Wild Willy Barrett (born Roger John Barrett - May 1950) is an experimental musician and multi-insrumentalist from Aylesbury best known for his collaborations with John Otway. His musical style has included folk, blues, psychadelia, pop and punk rock and his live performances are punctuated with his dry humour and onstage wit. He is known for virtuoso fiddle playing, ability with a great number of stringed instruments, and playing slide guitar with a whole raw egg (known as egg-necking). During recent Otway/Barrett performances, he has also introduced the 'wah wah wheelie bin'.
He is credited with supporting guitar, fiddle and vocals in a number of other albums, from Rolf Harris' version of "Bohemian Rhapsody" to playing fiddle, guitar and mandolin for George Hamilton IV. Also played pedal steel guitar on the influential Keith Hudson reggae album entitled 'Rasta Communication', along with Sly and Robbie.
Barrett has been performing vocal and strings for Sleeping Dogz, and closed the Cambridge Folk Festival in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2009. He toured autumn 2009 with John Otway and toured with Sleeping Dogz in April/May 2010.
Barrett is also a skilled wood worker and carver and has produced highly unique furniture over many years. He once made a wooden record sleeve for his album Organic Bondage when he did not have the finances to get a sleeve printed.
Read more about Wild Willy Barrett: Discography
Famous quotes containing the words wild and/or barrett:
“We follow where the Swamp Fox guides,
His friends and merry men are we;
And when the troop of Tarleton rides,
We burrow in the cypress tree.
The turfy hammock is our bed,
Our home is in the red deer’s den,
Our roof, the tree-top overhead,
For we are wild and hunted men.”
—William Gilmore Simms (1806–1872)
“Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everything ... and that the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself.”
—William Barrett (b. 1913)