Mildly Annoyed Barbarians
Profile by Mark Walter
The Barbarian Horde are coming. The name could evoke a tribe with Germanic roots who want to destroy Rome, then and run screaming into the Teutoburg Forest. Actually, it’s two guys from Hastings – ‘EL Mustachio’ and ‘The Grand Weasel,’ better known as Andy Cordell and Robert King.
Andy grew up outside Solihull in the West Midlands, which he describes as a “reasonably disappointing town” most famous for its motorcycle museum. Rob spent his youth in Newton-le-Willows, ‘a place to pass through’ between Manchester and St Helens, famed for making trains, tanks and biscuits.
Rob and Andy
CREDIT: Montage Photos Nigel Dean
They met on a TEFL course before Andy moved to Paris and eventually regrouped in London around 2002 and joined the Indy-band outfit, College Pinks. In 2009 Rob moved to China not returning to London until 2015. This is where they found their equilibrium and formed The Barbarian Horde. They told me all this was foretold by a gypsy shaman in Penzance in ’91. According to Rob they were “puppets to the fates”.
They started in London as a three-piece with Phil Aspery – stage name Bill Collins – on drums. In 2019 both decided to move to Hastings/St Leonards after hearing about it through The Lantern Society, a folk club based in a pub in Farringdon. So, after much research on Google maps, the Grand Weasel led the way, hotly followed six months later by El Mustachio. But not Bill Collins, who decided to stay in London. So they had to decide on a replacement and after much deliberation they decided on a backing track machine, possibly because it was easier to put in a bag!
Rob King is the main vocalist who says his voice was once described as ‘a broken tenor’. He also plays a four-string guitar, and he writes the lyrics. He grew up listening to Abba, but the duo’s influences are more Kinks, Pulp, Divine Comedy and The Smiths. Also, oddly enough, the slightly left-field John Philip “Jake” Thackery, an English singer-songwriter in the French tradition: a ‘chansonnier’ whose songs are nevertheless characteristically English. The Horde’s eccentric style is difficult to pin down but maybe they are ‘flaneurs’ – cool, aloof observers of urban society. It is probably truer to say that they simply don’t fit into a neat musical box.
Andy, the instrumental guru of the Barbarians, is better known for plucking at the cello and has been seen playing the hand-saw and even a washboard. But it’s the organ where the latest vibes come from, particularly at live performances, featuring his psychedelic seaside sound. This is particularly prevalent in their new inventive and dynamic EP, ‘Aimless Summer.’ Rob tells me the title track ‘Martin Aimless’ is about a life that is ‘perfectly serviceable’, exploring the idea that you should be “more grateful than perhaps you are for an underwhelming life.” The ‘Bankerholiday’ is about the briefest of hiatuses on a bank holiday, “that one might attempt to reassemble the jigsaw pieces of one’s sanity before launching back into it over again”. And finally, the uplifting ‘Circus’ is an older song from their oeuvre, but they thought they would bring it slap bang into 2022. So they had a critical listen to the original and it turned out they still liked what they did in the first place. Sometimes hard work consists of doing nothing.
• The Barbarian Horde will be at The Beacon, West Hill, Hastings on 25 August.
• Hear them on our Podcast, HIPcast#204: www.hastingsindependentpress.co.uk/category/hipcast
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