- #My dad is a rock star chili con carnage driver#
- #My dad is a rock star chili con carnage professional#
He taught guitar there for a while, before opening his own teaching studio/store in a friend’s drum shop. He left school and got a job in a music shop with a studio underneath. “And I said: ‘Do you know what? That’s the best bit of advice I’ve ever been given by a teacher.’”
“I was so far behind in my coursework, and one day my drama teacher said to me: ‘You obviously don’t want to be here, why are you here?’” he recalls. At 17 he was driving a BMW into sixth form. After GCSEs he got into his first band (having also started fighting as a hobby), gigging at local bars and making a tidy living out of it. Growing up in Torquay, Barras was a “mostly As and A*s” grammar school student, gearing up for law school. The dressing room looks like a Robin Hood film set, so our photographer and the band dart between backdrops for pictures. Inside the castle grounds, huge mixing desks and staging contrast sharply with 13th-century walls. And some of the nastiest people that I’ve ever met have been in the music industry, so go figure.” “Some of the most gentle, kindest people I’ve ever met have been people I’ve met through the fighting world. “I fought a Russian guy who didn’t speak English, a Polish guy, a guy from South Korea, but we’d still have some kind of signed language after,” he says. Most of his best friends are from his cagefighting days, with comradeship found even in queues for first aid after fights. I don’t particularly like social gatherings or large groups of people.” “I’m much more of an animal person,” he muses, showing me pictures of his dogs back home in Torquay. They’re a loyal, tight-knit team, even if Barras concedes he’s not naturally a ‘people person’. The castle can be entered only via drawbridges, so gear is transported in vans while band and crew walk. They don’t need more 12-bar, ‘My baby left me’ and all that.” “There’s people that do it a lot better than I do. “Traditional blues fans don’t like me anyway,” Barras says, spinning an NFL ball in his hands as our bus winds through Caerphilly’s tiny streets. The joyous Counterfeit People in particular says ‘arena rock star’ more than ‘weekend blues warrior’. There’s southern crunch and bluesy bite in What You Get, heavy rock in Ignite, and Richie Kotzen-esque fusion flourishes in Not Fading, a reminder of his younger days as a highly technical guitar teacher on websites like Lick Library and Shred Academy. It’s a rock album with lip-smacking immediacy and a vivid sense of all the genres Barras has studiously absorbed. But it’s a natural response: fight or flight Kris Barrasīut on the strength of his new album, Light It Up, the Black Stone Cherry billing makes a lot of sense. When people say: ‘Are you nervous?’ it’s got such negative connotations. Gary Moore was his first guitar hero (the influence of his late father), and the influences he name-checks typically include blues-based A-listers like Howlin Wolf, Stevie Ray Vaughan, BB King. He sort of is he’s signed to the same label as Joe Bonamassa, Eric Gales and Walter Trout. Somehow Kris Barras got pigeonholed as a blues guy.
#My dad is a rock star chili con carnage driver#
They’re playing a series of UK shows with Black Stone Cherry, and every spare inch of the bus is crammed with kit, although we do all have space to sit back and chat over coffee – soundtracked by Mike the driver singing along to Cyndi Lauper’s True Colours on the radio. We’re on a tour bus right now, his band’s home for the next few days, driving from Birmingham to Caerphilly Castle in Wales. He’s still built like a fighter – with tattooed biceps to rival those of The Rock – but insists he’s “much less healthy” when on tour.
#My dad is a rock star chili con carnage professional#
Barras’s past life as a professional MMA fighter (also often referred to as cage fighting) is well documented, and until last year he was still involved as a trainer.
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