Barry Ryan (72) was born Barry Sapherson on 24 October 1948 in Leeds, England. He was the son of Marion (née Ryan) and Fred Sapherson. Fred left when the boys were two, and Barry and his identical twin brother Paul were brought up by “Nana”, their adored grandmother. While Marion, who had had her boys as a teenager, pursued her singing career. She became a successful performer, rising to prominence in the 1950s with the band leader Ray Ellington, and was a regular on the television musical quiz show Spot the Tune.
By the time the twins were 11, Marion was earning enough as a 50s pop singer to buy Nana a big house and to pay for boarding school. At 16 Marion sent them to a kibbutz in Israel, where they lasted two weeks and were later discovered singing in a Tel Aviv nightclub.
Now they knew what they wanted.
When we came down from Leeds to London we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. We had no skills, we weren’t academic, we came from quite a working class background, so the idea of going to university then was just not an option really so they didn’t really know what to do with us, so mum said “why don’t you guys become singers?” We thought, “Sounds a bit mad that, but why not? Better than working for a living.”
Through Marion’s husband-to-be, the impresario Harold Davison, Paul and Barry Ryan signed with Decca. The pair belted out catchy, dramatic love ballads, songs that drifted around the UK Top 20, bobbing tantalizingly close to the big time until, in 1968, they had a hit single with Eloise, and with it came the perils, pressures and pleasures of stardom. Soon Paul ceased performing to concentrate solely on songwriting and Barry became a solo artist. His most successful hit, “Eloise“, reached number 2 on the UK Singles Chart in 1968.
Paul had written the track for his brother’s deep, soulful voice; in later life, Barry would tour with Eloise as a tribute to Paul, who died from lung cancer in 1992.
Eloise is mysterious. Its collision of styles – Puccini meets gospel meets Broadway musical – was part of what was being manufactured as “new” in pop. Not everybody warmed to it, with one critic describing the song as “sounding like a man being strangled by a cat”. The orchestral textures and structural intricacies were clearly influenced by Jimmy Webb’s MacArthur Park; and its “popera” owes much to Phil Spector’s Wagnerian overlays on tracks such as Walking in the Rain. Hyper-melodramatic content with soaring male vocals were in vogue. Yet none of this accounts for the enduring allure of Eloise. Freddie Mercury even mentioned that the song had an influence on him writing Bohemian Rhapsody
No one can agree whether it is a sugary madeleine of a song about a man’s idealization of an unobtainable woman, or a melodrama of dark obsession and savage yearning. But everyone does agree that the vocal style and the power of Barry’s voice carries the song. “Singing from the heart,” one critic noted. Barry performed the recording in two takes, with a high degree of professionalism in the production. Jimmy Page, and John Paul Jones, in the run up to founding Led Zeppelin, were two of the session musicians on the recording. Barry’s life hereafter got its share of Dionysian excess – parties at his flat in Eaton Place were renowned; Jimi Hendrix spent his first night in London there.
In 1969, Barry was injured in a studio fire in Munich. Although he was not physically scarred it had a psychological impact, which may have increased his dependency on alcohol. In 1986 both brothers entered rehab and Barry never drank again.
Years later, in 1986, when the punk rock band the Damned made their cover of Eloise, Peter Barnes, their music publisher, remembered: “Dave Vanian adored the song and mirrored the vocal performance as a tribute.” Barry, in the audience, was heard to say, “I like their version more than my own.”
By the mid-70s the twins had disappeared from the music scene and Barry turned to his lifelong passion, photography. His friendship with the German photojournalist Christa Peters exerted a strong influence and his photographic sensibility developed into an unusual fusion of self-expression and documentation. It surprised no one but him that when he submitted six pictures to the National Portrait Gallery, all were bought.
In 1976 Barry married Miriam, daughter of Sultan Ibrahim of Johor, Southern Malaysia close to Singapore. They divorced amicably in 1980. Barry had a talent for not falling out with people – and that stood him in good stead when, after Paul’s death, he published a memorial book of 80 portraits, donating profits to Cancer Research. Everyone he contacted agreed to pose, including Sting, Paul McCartney, Björk and Stephen Hawking.
He also photographed Margaret Thatcher, who had left office by this time. Mid shoot, noticing the hem of her curtains was adrift, she fetched a needle and thread. Without turning around when he moved his camera, she scolded him: “Don’t even think about it, Mr Ryan.” Thatcher subsequently helped Barry secure a portrait with Ronald Reagan.
Ryan maintained a successful career as a fashion photographer, from the late 1970s, and his photographs appeared in such magazines as Ritz and Zoom. But most of his fame derived from his brief, if meteoric, success as a pop star and teen idol in the mid to late 1960s.
Barry Ryan died on Sept. 28, 2021, aged 72 after complications from a lung disorder.
