As small as the “e” is, it is there now. “It’s just correct, I checked,” explains Gerhard Gmell. He no longer calls himself Barny as he did when he was at school, when he first became “Gmellheimer” and then “Barny” because of his Fred Feuerstein friend Rubble, who was present on television at the time, and then became “Barny”, who “at the time when we were still rock stars and also needed belittling “, to which Barny Murphy grew up. So now, as a rock, “Barney”, “maybe because I’ve gotten older,” says the 67-year-old. For the first time he has now released a solo album, the “mixed record” with his affair project: Barney and the Swingers Club – because of swing, nothing fiddly, but a man’s thing.
Another aging phenomenon is the “guitar cellar”. When he and his wife bought a house in Graefelfing five years ago, he was amused to discover a pink-painted cellar bar in it. It is now dark, insulated, spacious and so well equipped that he can with his Spider Murphy Gang rehearsed here for the big show in the Olympiahalle. In the evenings, Murphy often retires here with a red wine and plays his 40 guitars. “I couldn’t do that in the apartment before.”
At a certain age you can afford nice things. For the musician it was a Maccaferri, built by the Wolfratshausen guitar master Joe Striebel according to original plans of the legendary instruments by Django Reinhardt. He simply had to have such a noble piece since his friend Christian Niederer introduced him to the old string wizard. They jammed in the guitar cellar. His “former apprentice” Louis Thomass joined them and Schorsch Angerer from the show band Cagey strings. The men’s group plucked through everything from gypsy swing to Latin jazz, “a new world” opened up for rock’n’rollers: “I had to squat down and practice,” says the self-taught, “terribly exciting”.
Friends Christian Niederer and Schorsch Angerer died within a month
“And then the hammer came,” says Barney Murphy, almost whispering it, within a month first Niederer, then Angerer, died. Both way too young. You can tell that it was getting close. Like the recent death of Franz Trojan, the Spiders’ first drummer. “I don’t want to talk about it,” says Murphy, “I’m very sorry about Franz.” Trojan left the band, which was founded in 1978 and is still a haven for Barney Murphy, very early on. The other day on a big stage in Bayreuth shot through his head: “It’s amazing, we’re still playing.” His explanation sounds like a question to him: “Maybe simply because we are good musicians?”
The joy of acoustic craft is all the more important in the swingers club, which Murphy and Thomas are now continuing with drummer Andreas Keller, bassist and producer Tom Peschel and guests. The tones flicker like in the “Downhill Blues” dedicated to Chuck Berry (Murphy shows a photo with his idol on his cell phone). But when Barney turns “Johnny B. Goode” into a rumba in minor, which “the stubborn” Günther Sigl always refused to do with the Spiders, he sometimes lolls as relaxed as he did on his last vacation in Cuba. With the Spiders love song evergreen “Rosmarie”, Barney took up the old idea of a string arrangement. When six musicians from the Bavarian Philharmonic came into the studio and played, “it was so nice that I almost cried”. He turns the punk “S-Bahn surfing” of the Spiders into the summer hit “Eisbach surfing”.
Willy Astor wrote the “Donnersberger Brück’n” for him
The swingers whiz through Ted Snyder’s “Sheik of Araby”, a favorite of Django and Django alike Beatleswho sang live guitar fex George Harrison. Barney once met him at a photographer friend of his, but was too shy and too bad at English to talk much. Somehow he’s the George of the Spiders, likes to be inspired. For example from Willy Astor, whose hymn “Donnersberger Brück’n” he took with him because “Willy wrote that for me, so to speak”: He grew up there, on the old iron bridge, scrambled around on it and almost fell.
Now the memories come up. How he saw the Jimi Hendrix carry two Stratocaster from the Music City store across the street to the “Big Apple”, where the electric guitar god then lit one in the evening at the concert: “I only had one fucking Framus, and there My dream part burned … “It was” Wuide Zeit’n “in old Schwabing that Barney Murphy brings to life in a new song. He also unpacks a well-known riff and the Rosi again. Makes a good mood. But to be honest, “Scandal in the restricted area” cannot top it, some things cannot be improved.