Tony Barrell (broadcaster)

Anthony Barrell (7 May 1940 – 31 March 2011) was an English writer and broadcaster who lived in Sydney, Australia. He produced several award-winning radio and television documentaries for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the BBC World Service, usually with a focus on Asia and particularly Japan.

Barrell was born in Cheshire, England, in 1940; both his parents and most of his family came from the Suffolk town of Stowmarket. His maternal grandmother, née Florence Laflin, had a family tree linking her through an unbroken line of agricultural labourers to the end of the sixteenth century.

He was brought up in the Welsh town of Mold in Flintshire and went to The King's School, Chester, in 1951, and then Liverpool University from 1958 to 1961, where he obtained a degree in economics. He was a student journalist and edited the literary magazine Sphinx. The magazine's covers were designed by Bill Harry who later edited Mersey Beat. In Liverpool, thanks to a friendship with the London teenage pop poet Royston Ellis, he met George Harrison and Stuart Sutcliffe, the Beatle who was a promising young artist but died of a brain haemorrhage in Hamburg in 1962.

Barrell moved to London in 1961 and lived for some years with Roger Deakin, author of Waterlog, in a flat they shared in Bayswater. He worked as a writer and researcher for Pathé Films from 1965 to 1969 and made journeys to shoot Pathe Pictorial in Morocco, Bermuda, Florida, New York and Hong Kong. In 1967, he met film designer Jane Norris and together they began visiting the Greek island of Lesbos. Norris started the design shop Ace Notions in Camden Town, London, which was later shared with the new wave fashion house Swanky Modes. Barrell co-wrote Superslave, a comic book for adults, with illustrator Bill Stair, which was published by Penguin Books in 1972. He also wrote a long profile of Captain Beefheart (Don van Vliet) for Zig Zag magazine, during his UK tour with the Magic Band in 1973.

Following the excesses of the Three-Day Week and the IRA bombing campaign of 1974 (and the birth of their daughter Klio), Barrell and Norris moved to Sydney, where they lived together in the same house in Balmain. Barrell was hired by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in 1975 to write and produce ideas and stories for their 'youth station' 2JJ (later Triple J). He and producer/engineer, Graeme Bartlett, developed the style of "cut up" radio shows through Sunday Afternoon at the Movies, Shipbuilding For Pleasure (the latter show, hosted by Graeme Bartlett, aired on 2JJJ during the late 1980s), and Watching the Radio with the TV Off.These shows were the aural equivalents of the avant-garde cut-up: a montage of interviews, location sound, music and found audio, comedy shows, mystery stories and contemporary pop (avant garde and mainstream) to create new narratives - a style that was later re-invented by ABC Radio National's Radio Eye and The Night Air program (both shows now defunct). Barrell was founder producer of these two shows and continued to work on the latter towards the end of his career. Among those Barrell interviewed for Triple J were Brian Eno, Hunter S. Thompson, Johnny Rotten (né John Lydon), John Cale, and members of bands such as Madness, Wire and Cabaret Voltaire.

Barrell worked with Rick Tanaka for Triple J on The Nippi Rock Shop—a program on pop culture and politics of Japan—for thirteen years. People featured in the programme included The Yellow Magic Orchestra (Ryuichi Sakamoto, Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi), Sandii and Makoto of Sandii & the Sunsetz and other people from all walks of Japanese life. The pair also made a groundbreaking series of radio documentaries Japan's Other Voices for the ABC's Radio National network's Background Briefing program in 1984. Tony and Rick wrote articles for Australian Rolling Stone, Kyoto Journal and, for a while, were Sydney correspondents for the newsletter Tokyo Insider.

Barrell made a four-part radio documentary series in the UK in 1987. Two parts, Welcome to the Post-Industrial Museum and Militants on Merseyside, were about the industrial decline of Liverpool and the control of the city council by the Militant tendency; and the other two were about the British press. The Wapping Truth was the story of the Wapping dispute that followed the relocation of News International papers from Fleet Street to Wapping, and Nothing Left to Read was an examination of the perceived bias of most British newspapers in favour of the government of Margaret Thatcher. The programmes included interviews with author Linda Melvern, Tony Benn MP and the then-editor of the New Statesman, John Lloyd.

In 1988, the last year of Ronald Reagan's presidency, Barrell toured the US to make a five-part radio series Choice of America which visited Los Angeles, Houston, New Orleans, Boston, Washington and New York City. Notable interviewees included John Kenneth Galbraith, Jim Garrison (the New Orleans attorney who was later the subject of Oliver Stone's JFK movie), and former New York City mayor John Lindsay. The second part of the series, What Happened to Houston, won an award at the New York Festival.