Kris Barras
He gave up cage fighting to become a rock star, slinging out riffs instead of throwing punches. Now, armed with a new album and a ton of life experience, Kris Barras is making good on that promise.
He gave up cage fighting to become a rock star, Now, armed with a new album, he is making good on that promise.
It’s a summer evening at a biker festival in Germany. The beer is flowing, the atmosphere is upbeat, and the crowd are gagging for the artist soon to arrive on stage. Little do they know that said artist, Kris Barras, will end up almost killing the front row. Well, sort of.
Reeling from all the good vibes and a few too many strong local brews, Barras and his band play a killer show. Confident on stage at the best of times, tonight the singer/guitarist is practically flying already, so decides to take it up a level.
“I was loving it, I was having the best gig of my life,” the 33-year-old enthuses later. “On the last song, I decided I was gonna do a stage dive –and the front row was all middle-aged women! And I just fucking jumped. I tried to call people forward, a trick I learned off Ty [Taylor] from Vintage Trouble, but they were a bit confused and…”
He laughs, a broad grin flashing through a neat sandy beard. This Kris Barras is much softer than the steely, ‘game face’ version conveyed in the media, honed in part by years as a professional MMA (mixed martial arts) fighter. As we discover during a couple of days on the road with Barras and co, he moves between the two.
“So yeah, I killed the front row. With my ass,” he finishes. “I was a little bit sick off stage after.” That was your first and only stage dive? “Yeah, but I loved it. I’d do it again.” Kris Barras is not just a guy who plays guitar and sings. He writes all his own songs. He edits and/or shoots all his own videos and promos. He handles merch and funding. More often than not he drives the tour van. On top of all that he fronts the Supersonic Blues Machine with ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, and does filming work on the side – shooting music videos, live sessions, minidocumentaries on fighters… The day before we meet, he was shooting a wedding.
“That’s my chill time,” he says, smiling. “I enjoy filming. That stuff is easy to fit around touring, so it’s the perfect side hustle. It’s not like I’m Quentin Tarantino, but I’m a, what’s the word… pro-am.”
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. 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.
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. 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.
Somehow Kris Barras got pigeonholed as a blues guy. He sort of is; he’s signed to the same label as Joe Bonamassa, Eric Gales and Walter Trout. 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….
But on the strength of his new album, Light It Up, the Black Stone Cherry billing makes a lot of sense. It’s a rock album with lip-smacking immediacy and a vivid sense of all the genres Barras has studiously absorbed. 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. And the tunes are spot-on throughout. The joyous Counterfeit People in particular says ‘arena rock star’ more than ‘weekend blues warrior’.
“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. “There’s people that do it a lot better than I do. They don’t need more 12-bar, ‘My baby left me’ and all that.”
We pull up, and the bus is unloaded. The castle can be entered only via drawbridges, so gear is transported in vans while band and crew walk. They’re a loyal, tight-knit team, even if Barras concedes he’s not naturally a ‘people person’. “I’m much more of an animal person,” he muses, showing me pictures of his dogs back home in Torquay. “I have a low tolerance for bullshit. I don’t particularly like social gatherings or large groups of people.”
Most of his best friends are from his cagefighting days, with comradeship found even in queues for first aid after fights.
“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. “Some of the most gentle, kindest people I’ve ever met have been people I’ve met through the fighting world. And some of the nastiest people that I’ve ever met have been in the music industry, so go figure.”
Inside the castle grounds, huge mixing desks and staging contrast sharply with 13th-century walls. The dressing room looks like a Robin Hood film set, so our photographer and the band dart between backdrops for pictures.
Growing up in Torquay, Barras was a “mostly As and A*s” grammar school student, gearing up for law school. 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. At 17 he was driving a BMW into sixth form. Studying took a back seat.
“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. “And I said: ‘Do you know what? That’s the best bit of advice I’ve ever been given by a teacher.’”
He left school and got a job in a music shop with a studio underneath. He taught guitar there for a while, before opening his own teaching studio/store in a friend’s drum shop. He was 19.
For a couple of years or so the business thrived. Then, at the end of 2007, the financial crash happened, leaving Barras bankrupt at 22: “We ended up with a fuck-ton of stuff that we couldn’t sell off, I closed the shop, caused me a lot of stress.”
He’s called away for sound-check, and we watch from the battlements.
Come show time the castle grounds fill with punters bearing beers, bottles of rosé and sun cream. Falafel wraps and burgers are sold from food trucks. It feels like a mini-festival, or a really giant picnic. Barras, his wife Harriet, his mum and sister watch the opening act, southern
“When people say: ‘Are you nervous?’ it’s got such negative connotations. But it’s a natural
response: fight or flight.”