My Musical Biography

Seamus Barnett has been involved with The Painter's Chronicle for almost a year now, performing at The Big Night In and the Ramble ‘n’ Rave. His extensive band history includes Paintseamusyellow, Pink Elephant fish, Sense Offenders, Political Suicide, as well as appearances on Phoenix FM. In this new series of fortnightly posts Seamus shares how he found music, how it has affected his life and how it is shaping his plans for a musical future.

Chapter 1 – Discovering Music

I sit here, writing this, listening to music. I like music. 

Music means different things to each person, to some it is about the musicality, so the harmonies and how good it is technically, to others it is about the style, for example pop, which is very much about creating not musically challenging but mainstream average records, a lot of pop is about the image given by the band, Lady Gaga for example. Please do not think that I do not like the bands I talk about unless I explicitly express it. A lot of people might see me calling Lady Gaga mainstream all-about-the-image band is a bad thing, but it is not.  

I found music in two different ways, firstly through my brother who influenced greatly my musical taste, he showed me Metallica, who were my first favourite band. Slowly he developed my musical taste, and then I began to develop my own musical taste through that. This was all heavily influenced though after I started to play guitar, I wanted to play guitar to these songs, and Metallica was perfect, I then got into bands like Children of Bodom and various other thrash metal bands (including embarrassingly enough dragonforce, who I THINK ARE BAD!) the other major influence was concerts, at an early age I was told by my Brother what bands were good and what were bad, for example Trivium – bad and Marilyn Manson – good. But all that changed when my dad came home one day asking if I would like to go and see Trivium live in Bradford, as this would be my first gig even though I had been taught to change the channel when Trivium came on TV I leapt at the opportunity, and started to listen to them lots, realizing I did actually like this music and learning all of their songs! The gig was incredible, and I was a convert.  

From there I then went on to discover various different types of music through different ways, partly through media like magazines and TV, radio, and sometimes through people, especially girlfriends i’ve found! So now I like almost any genre of music! To give you a sample of just how varied that is I will quickly do a totally random shuffle on my i-Tunes and be totally truthful with the results. 

Paintseamusyellow (my band!), Lostprophets, Michael Jackson, Trivium, Arctic Monkeys, Glen Hansard, Kill Paradise, Bullet For My Valentine 

A lot of the music isn’t as mainstream as that bunch, but a shuffle is a shuffle!(N-Dubz totally just came on!) 

So that was how I first discovered music, the internet has helped greatly. Next time I will tell the story of beginning to write music and learning guitar.