Barry Booth was born in 1937 and raised in the West Riding of Yorkshire. His father Ernest Booth was a coal-miner. At a family gathering the 7 year old Barry reached to open the lid of the piano keyboard his older cousin Donald had just been playing, but his aunt Gladys swooped in and slammed it shut: 'It's only for Donald,' she said, forbidding him to touch it. 'It's not a toy.' Barry's mother Annie (Cooper) Booth was furious at this affront. 'We'll see about that,' she said on the way home. 'Who does she think she is?'
Annie swiftly arranged her son's first piano lessons. Soon he was playing popular songs of the day on pianos in local pubs. The Sir Edward Bairstow scholarship then enabled him to receive tuition from Dr Melville Cook, the choirmaster and organist at Leeds Parish Church where he was a boy chorister, and in 1955 a County Music Scholarship paved his way to the Royal Academy of Music in London. For the next three years he studied composition, harmony and counterpoint under Patrick Savill and pianoforte under Leslie England, while flouting the Academy’s rules by playing professionally in the city’s jazz clubs by night. Following graduation he did his national service in the band of Her Majesty’s Life Guards, performing at royal banquets at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle.
In the early 1960s he worked on back-to-back national pop tours, as a bandleader and piano player for various acts including visiting Americans Roy Orbison and Ketty Lester. At one point around this time, he put his classical training at the service of one of the support acts when he offered a simple solution to a vocal harmony line they were having trouble figuring out. He proposed that they use an inverted pedal-point, sustaining a single high note in harmony with the descending melody line. The proposal was accepted and consequently can be heard in the verses of the Beatles’ early hit Please Please Me. (Many years later, Elvis Costello would remember noticing it as a 9 year old boy. As described in Craig Brown's One Two Three Four, he 'listened intently to the disc as his father played it over and over again. He was startled by the vocal harmony line; the second singer seemed to be singing the same note repeatedly against the lead singer.’)
Orbison, the original inspiration for that song, was sufficiently impressed by Booth’s abilities to hire him as his musical director and piano player in his backing band The Candy Men, taking him on tours of Europe and North America. Booth first entered the US illegally, smuggled by Orbison over the Canadian border in the boot of a car after a work permit had failed to arrive on time.
Video of The Monument Concert, 1965
Booth continued to serve Orbison in this position for several years, before going on to enjoy a long career as a highly versatile musical director, arranger, composer and pianist, working with some of the biggest names in entertainment, musical theatre and television and conducting orchestras around the world. But he is now most widely known for the only LP that he ever released as a solo recording artist and vocalist. The 1968 album entitled Diversions! consisted of musical settings of fourteen lyrics he had commissioned from two young writers he’d worked with in television: Michael Palin and Terry Jones, soon to become famous with Monty Python's Flying Circus. Pitching the songs to producer Tony Hatch in the hope of landing them with established singers, Booth had inadvertently landed a deal to record them himself.
Featuring skilful arrangements for a range of different instrumentations, and characterized by frequently shifting time signatures, Diversions! is an example of how ambitious and inventive popular music was becoming at the time, a record made to be listened to rather than danced to. It is uniquely charming, whimsical, often cryptic and sometimes slightly sinister, and also reflected Booth’s (and Palin’s) Yorkshire roots. On release it was a commercial flop, but over the years it has gained a cult following and a reputation as a lost classic of British psychedelic chamber pop. Re-released on CD in 2002, it has been championed by broadcasters such as John Peel, Miles Kington and Stuart Maconie, and the BBC archive's copy occasionally given an airing by Jarvis Cocker, Cerys Matthews and Gideon Coe.
Among Booth’s many other compositions were a ballet choreographed by Gillian Lynne at Sadler’s Wells, a cantata to mark the 50th anniversary of Unicef, a story for young people performed by narrator and symphony orchestra, two pieces for shakuhachi and strings, a number of Christmas carols and many settings of lyrics by the American poet Fran Landesman. His last major undertaking was Better the World with a Song, a cantata in ten eclectic movements for symphony orchestra, solo singers and a children’s choir, commissioned and performed to mark the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002.
As a composer his work was rich in rhythmic invention, while harmonically, unlike some notable Academy graduates of his generation, he was instinctively pre-modernist, giving free rein to his gift for melody. This combination resulted in work that was stimulating and sophisticated but always accessible and emotionally satisfying. He was exceptionally good at writing pieces for young people to play or sing, deliberately limiting the complexity and range of the melodies without compromising on musical pleasure.
He was known for his boundless curiosity for music-making across many different genres. As a piano player, he was a sensitive accompanist, with the improvisational ability of a jazz musician and also the strong left hand required for bar-room boogie-woogie. He was equally at home as a guest keyboardist with the BBC Concert Orchestra as he was playing gypsy swing or regaling a packed pub with bawdy comic songs. A typical Barry Booth set list might include an obscure music hall number, some Irish folk, a jazz standard overlaid with a piece of Satie, vintage pop, and heart-stopping coal-mining ballads, besides material from his own considerable songbook.
He also appeared on several occasions with the theatre company Punchdrunk, memorably at the Big Chill festival in 2005 in a secret speakeasy accessible only through the fireplace of a sweet-shop, and most recently as a pub piano player leading a singalong in the Sky/HBO TV series The Third Day.
One of his proudest days was in 2019 when he went back to Buckingham Palace to see his wife Elizabeth, formerly the headteacher of Dalmain Primary School in Lewisham, receive an MBE for her services to education and the arts.
In his later years he regularly provided much entertainment at his beloved Chelsea Arts Club, where he played with friends every Friday evening, and where he occasionally hosted informal concerts of his 'Chelsea Colliery Band' under a large trade union style banner emblazoned with that name. When someone questioned whether there was really a pit in Chelsea, he replied 'They're professional musicians - from the orchestra pit!'
He will be remembered by many whose paths he crossed not only for his outstanding musicianship but also for his generosity of spirit, his love of life, laughter and vigorous conversation, his powerful charisma as a personality and as a performer, and his ability to fill a room with joy.
