Early Years
Barrett was born in Blackwood, Monmouthshire in 1940 but moved to Penarth near Cardiff, at a young age, where he has lived ever since. His father was a brass moulder and his mother was a housewife and author. His parents named him Paul after Paul Robeson the black American Marxist Communist and Francis after Sir Francis Drake. However Barrett always disliked his middle name and formally changed it in 1961 to Franklyn because he preferred the name and admired Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
He was educated at Cogan School, King's College, Cardiff and Victoria Road School, Penarth. On leaving secondary school Barrett had several mundane jobs including photographer's assistant, market barrow-boy, door-to-door salesman, council labourer, brewery worker, warehouseman, plastics-moulder, potato-packer, railway-signalman, shop assistant, grassmower, hospital porter and hotel receptionist.
During the 1950s he developed a passion for American rock and roll music. In his spare time he started acting as agent and manager for Penarth's first rock group, the Backbeats. He began promoting teenage dances at the local venue, the Paget Rooms, that would continue until the early 1980s. Barrett was active in promoting events during the annual Penarth Holiday Fortnight each July.
A supporter of American Rock and Roll DJ Alan Freed, Barrett also organised film nights at the Paget Rooms. He also opened a specialist rock and roll record shop on Glebe Street.
To cash in on the 1960s psychedelic movement in British music the Backbeats briefly shifted to performing as the 'flower power'-style "Earl Fuggle and the Electric Poets". Barrett himself took the persona of Earl Fuggle on lead vocals. The idea developed into a performance group named "The 98% Mom and Apple Pie West Coast Rock and Roll Band".
Read more about this topic: Paul Barrett
Famous quotes containing the words early years, early and/or years:
“I believe that if we are to survive as a planet, we must teach this next generation to handle their own conflicts assertively and nonviolently. If in their early years our children learn to listen to all sides of the story, use their heads and then their mouths, and come up with a plan and share, then, when they become our leaders, and some of them will, they will have the tools to handle global problems and conflict.”
—Barbara Coloroso (20th century)
“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, its probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Her fist of a face died clenched on a round pain;
And sculptured Ann is seventy years of stone.
These cloud-sopped, marble hands, this monumental
Argument of the hewn voice, gesture and psalm,
Storm me forever over her grave”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)