DRUM! Magazine – Issue 14-6, Pg. 41-42

The Barker surname might bring one particular punk drummer to mind, but this kind gent from New Zealand is not who you were thinking of. Michael Barker, the multi-talented drummer and percussionist for The John Butler Trio, doesn’t have the other Barker’s notoriety, but he’s logged a lot of miles and has a few stories to tell.

“I started playing the drums when I was ten,” he explains. “My older brother Doug used to play the drums and I wanted to be just like him. I played the drums at school in school band, and had a really good music teacher. He wasn’t a drum teacher – he was a guitar teacher. But he was my first real introduction to playing the drums with other musicians. He was a really cool guy, but then I changed schools and got a terrible teacher who tried to get me to play clarinet. He was masquerading as a drum teacher but was actually trying to get clarinet students.”

After dodging the clarinetist’s evil plot, Barker jammed with several local bands around his hometown of Rotorua, and at the tender age of 18, headed to Melbourne, Australia to study at the Victorian College Of The Arts, cut his teeth on orchestral percussion, and even fulfill a longstanding fantasy.

“I played marimba, xylophone, timpani, and all that stuff,” Barker says, “but I played with lots of bands the whole time. I played with Neil Finn [of Crowded House fame] and David Bridie.

“The Neil Finn project was interesting. I grew up in New Zealand listening to a band called Split Enz that Neil was a member in. Getting to play with him was a childhood dream come true in a way. It was an interesting audition – I was on tour with an orchestra playing these orchestral arrangements of Split Enz songs and I was playing percussion. He asked me to have a jam with him – kind of easy going, nothing serious. I get around and the drum kit is miked up, everything is miked up, there’s an engineer in the room and sort of recording everything. It was quite an intense jam and it turns out it was an audition process. We recorded some stuff that very day that ended up on the album Try Whistling This. I eventually toured with him.”

Whirlwind audition passed, dream come true, and armed with a strong percussion foundation and touring experience, Barker was looking to further his career with a big break. Enter rising Aussie songwriter John Butler, whose brother-in-law Nicky Bomba kept the drum throne warm during the recording of The John Butler Trio’s Sunrise Over Sea. Obligations to his own band made touring to support the trio’s album impossible, so Bomba suggested Barker take over as the touring drummer, and Barker agreed to a jam session.

“I ended up having a few jams with John that felt good,” Barker remembers. “He was already in the process of recording and Nicky as having a go playing congas and he just sort of said, ‘Why don’t you come down and play some stuff?’ I brought a bunch of gear down there and had a go at a few tracks. There were a couple of drum tracks that we recorded later, after the initial recording of Sunrise Over Sea.” Rehearsals with Butler went so well that Barker ended up overdubbing percussion tracks on most of the album and laid down the main drum track on “Betterman.”

Playing with Butler afforded Barker a chance to use his orchestral discipline and think outside the box. Barker approached his parts from a more compositional perspective – not as a mere timekeeper.

“Playing melodic instruments like marimba or xylophone gives you a greater understanding of harmony and melody,” he offers. “When you take those sorts of skills into a recording studio, it allows you to build textures rather than rhythms. It helps you hone the timbres that are available whether it’s playing with sticks, mallets, brushes, or your hands, and striking different surfaces. It really expands your mind and gives you a great understanding of your music and your part as a drummer. There is a real depth in Butler’s songwriting that allows [bassist] Shannon [Birchall] and I to make use of the space and create textures that make for a more musical experience.”

Soon after wrapping up recording Sunrise Over Sea, Butler, Barker, and Birchall headed out on tour to support their first international release, which has been in stores down under for over a year. The stage is where the multitalented Barker really shines as he takes on drumming and percussion duties. The call for multitasking means that Barker has to be creative with his setup.

“The way we do it live is I have a quasi-percussion rig beside my drums,” he explains. “I have a conga on my left side by my hi-hats, along with some other toys like cowbells and other things that I incorporate into some of the field. I have a couple of things worked out where I get that drum-and-percussion texture going and it produces a really full sound. Having a percussionist for a full show would probably be a little boring for him because he’d have to sit out on a lot of songs. I’m my own percussion menace. My left hand ventures onto conga drums and I sort of muck around a bit.”

Radio airplay, big gigs, and record label obligations are making things hectic for the trio, but there still is a good amount of downtime while on the road. No worries, the band is making the most of it. “A cool thing is that we’re getting a conference room in a hotel where we can go and jam. You do so much travel and talk and B.S. and you play for an hour and a half and that’s it. Now we go to these little rooms, jam, and work on new material. It’s exciting and sure beats watching CNN all day.”