Mull It Over 054: The Curious Case of Barry Peak
Coming up during the 'Ulsterpunk' scene of 1990s Belfast, alongside the likes of Ash - the Backwater and Torgas Valley Reds frontman skates back into focus.
About a month ago I received a fairly innocuous DM on the Mull It Over Instagram account. A short message, politely asking for an email address to send a press package across to. This happens quite regularly, considering the game we’re in. I responded in kind, thanking the sender for reaching out and grateful another young band wanted me to write about them.
Then came the response. “Supercool. I’ll send you some stuff over tonight”.
Supercool. The word obviously grabbed my attention. It immediately usurped the banality of the conversation; not an adjective dispatched regularly in our common vernacular. It instantly made me care more about the person who wrote it; so I started to have a look around.
The Instagram profile didn't give much away. Firstly, it was set to private, which was odd for a musician. It had around 600 followers, which seemed reasonable enough. What struck me though were the notable people who followed the account, despite its apparent low key nature - David Holmes, Tim Wheeler, Joe Lindsay and Rocky O’Reilly amongst others. Somehow this, as yet, unknown artist was already on the radar of a veritable who’s who of Northern Ireland music industry personalities. Except for me.
I remember having a conversation around Irish music with my father in law earlier this year. I had just discovered the Dublin band Whipping Boy, one of a slew of Irish bands I dug out this summer after being hit like a lightning bolt by fellow Dubs A Lazarus Soul’s “Long Balconies” on the car radio after one particularly gnarly run across Glenariffe’s forest park. You could blame the endorphins. I blame Brian Brannigan’s acoustical yearning that specific morning. So, in an attempt to bridge a generational gap I posed the question, (notwithstanding the hugely successful acts emanating from Northern Ireland like The Divine Comedy, Snow Patrol or Ash) - I pondered, “Why have we never had a true scene of bands who bubbled just under the surface, under the aforementioned headline acts, as seen in Dublin with bands like A House, Cry Before Dawn, Bell X1, A Lazarus Soul, Hothouse Flowers and indeed Whipping Boy?”
The answer was frustratingly simple. “We did”.
Barry Peak was the frontman of the Belfast band Backwater. Remembered now, mainly by those who were actually there as they came up alongside acts like Ash in the ‘Ulsterpunk’ scene of 1990s Belfast, they were something of a quintessential ‘also-ran’ outfit. A band that directly answers my earlier question about artists that flourished in the shadow of their more famous peers. You’d be forgiven for thinking the only acts to ever exist in Northern Ireland are those that made it out. Clearly that is not the case. For every Stiff Little Fingers there was an Outcasts. For every Van Morrison there was a Rab McCullough. And for every Ash, there was a Backwater. Not that they went entirely unnoticed. Peak’s song craft and genuine ear for melody resulted in airplay on BBC with “Didactic No” and perhaps their most signature song “Supercool” - a genuine relic of the mid 90s that sounds like somewhere between Nirvana, Sonic Youth and Grandaddy. The end result was Angels Are Cool. A full length release on London based record label Ché and tours alongside the likes of Mogwai and Urusei Yatsura. You’d be hard pressed to find the LP anywhere to stream online, though 16 CDs are available on Discogs.
A John Peel session followed in 1996 but then things soon fizzled. Not that a BBC Peel session is a bad swan-song by any stretch. Peak popped up again with the beloved Torgas Valley Reds who made a dent in the local music scene, this time in the early 2000s and landing somewhere between the pop sensibilities of Alex Chilton and the thumb your nose energy of Blink 182. However, by this time the landscape had changed from the mid-90s. Gigs and CDs no longer the touring band’s bread and butter, musicians and the music industry at large were scrambling to find any way through the advent of online streaming and MySpace profiles and music for free (for better or worse). Barry vanished.
Vanished as much as one can who then dedicates their life to public service. Working as a teacher and alongside Universities as an advocate for social justice issues and climate awareness, Barry was busy. He just didn't make music for over 20 years. Now based in Dublin, he found himself in 2024 and had, as he put it to me, “Started a doctorate, really hated it, quit, and used the money to buy some home recording stuff.” - and since then has been self-releasing music on Bandcamp, for no reason other than a newfound passion for his first love, one that appears to sit neatly alongside his other great love: skateboarding. The natural result of this late-period revival has been the, frankly, excellent Read Like Lisa; Skate Like Bart. A mini-album of six songs ranging from re-workings of tracks from the 90s to one of the best songs of the year in “Shivers & Shakes” which boasts an undeniable melodic thread that surfs the noisy, lo-fi results of recording at home with a guitar, midi keyboard and a computer. That I do not have the Sony Walkman I bought from a neighbour in the year 2000 to experience the extra mechanical heft a cassette tape brings out is something I will have to change immediately.
I can’t recommend it enough. You can access it through Barry’s Bandcamp page which I will link below. After positive reviews from the likes of Hot Press and The Irish News this year, it seems like the start of something all over again for our godfather of indie. Clearly, don’t just take my word for it. Not that there are any delusions of ‘making it’, as it were. Ever the socially aware, Peak has suggested donations to Doctors Without Borders or Extinction Rebellion in lieu of purchasing these songs.
As Barry told me himself, his is a “pretty cool story”. Not everyone gets a second chance to rediscover something they love, and then receive acclaim for it. If anything, it teaches you that for all the U2s and Snow Patrols of the world, they were all just kids at one time, making music purely for the love of it. Hopefully now as adults it’s for the same reason, just like Barry. That’s in essence what made this seemingly “innocuous” overture so interesting to me. It’s a cool story. So to lift from the lyric sheet of the man himself:
What makes you supercool?