Barry Peters

Barry Peters looks back on 20 years as a children's entertainer

By MATT NEAL
April 8, 2016, 6 p.m.

Barry Peters has followed a unique musical path over the past 20 years. Picture: Amy Paton

To have ended up in such a specialised musical niche seems like it could have only happened by choice, but Peters said he “never ever contemplated being a musician or making a career in music”.

“I didn’t choose to do what I do - it chose me,” he said. 

“I just said ‘yes’. I had never thought about creating music for children or entertaining children. It was totally off my radar.”

Barry Peters and a stage full of helpers.

The reason for all this is Peters is a children’s entertainer who specialises in environmentally themed music. He predominantly works in preschools, playing between 170 and 200 gigs per year across Victoria, NSW and South Australia.

Although he had a few childhood guitar lessons and learnt to play Beatles songs as a teenager, it wasn’t until he took a job as an inner city youth worker in Melbourne in his 20s that he started to understand what music could do.

“I just started playing with people at a street level,” Peters said.

“It was about connection, about being present with people, and music (did that). I really enjoyed it. You would meet astonishing musicians I could barely keep up with.’

Peters helped run emergency accommodation for the homeless and the mentally unwell. People would drift through and Peters would use music as a way to break the ice or win their trust. They would sing together or he would give them guitar lessons.

“There was a young kid who was staying with me in Kensington and he’d been on the streets since he was 12,” he said.

“His dad was in jail, his mum was schizophrenic, and he was a kleptomaniac. Basically he would steal stuff –that was how he lived. He was 14. I had two guitars - one was a good one and one was a not-so-good one and he stole the cheap one. He was always playing the good one and he was quite talented. So he pawned my cheap one.

“After agonising about it for a few days I decided to give him my good guitar. I basically said to him ‘I’m giving you this so you don’t have to steal it’. 

“About three years later I got a letter from him saying he’d been accepted into the pre-program for the conservatorium for music. And I got a Facebook message off him about 18 months ago inviting me to stay with him down in Melbourne. He’s now got a young family (and) he makes music with his family every day. He gave me a plaque thanking me for the guitar when I saw him 18 months ago. That was pretty special.”

Such a story goes a long way towards explaining Peters’ musical path. He said he never desired to start a band or be up on stage. Music was merely a way to communicate, to share stories, to bring people together and to create a sense of community. Peters liked the idea of sitting around a loungeroom singing with friends far more than standing in the spotlight.

Barry Peters and friends.

In 1992, Peters and his growing family came to Warrnambool, with his early musical experiences in the town involving playing guitar sporadically as part of his role as a social worker, similar to what he had done in Melbourne, Portland and Ballarat previously. 

Three years later, his playing caught the attention of Dennington kindergarten teacher Robyn Bishop, who taught at the preschool where Peters’ eldest child Madeleine went. Peters said his career as a children’s entertainer “basically began” with a simple request from Bishop to come and play music at the kindergarten.

“I learnt up a bunch of Play School songs and the night before Madeleine and I wrote a song together,” he said.

“I just said ‘we should write a song if we’re going to sing tomorrow’, so we wrote this little ditty (called The Lolly Song). I said to her ‘what do you want to write a song about?’ and she said ‘lollies’.”

The experience of writing music with Madeleine and playing at the kindergarten was life-changing. 

“I loved doing it,” he said.

“A couple of months later I wrote a couple more songs, including one called Puffing Billy which is still the most popular song I do.

“I went back a few months later and I’d written Puffing Billy (by that stage) but we’d also written a farewell song for Robyn because she was leaving the preschool. And I still remember being in the room with the children and parents singing Robyn’s farewell song and halfway through the song I was looking around the room and literally everyone in the room was crying. Kids were crying, parents were crying, staff were crying because Robyn was very loved. What struck me about it was how powerful music was. I hadn’t had that experience until that moment and I was just addicted.”

Peters quickly worked up a body of songs and started performing at local preschools and festivals. Soon after, he convinced Warrnambool musician Don Stewart to join him in the endeavour, which was named Canya Dantz at that stage. Peters said Stewart was “the backbone of the music” and still is, serving as producer on almost every recording Peters has made.

Stewart eventually left the performance side of things to Peters, preferring to focus his musical attention on his own projects such as Dalriada and Aniar, but his efforts in the studio helped create the Canya Dantz album that came out in 1997. The release confirmed to Peters that he was on the right track.

“It was intimidating and exciting,” Peters said of making the album.

“What solidified things for me over the next 12 months was the feedback we got from that first album from parents. It wasn’t little things like ‘the kids like your album’. Andrew Hallett, who plays bass with me still, he pulled me aside one day and said ‘you realise our kids haven’t let us take your CD off for about nine months. It’s the only CD they let us have in the CD player’. It’s sort of like the kids voted.”

Barry performing under the name Canya Dantz in the early days of his career.

Peters considered ditching his day job to focus on being a children’s performer full time, but first he sought out the advice of others in the field. He contacted the likes of Peter Combe, Franciscus Henri, and Monica Trapaga, who Peters said he was “inspired and cautioned by”.

“I admired them but learnt from them as well in terms of their careers and things they’d done and not done and what I felt would work,” he said.

“(Peter Combe) is back in business now but at that time he was bitter and twisted and angry and not working in that area at all, but had a whole lot of baggage. That was actually the thing that struck me most (about talking to children’s entertainers) – (a lot of these) people were full of demons. They were trying to process these things that hadn’t quite worked for them. I thought ‘gee you’ve got to do a lot of emotional work to stay ahead of that’.”

As his profile grew and Peters found himself performing further away from Warrnambool, he was approached about taking the next step up the ladder of kids entertainment.

“Twice in those early years I had promoters wanting to take me up and down the east coast,” he said.

But Peters and his wife Rachel had three children of their own, including Lachlan, who was diagnosed with autism, and Peters decided he couldn’t afford to be touring all the time making other people’s children happy.

“I went very close to going on the road but they wanted four or five months at a time to do the TV level and theatre stuff and I just couldn’t do that,” he said.

Instead Peters began creating his own preschool and primary school tours across Victoria, which meant he was never away for more than five days at a time. 

“Very quickly I realised that education side of things was an income and it was during daylight hours,” he said.

“That was over the first six years and that just grew as a business. So that became an income.”

Peters said that for a long time he still thought playing in preschools was “a stepping stone to something else” but eventually realised he was doing what he loved.

“I don’t know what stage in the journey (it was) - probably 10 years in - but I started to think ‘I actually like preschool shows better than any other show I do’,” he said.

“There’s just something magic about the context of a preschool. They’re little arts precincts. Not only that, but you get the audience’s (attention) for an hour. When you do a public event … unless you swallow fire in the first 30 seconds the kids go off to the woodwork room.”

The number of gigs per year started growing to more than 100 and the road trips got longer. His three kids, who would often appear on stage with him at public events, got older and Peters admitted he had to start gleaning song ideas from friends’ children to keep the inspiration flowing.

In 2001, he released a second album (Dantzing Round The Bus Stop) and the following year he released the first of his two DVDs, inspired by Lachlan, and Peters’ newfound understanding of how autistic children approach the world.

“I learnt how important it is to make music visual because I recognised in my son a whole (group) of human beings that see things through a physical maze first before they hear the words or the music,” Peters explained.

“So particularly in preschools when I’m preparing shows I work really hard on the visual presentation of each piece. 

“One of the local shows I do every year is at the Special Development School. The first year I played at the SDS the autistic boys … sat in the back rocking and screaming or ran out the door and didn’t participate in the show. It was the year I released my first DVD and (the school) bought a DVD from me. The next time I turned up at the SDS to perform, those autistic boys were in the front row ready for the show and loved it and stayed there for the entire thing. And the teacher simply said to me afterwards ‘they’ve been watching the DVD’. And so it made me realise ... that once they were able to see it visually they knew what was coming and they weren’t scared of it.”

Another DVD was released in 2006, followed by another album (Come Over & See Me Sometime) in 2007.

In 2008, Peters attempted a rare foray into the world of making music for grown-ups with a project called Gaberdine. While some of his kids music certainly don’t sound like you would imagine kids music to sound – tracks like That Little Light has a psychedelic or prog rock edge to it, while the title track of his new album When We Walked With Butterflies is a beautiful piano ballad – Gaberdine was his first attempt at deliberately targeting a more mature audience.“I’d always written poetry and so I found myself writing songs for adults as well,” he said of the project’s genesis.

“I started putting together a project where I was hoping to be able to perform to adult audiences. It was also linked with the fact that I applied to every folk festival or music festival in the country and apart from a couple of local ones I hadn’t been booked by any as a children’s entertainer. So I thought if I had a kids show and an adult show, the doors might open a bit better. So I put a lot of work into producing the Gaberdine album. When it was released, I sent it off to festivals with my kids stuff and immediately got booked by a bunch of festivals for my kids act and no one booked Gaberdine!”

The band he assembled for the album (titled The Flight Of Birds) and resulting live shows soon dissolved. While Peters admitted it was a bit of failure in one sense, it did inadvertently kick off a renewed interest among the festival circuit in his kids’ work.

Over his two decades as a children’s entertainer, Peters’ output has becoming increasingly environmental, to the point now where he says his songs and shows are “100 per cent” about the environment and getting children to be aware of the world around them and their place in it.

This has manifested in a compilation of environment songs in 2009 (If You Live On My Island, which featured the locally inspired track They Call Me Maremma), as well as a mini-musical called The Story Of Tower Hill, which he revived at this year’s Port Fairy Folk Festival.

There was also The Story Of Buninyong, a four-month-long project Peters undertook with the children, teachers and local indigenous elders of Buninyong, which culminated in a huge community performance. The project won a Premier’s Education Excellence Award. More recently, he completed the Lake Songs album, co-written in 10 days with 10 schools in East Gippsland and produced in collaboration with the Gippsland Plains Conservation Management Network.

Next year will mark the 20th anniversary of his first album, although he’s presently more focused on the release of his new one When We Walked With Butterflies, which was partly produced by his son Didi.

Despite the awards and album sales, Peters still doesn’t consider himself “to be much of a musician”. But that doesn’t matter to Peters – he’s more intent on making children love where they live and to become aware of the world around them. 

“My passion is about ... trying to connect children to reality,” he said.

“I love the work. I came home from the first week of touring this year and it was just so nice. I just laugh with children. 

“What I do before every show (is) I say to myself ‘this is as good as life gets’. So when I’m with the children and I’m performing I’m not trying to be somewhere else. There’s no stepping stone, there’s no ladder. I’m simply saying playing with these children now for the next hour is as good as my life will ever get. So let’s be in that moment.

 Warrnambool Standard 9th April 2016