadogan isn’t alone in adoring Jones’ 2005 solo debut, either.
Upon release, even Noel Gallagher was moved to say, “It bent my head, man. It’s probably one of the best records I have ever heard“. Inspired by signing to his local Viper Label, Jones entirely transformed what might spring to mind when you hear Merseybeat in a manner that was at once instantly catchy, yet truly pioneering.
In times when it seems like there’s nothing new under the sun, Gravity Freeze and the mystic mirage that Little Barrie will be offering up on their forthcoming tour dates are testimony to the fact that if you look a bit harder, the spirit of Soothing Music for Stray Cats is alive and well. Now on Easy Eye Sounds, they’re rolling with Mustang swagger.
