BARRY LEITCH
“I’ve moved like 33 times since I left home,” Barry tells us from his studio in Ohio, his Scottish accent revealing hints of an American twang. We ask if he had any musical training. “No, other than learning to play the recorder in school. In the end, they wouldn’t let me take my music O Level because I couldn’t play an instrument well enough. I was always interested in music but I was just too damn lazy to learn how to play the piano properly.” Instead, he became interested in computers, his earliest experience typing in listings and trying to make games on a ZX81. “Playing Flight Simulator on the ZX81 – ‘Oh my God, it’s so real!’”
What was it that made you start writing music on computers?
When I heard Rob Hubbard’s Synth Sample demo, it was like, ‘People are making music on these machines that sounds really good!’ I borrowed a BBC Model B over the summer and programmed a bunch of music into The Music System. If you ever run into a copy of Toccata in D Minor in The Music System, that was five days of my life, putting that in note by note.
How did you get your first commercial gig?
I was 14 or 15 and I started making demos. We were in the Compunet era, just going to computer clubs every week and swapping our demos. If you had some new demos, people would give you games and demos in exchange. I sent tons of demos to every videogame company in Britain and pestered them all, and they all said, ‘No kid, we don’t want your music, stop calling us.’ So I made more demos and sent them off, phoned them up again and said, ‘You should really check out my new demos, they are much better than the old ones.’ And finally Colin Fuige at Firebird said, ‘That one tune… I think we can use that one.’ Yes!
