Meet the band supporting Paul Weller in Lancashire tonight: who are Barbara and what are they about?

The former frontman of the Jam, Paul, is currently part way through his latest 14 date tour across the UK and it heads to Blackburn's King George's Hall tonight.

Joining him on all 14 shows is Brighton based pop duo Barbara, made up of brothers Henry and John Tydeman, 30 and 29 respectively.

Despite performing together throughout their teens, it was only four years ago that Henry and John began writing music together and formed the band Barbara, enlisting three other members too - Jack Hosgood (bass, vocals), Dean LLewellyn (guitar) and Lawrie Miller (drums).

Just before the band departed for Lancashire, celebrity reporter Aimee Seddon was able to catch Henry for a chat to find out more about Barbara and what it’s like touring with Paul Weller, take a look at the interview below:

How has the tour been so far?

Henry: “It's been an incredible experience for us and it's still quite surreal because we were all really, really big Paul Weller fans .I remember being a teenager and having all those CDs and listening to those songs endlessly on my iPod. So now, 10 years later, to be getting to meet him and open his night with our songs, it's very strange, but it's the most fun thing I've ever done in my life, and crucially, I think we're winning the crowds over. They've got very high standards, the Paul Weller crowds, for understandable reasons, but I suspect that we're getting through to them, and they're quite enjoying what we're doing. In Newport, which was now about a week ago, we even had a standing ovation from what a full seated crowd so that was amazing.”

Is this your biggest tour yet?

Henry: “Absolutely. We've done two other support tours- Divine Comedy two years ago and then Haircut 100 in Autumn last year - they were both amazing thing for us to do and they were brilliant and lovely people but this feels like a step up in terms of the amount of people that are at the shows. All of the shows are sold out so each of the venues is between 1,500 and 3,000 people and the strength of feeling that Paul Weller fans have about his music is on a different level to anything I've seen. We've turned up at 7:45pm each night and the rooms have been 75 - 90% full so it's been wonderful and a far cry from the kind of shows that we have grown up playing over the last four years, you know performing to  one man and his dog in  rooms above pubs”

What’s it been like working with Paul Weller?

Henry: “He's a really great bloke, we have all got to speak to him here and there between sound checks and stuff like that. He's a 66 year old guy and  for a lot of musicians that are his age, I suspect that they lose interest in younger acts, whereas with Paul Weller- and I knew this about him already having been a fan - he's always interested in new stuff and helping to bring bands that he likes through. I know that it's a very regular thing for him to choose bands that he likes to open for him on tour and so what follows from that is he wants to talk to us and get to know us and our music. 

“A couple of days ago, we were sound checking in this empty hall and this figure walked across the hall in double denim and sat down right in the middle of the auditorium and just looked up at the stage. We then all clocked that we were playing our songs in this vast room to just Paul Weller and weirdly, that was more nerve wrecking than playing to any big crowd because this great hero of ours was properly sitting and listening.

“So yeah he's nice as well as being amazingly talented. One of the perks of doing something like this is we get to watch his set every night for 14 nights so we get to see an absolute master playing. We're learning every night but also just getting to enjoy his wonderful 40 years worth of music.”

How you feeling about coming to Blackburn?

Henry: “It should be amazing. We've got some really good friends that live in that part of the country, one of whom is actually joining the gang to do some backstage stuff for us. So yeah, we've been up in that part of the country before and following up from last night in Dumfirline, which felt like the best one yet, we're all in pretty high spirits going into tonight so I'd like to think that it will be just as good, if not better.”

Have you performed in Lancashire before, what are the audiences like? 

Henry “We haven't actually performed in this part of the country before so this will be a new thing for us. A brilliant thing that we have found is that all audiences in different parts of the country have a slightly different character. So if we're heading to a new bit of the country, it's going to be really interesting thing to see. We're from Brighton so we obviously love Brighton but we have found that the crowd in that part of the country is much more likely to be standoffish and not clap or cheer as loudly, which can make things a little bit more difficult. So I hope that tonight, and I suspect it will be the case, that it will be more similar to when we've played in Manchester and places closer to there, in that people will go for it a bit more.”

So audiences in the North are louder?

Henry: “Absolutely! We met Phil Jupitus on the last tour - who's a bit of a fan of Barbara now, which is amazing - and he said in his experience of doing years and years of comedy, generally speaking in the north of the country,  people that are paying to go and see entertainment, think of it as an investment in their own joy. Therefore they go to the event wanting to be entertained in a way that is slightly less common down south. For reasons that I don't have an answer to, that is the experience we've had. In the north, people tend to be more up for it so I hope tonight is like that, and I'm sure it will be.”

For readers who haven't heard of Barbara, how would you describe your music?

Henry: “It's kind of 60s and 70s style pop or rock music but we like to think that it's not pastiche, and that it's got a little bit of something interesting and fresh and new about it. We love bands like the Kinks and 10CC but we're also big fans of bands like The Divine Comedy and Neil Hannon, who  are doing a similar kind of thing, and the Lemon Twigs, who are also brothers like me and John. But a big part of what we're doing and this is becoming more and more prevalent actually as we go on, is there's also a sort of theatrical element to our records and live performances. John, who's the frontman, is often likened in his sort of style on stage to people like Rick Male and the other day someone said he was like Oscar Wilde.”

And what is it like being in a band with your brother?

Henry: “More than one person has said to me, and I don't know whether this is a myth or not, that when family members sing together, there's a vocal harmony thing which you just can't recreate if you're not related, and you haven't grown up together. That's something we sort of feel so - there's lots of harmonies on the tracks and I think they fit together particularly nicely because we've just sung together for so many years. And because we've sat together playing music and writing music for so many years, the process of writing the songs is such a natural thing, there's nothing guarded about it whatsoever, we are as brothers are with each other. And what flows from that is songs that we're very, very pleased with indeed and that have a lot of us in them.”

What’s next for Barbara?

Henry: “We’ve done some great tours and we’re just kind of hoping that we can do similar things over the next year or two. We're actually following this Paul Weller tour up with our own headline tour in November [which is coming to Barnoldswick, Lancashire] so we are hoping that lots of people who've come to see us support Paul Weller will want to come and see us in November.”

Barbara are also releasing an EP, called Happy Days in May 22, which you can preorder here.

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Paul Weller's tour has sold out but for future dates why should people get tickets to come see Barbara?

Henry: “If you like bands that are playing songs directly influenced by arguably the greatest era of popular music, the 60s and 70s! We’re directly influenced by them but not only are we playing songs that are like that, we are also bringing a kind of outrageous theatricality to the stage performance. So the songs on the record - I'm very proud of those, they sound great - but they only gives you a portion of what Barbara is really about, and John the singer, like I mentioned already, he takes this kind of stuff very, very seriously, he sees us as much as a theatrical act as we are a musical performance. 

“When we grew up in the 2000s, there were lots of bands that would just stand still on stage and look grumpy, like they didn't really want to be there. Fair play to them but I suspect that what we're doing, without realising it, is reacting a little bit against that. So I think that people will undoubtedly be entertained if they come and see us because there's lots to hear and lots to look at as well.”

Check out Barbara’s website or follow their Instagram page for more updates.