You could say that Swing Out Sister owe their existence to John Barry.
When Andy & I first met we went through the usual initiation/interrogation that decides whether you have what it takes to write a song, perform it...create a sound.
Andy played lots of  Brazilian jazz, Flora Purim & Airto Moreira, Azymuth, Ursula Dudziak and stuff I hadn't heard of at the time, and I told him I loved sixties pop and northern soul. We didn't seem to have any common ground...until we discussed our love of film music, especially the film scores of John Barry, including the epic Bond themes featuring Shirley Bassey.
I had just bought a recording Sony Walkman, the cutting edge of technology at the time, and the only cassette I had was a compilation of Bond themes that I played constantly. This provided a soundtrack that made tedious journeys to and from my 9-5 job in a design studio seem like I was in a glamorous sixties movie. Andy told me how as a child he had eagerly anticipated the release of each new Bond film, his mum & dad taking him to the pictures to see every one.
Their soundtracks poured technicolour sophistication and escapism into the black and white reality of our 60's childhoods.
John Barry also settled musical differences between ourselves and producer Paul O'Duffy when we started work on our first album, It's Better to Travel.
Without John Barry's scores we wouldn't have discovered our mutual desire to experiment in the studio to make recordings somewhere between film soundtracks and pop songs.
It was whilst working on this album that we found a hammered dulcimer in Ray Mann's percussion shop in Covent Garden. Intrigued by its Bond-esque sound, we wrote a tune with it which became Theme from It's Better to Travel. The hammered dulcimer or cymbalom was a key feature in many of John Barry's compositions so we were really pleased that we had stumbled upon it. We got in touch with the man himself to see if there was any possibility of us collaborating in some way on our album. To our surprise, John came down to the studio and gave our album a listen.. (A couple of years later, we were to play him another of our Barry-inspired tunes that was perhaps one note short of a lawsuit....)
He gave us his blessing, and in his dry transatlantic Yorkshire accent, told us he wouldn't sue. We didn't get to work with him but Paul our producer did, (I think it was his Lotus that swung it!) when John invited him to work on the next Bond movie.
The music of John Barry epitomised the jet set. What a pleasure it was to fly with him.

There are some mad nights on here if you're after something different! It's open late so I always end up here after a night out elsewhere in the area and I never know what I'm in for. A few months ago we went in and there was a DJ who looked like Thelma from Scooby-Doo playing music in front of a wide screen showing clips of the old 90s Hart Beat art show. On the dancefloor were two particularly hilarious guys really going for it (I've never seen dancing like it, but in a good way) and a man dressed in paper (I can't explain). There were crayons everywhere and drawings stuck to the wall, as it turned out it was some kind of art party for the public. I left at 4am, my face covered in index stickers and my arms graffitied in crayon, having made some new friends.