ABOUT BARRY
The Cuckoo
Early Life & Oxford Beginnings
I grew up in Headington, Oxford, in a house filled with music and the quiet encouragement of my mother. I began singing as a boy in local church choirs and the Co-op Choir and, at the age of eleven, won the Morris Motors Folk Song Competition with The Cuckoo, making a private recording at Acorn Records — a small but treasured moment that set everything in motion.
I couldn’t sing after a difficult voice break, so I studied violin and eventually led the Oxfordshire County Youth Orchestra. It was a privilege to have Muir Mattheson the film composer as our conductor, sadly only for a short time due to his passing. Sian Edwards, the conductor, played the horn in the youth orchestra. Oxford was a melting pot of excellence in those days.
Saturdays were spent travelling with my mother to pitch a stall at London’s Bell Street antique market. We visited my great aunt ran a second-hand clothes stall from her house off the Edgware Road as part of the Church Street Market. I often stayed at 32 Salisbury Street — a house that would later become the famous Red Bus Studios. Those teenage weekends opened the door to London, its markets, its music, and the emerging scene of the 1970s. They shaped a sense of identity that would take decades to fully understand.
CAMBRIDGE AND FIRST STEPS INTO OPERA
My school in Oxford was a Comprehensive that in my final year got 14 pupils into Oxbridge. I studied Religious Studies and then Philosophy at Cambridge, where a chance audition for a college tenor position shifted my path from academic life toward professional singing. After completing a PGCE, I produced Purcell’s King Arthur in the open air at Corpus Christi Old Court which toured to the Minack Theatre (the first ever opera produced there), balancing college with early musical projects and discovering a growing pull toward opera.
CONSERVATOIRE TRAINING
I trained at the Royal Northern College of Music and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, developing the technical foundation that would support the next two decades of my career.
I sang various roles at college, including Mozart in Mozart and Salieri, Dorvil in La Scala di Seta.
This is a performance of me as Guillot in Manon (first voice heard on stage, to the right) as a student at the RNCM in 1987. Some great friends and voices were in that show. Simon Keenlyside, Sally Harrison, Kate Witney, etc!! I went on as a last minute understudy!