Barrie Cadogan, fierce frontman and guitarist for Little Barrie, is demolishing a wah-soaked guitar solo with Jeff Beck-style stabs on “More Bad Miles of Road,” the funky opening cut from the band’s latest slab, Gravity Freeze. As incendiary as it is, it’s only the party-starter for their Saturday night October 24th show at Brookyn’s National Sawdust.
Here in the heart of Brooklyn’s bustling Williamsburg neighborhood, Cadogan is quite possibly one of the most laid-back and amiable guys you’ll come across. Still, put a vintage Jazzmaster or a Gibson Les Paul in his hands, and he seems to transform before your very eyes into a ninja master of the flying guillotine, with volume.
He’s been lauded in the press on both sides of the pond as “your favorite artist’s favorite guitarist,” and with good reason. Almost from the moment Little Barrie’s earliest singles started popping up in London record shops back in the summer of 2000, crate diggers took notice of the trio’s raw “garage soul” sound and estimable skills.
Cadogan took inspiration from the likes of John Squire, Johnny Marr, and Jimi Hendrix, all while flashing a catalog of vintage blues and soul chops in the vein of Otis Rush, Steve Cropper, and Curtis Mayfield. On top of that, he’s a dry, down-and-dirty singer with a distinctive rock ‘n’ roll rasp all his own.
Britpop’s modfather, Paul Weller, soon got in touch, inviting Little Barrie to open for select dates on his 2002 Illumination tour. In the run-up to the band’s debut, We Are Little Barrie, in 2005, Cadogan joined Morrissey on tour for ten shows. Two years later, Primal Scream recruited him into the band as co-guitarist. Along the way, Cadogan has recorded or toured with Weller, Liam Gallagher, The The, Spiritualized, and many more.
Through it all he found time to compose the bluesy guitar theme for the hit TV series Better Call Saul. Most recently, he’s been a hired gun on the Black Keys’ latest tour, which wrapped on October 21st. What’s more, Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound is Little Barrie’s current record label home.
“I mean, it’s all been a bit bonkers,” Cadogan confides before the show, “but at the same time, when you get the opportunities, you’ve gotta take ’em. It’s just great that we could fit a few Little Barrie shows in, you know? It isn’t easy for British artists to get over here, and it’s been really cool, being part of the Easy Eye family and getting the reception we’ve had for the record.”
The packed house is a fitting reward for a band that has seen more than its fair share of adversity. In 2017, Cadogan and bassist Lewis Wharton were primed and ready for a U.K. tour to celebrate the release of Little Barrie’s fourth album, Death Express, when they received the cruelly ironic and devastating news that drummer Virgil Howe (the son of Yes founding guitarist Steve Howe) had succumbed to a heart attack and died at age 41. Two years later, they attempted to soldier on with fellow session ace Tony Coote behind the kit, only to be stopped in their tracks by the COVID pandemic.
Longtime friend, drummer, and record producer Malcolm Catto stepped into the breach to make two excellent albums with Cadogan and Wharton, but the need to keep Little Barrie a cohesive trio soon took over. Gravity Freeze became the vehicle for a reunion of sorts, with Coote adding a solid backbeat, precision timing, and an easygoing demeanor that gave the band some room to stretch out, metaphorically speaking (the cramped confines of producer Rupert Lyddon’s mixing room were where the band found the sound it wanted for the album).
Coote is now a full-time member, and he brings a real exuberance to Little Barrie’s live sound, as well as a reverence for Howe’s indelible contributions. It’s a spark that lights a groovy blue flame under the band’s older material. “Molotov Cop” retains the frenetic edge of the Death Express original, with Cadogan closing it out on a screaming lead lick that cues his bandmates to slam on the brakes.
Further on in the set, the dreamily melodic “Why Don’t You Do It,” which features Blues Explosion drummer Russell Simins on the original album version from 2006’s Stand Your Ground, got a slight tempo boost that seemed to energize Cadogan, who put on a master class in singing over very complex guitar lines, his left hand flying up and down the neck. It’s a crowd pleaser, and when Coote and Wharton joined him on successive punches of “Do it!” to wrap the song, the room erupted in cheers.
That connection with his audience is a key part of what continues to fuel Cadogan when he’s on tour. It also fed into the making of Gravity Freeze, in the sense that connecting with something beyond themselves, in a manner of speaking, is what the band always strives for.
“I mean, there’s a lot of music that we like,” he says, reflecting on how the band collaborated with Lyddon to harness the sound they were chasing. “There are also things that we admire in records and certain productions, and a certain spirit of things. I guess we’ve always loved an older sound, but we wanted to make our own record. The thing that appeals to us about the sound in all the records we like, and in the way people played on them, is just the way it makes us feel. We wanted to try and capture that, because we’re a bit unexcited by a lot of modern guitar band production. It just seems a bit bland, or that it’s missing something.”
As a live experience, Little Barrie are tapping into that spirit. When they launched into “It Isn’t Soul,” another standout from Gravity Freeze, they channeled the dark “stoner soul” vibe that Cadogan had in mind when he wrote the song. It’s a direct nod to the Budos Band, whose guitarist and producer Thomas Brenneck is a fellow traveler. It certainly isn’t lost on Cadogan that Brenneck and his compatriots in the legendary Dap-Kings used to walk these very streets in Williamsburg, and that Daptone’s House of Soul, the label office and studio where Amy Winehouse and Sharon Jones once recorded, is just a few train stops away in Bushwick.
As the band got deeper into the set, the richness and wide-ranging scope of the songs on Gravity Freeze revealed themselves. “Coralisa” merged funk and hard rock into one hell of a banger. Cadogan plays a relatively clean-sounding guitar on the album version, but on stage he overdrove his Fender amps to heighten the mood of the closing solo section, while Wharton and Coote teamed up to push the furious groove even further. It was almost jarring when Cadogan led the band right into the brooding minor key sprawl of “Anything You Are,” but the juxtaposition was well-crafted. The song shifted into higher gear for the second verse, then downshifted again for the last, ending in a bluesy flourish.
“Luggin’ Hurt,” arguably the new album’s centerpiece, closed the show. To these ears, the studio version recalls the sound of the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s famed BBC Top Gear throwdown from 1967, a revelation that clearly delights Cadogan. “Oh man, I love those Radio One sessions,” he says. “To be honest, that was the first Jimi Hendrix material that I ever heard properly. When I was a kid learning how to play guitar, my dad was a big fan of Jimi. He used to have those sessions on cassette, and we listened to that a lot. The sound is just incredible on that stuff.”
At the end of the show, Cadogan pulled out his Gibson SG to dig into “Luggin’ Hurt,” and when he stopped the Northern soul-style shuffle to apologize for being slightly out of tune, the crowd cheered him on again. The band responded with freewheeling energy, leading the song into an extended jam that really highlighted what Wharton, an anchoring presence throughout the night, brings to the fold.
Cadogan egged him on to take a brief solo, and he delivered, tapping into the upper reaches of his Fender P-bass and then sliding back into the main bass line to lay down a solid and unshakeable pocket with Coote. Cadogan stepped in again, dropping some Hendrix-y blues licks to cue the coda. “Cheers, thanks for having us,” he told the crowd over whoops and hollers. “We’ll see you again soon.” Hell, let’s count on it, shall we?
Check out footage of Little Barrie performing “More Bad Miles of Road” and “It Isn’t Soul” at a recent show in London.
Little Barrie | “More Bad Miles of Road” | Rough Trade | London, England | 6/29/2026
Video: Still Gigging Around