Interview with Charlie Barnes
Charlie on upcoming new album, touring with To Kill a King and new solo shows!
Singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Charlie Barnes joins me for a chat, over Zoom. He speaks to me from his snazzy new home studio about why being an independent artist is freeing and how he is evolving as an artist, which includes letting go of past goals and realising the type of music he really wants to make.
Charlie Barnes is also known for being a touring member of British group, Bastille. I ask how their recent tour was, to which Charlie responds: “Which one?” The band have been touring pretty much non-stop since May and have played in the UK, the States, Dubai, Singapore and more in recent months. “It’s been good fun. Very different to our usual year of what we’d be doing. Being a support band for a good couple of months of it was low pressure. That was nice.” (They were supporting Duran Duran,by the way!).
Charlie has been working on his fourth album, which is - as yet - unnamed. He says he has been working on the album, despite “slowly’. “Very slowly, but it’s getting there,” he says. He laughs and I notice it seems like a nervous one. “There was a point two and a half years ago, where I thought I’d nearly finished it. And I only had a few bits to do but then, I think it’s been an interesting process this time around because I am not with a record label so there’s no kind of contractual obligation to get it finished by a certain point of time or anything like that. I am just doing it for me and for the couple of tens of people who are paying attention to it,” he says, modestly.
Being an independent artist has removed some of the “pressure” when it comes to creating the album. “There was a point really, where I kind of really felt like I had drawn a line under doing music of my own anymore. It didn’t really feel like there was any point in doing it. I’ve said stuff like that before, but - I think - previously those sorts of feelings have been more a feeling of defeat and a feeling that things hadn’t gone quite the way that I had wanted them to. But, I think after putting out ‘Oceanography’ and doing the ReOrchestrated tour and stuff like that, that was like a hitting of a really nice point, like, ‘That was good’ and it felt like enough, which was a pleasant feeling…”
Inevitably, he was drawn back into the life of a solo artist. “I finished writing this album in the summer of 2020, got started and got the songs for it and started recording. Got my mate John from the band, Cleft, to do a bunch of drums for me and worked pretty hard at it for a few months. Just on my own, this time, covered a lot of ground very quickly.” And then life happened and meant the album was put on hold. When he got around to listening to his tracks again, he realised that he didn’t want to record “more versions of the same thing that I had already done”. This led to lots of “reflecting” and also meant Charlie reworked some songs and even “got rid” of some of the tracks which had previously been on the album.
As it stands, the tracks on Charlie’s album are not exactly what you would call radio-friendly, but that’s not something that really bothers him too much. “I’m going to put this album out and I know the only people who will listen to it are the people who are paying attention now. I’m not going to waste my effort on trying to get loads more people to listen to it. I have better things to do with my life. It’s not going to be some runaway, exciting hit and I don’t really want it to be and I don’t really care it being that”.
Charlie runs a Patreon and says the support from fans has been “unreal” and one of the main things he is looking forward to is sharing the album with his fans, when it is ready, and also having a listening party for them.
As mentioned in a previous Substack edition, Charlie is going to be supporting To Kill a King on their tour, which starts in January 2024. “It will be lovely to meet with those guys again. We played together a lot on the ReOrchestrated tour and then we did another gig together in London as a one-off for Music Support. It’ll be nice to play with those guys again and be around to celebrate a landmark and realising that we’re all a lot older. It’s going to be really cool.”
He also has a couple of solo shows coming up too. One in Halifax, which has sold out now, and the other in Hoxton, London (which is very close to selling out and may even have done so by the time I post this). “I have asked a very good friend of mine, an old friend from Uni - Adam Smith- who is the guitar band in the band, Temples. He’s going to open for me with his new solo project, which is called Foxette Moxy. And then I had the gall to ask one of my favourite singer-songwriters if she would also support me, which seems utterly ridiculous and it should be the other way around, but I thought ‘Fuck it, you’ve got to ask sometimes’. So, the other support act is going to be Hannah Lou Clark, who is absolutely amazing. She’s so good. It’s going to be a pleasant evening that hopefully people will turn up to.”
See here for:
Halifax tickets (sold out): https://www.loafersvinyl.co.uk/collections/event-tickets/products/charlie-barnes-acoustic-3rd-feb-2024-19-30
Hoxton tickets: https://t.co/fKS7V4CBYr
To Kill a King tickets: https://www.seetickets.com/tour/to-kill-a-king
Patreon (Charlie Barnes): https://www.patreon.com/charliebarnes
When I saw this on Charlie's insta I thought: What? An interview with a musician I know on Substack? I've subbed and will also be going back through your previous posts about him and To Kill A King.