My Story — This isn’t a success story. It’s a building story. A life shaped by South Africa, childhood adversity, music, sport, education, fatherhood, family, loss, faith, creativity and community — and repeatedly starting again.
Story is what life gives us.
Building is what we do with it.
This is not a view from the top of a mountain. Barry is still on the climb — still learning, still building. What follows is the story so far, told in chapters, with more added over time.
The story behind the music.
Long before the projects, communities and stages, there was a story.
An earlier personal film, made several years ago — an authentic telling of the background, music, childhood, education and teaching that shaped the work.
Music entered through the people, not the lessons.
Before the guitars, the classrooms and the crowds, there was a boy in South Africa — curious, imaginative, and learning early how to survive.
His earliest memory of music is sitting close to his father as he played and sang — the Rolling Stones, Cat Stevens, Rodriguez, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Beatles. His mother found her escape in the songs of Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers and Don Williams. “My son,” she would say, “these songs tell stories.”
Music came into his life through memory, emotion and people. It has filled the happy, the sad and the empty spaces ever since.
What do we build from what happens to us?
Around the age of ten, after severe instability at home, Barry and his siblings entered care.
This is part of the story — but it is not the point of it. The point was never “look what happened to me.” It was a quieter, harder question, and it would come to shape everything that followed: what do we build from what happens to us?
A language of the body before music took over.
Sport gave him something to belong to. Rugby, physical challenge, competition, teamwork, discipline — a way of building himself through effort and through others.
An injury would eventually interrupt that direction. Something ended; something else began. It is a pattern that would repeat throughout his life.
Escape became expression. Expression became a way of life.
Music had always been there. In time the guitar became more than a comfort — it became a creative language, and then a direction.
What started as a way through difficult spaces grew into performance, songwriting and, eventually, a life built around helping other people find their own voice.
Teaching was never only about the subject.
Barry trained and worked as an educator — in the classroom, in Design & Technology, and in specialist behavioural and youth education, often with the young people hardest to reach.
It was about seeing someone, and helping them believe they were capable of more than they thought. That belief would become the thread running through everything he built next.
Giving his children what parts of his own childhood were missing.
Marriage. Fatherhood. Five children. A deliberate effort to build play, presence and connection into everyday life.
Play. Joy. Presence. Connection.
Every life contains storms.
For Barry’s family they came in waves — a young son’s cancer journey, financial collapse, the disruption of the COVID years, and long stretches of profound uncertainty.
Out of that season came an idea he has long returned to: an unfinished project called Tempest and Turmoil — Navigating Life’s Storms with Grace and Resilience. The storms were real. So was what came after them.
Not one dramatic moment. Thousands of ordinary actions.
Rebuilding happened through the unglamorous work — lessons taught, songs written, rooms set up, books drafted, gigs played, communities gathered.
Small, repeated, deliberate effort, day after day. That is how lives are actually built — and how they are rebuilt.
The story widened from me to we.
Somewhere along the way the story stopped being about one person. Around music, teaching, the ukulele, performance and shared experience, communities formed — rooms full of strangers becoming something bigger.
Barry doesn’t only build projects. He builds people, confidence, experiences and the sense of belonging he once had to find for himself.
The story isn’t finished.
There are unfinished books. More music. More performances. New ideas, new places, new projects — and always more to learn.
This story doesn’t end with a summary of everything achieved, because it isn’t over.
Still learning.
Still building.
Come with me.
Explore the worlds Barry is building