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Barry Blue: Full Circle

“Thank goodness I’ve got a studio at the bottom of my garden,” says Barry Blue, regarding the fact he’s been able to safely see out the pandemic while busying himself with work. Real name Barry Ian Green, the London-born singer, songwriter, producer and once-upon-a-time popstar is chatting to me about the release of Chapter & Verse, which he calls his “career-spanning” box set. “So I’ve buried myself there and I’ve been able to work on projects I should have finished years ago.”

Blue hit chart success in 1973 with two top ten singles, Dancin’ (On A Saturday Night) and Do You Wanna Dance? And despite these songs becoming ubiquitous on the radio and seeing him appear on Top Of The Pops, Blue suddenly withdrew into writing for other artists across a huge range of genres — some of his biggest hits to date have seen him writing with Andrea Bocelli, Diana Ross, Celine Dion, The Saturdays, The Wanted, and Pixie Lott.

“I became an artist by default because no one wanted to record my songs,” Blue says with a laugh. “

So the record company said, ‘well you sound okay, why don’t you record it?’ So I did, and launched into being a pop singer. But my real love was always being behind the scenes, in the studio. And then I found a band called Heatwave in the late ‘70s, and we had a rollercoaster of success with Boogie Nights and Always And Forever. So that cemented me and my production rather than me as an artist.”

Regarding the release of Chapter And Verse, Blue’s new box set of music, he says “I’ve done a 360 turn back to being an artist! Throughout my career, there’s always been songs which have been lost along the way or stifled at birth. And I kind of feel this is the swansong of my career, or at least it’s the end rather than the beginning. So I really wanted to take those ‘lost’ songs that are really personal to me and record them the way I always wanted to.

“So on one of the albums included, Songs From The Heartbook, I’ve taken songs that may have been recorded by other artists or ones left by the side of the recording studio and I’ve done them in my own way — the way I originally wrote them.

"They’re just songs I feel were missed and should have been heard. And then some of them were heard and were hits, but they weren’t heard in the way I always wanted them to be. So me and some musician friends have spent the last three years recording it, playing all the instruments and I’ve been producing it. It’s something you can only explain to people of a creative persuasion, this needs to be heard!”

I feel this is the swansong of my career.

Another CD included in this expansive release is Songs From The Lost Book, which includes a variety of Barry Blue originals, somehow encompassing Ibiza hits with those initial pop charters from the ‘70s.

“One of them is Affrodizziact,” Blue explains. “Which was a big Ibiza hit in the late ‘80s, during the Second Summer of Love. But I didn’t release that under my own name, I went for the pseudonym Cry Cisco! I also included a new version of Dancin’ (On A Saturday Night).”

A lot of the beauty in these new versions of what are mostly big pop songs is the back to basics nature of the project:

“I usually write on guitar, and for most people when you write that way, the songs start out quite sparse. I’ve experienced a lot of my songs becoming very over-produced when they go to an artist, so it’s been lovely to strip them back again for this record — no overblown production. It’s almost like people can hear the song, rather than hearing the production.”

As the conversation started with Blue’s studio, I ask if he doesn’t mind running me through what gear he’s been using of late. “I’m a Pro Tools guy,” he says. “So I run that on my Mac. I use the Universal Audio Apollo Thunderbolt system, and a pair of Genelecs that I’ve had for years. Around 10 years I reckon.

"If the gear works for me, I go with it. I think plugins nowadays are fabulous. At one point I was against all that, thinking you had to have valves! But it’s hard to argue with them now — I use loads of the Native Instruments and Waves plugins.”

With that being said, allow yourself a trip down memory lane and check out Chapter And Verse, a Barry Blue boxset that gives serious bang for your buck. A legendary songwriter who just wants to be heard, and boy, has he.