Obituary: Leo Barnes, talented musician who played memorable sax solo on ‘Don’t Go’ by Hothouse Flowers

The once internationally acclaimed musician lived in Finglas, Dublin, for the last 10 years and appeared to keep to himself to the point of almost being a recluse. Hothouse Flowers lead singer Liam Ó Maonlaí hadn’t seen him since Barnes left the band in late 1995.

A close friend of Barnes, Marcella Gillick, said: “He’d spend Christmas with us most years in Bray. I considered him part of the family. He lived in my family for years, between 2003 and 2008, and was part of all family events. Yet I know so little about him.”

Another of his friends, the musician Danny Tobin, talked to him last Christmas when Barnes visited him. “He had a cup of tea. He seemed very happy.”

In the 2000s, Barnes played occasionally in Tobin’s band Southern Xpress at the Bray Jazz Festival and at the Harbour Bar. “His last gig was 15 years ago with us.”

Born in 1955, Barnes was left as an orphan by parents he never knew and put in the Artane Industrial School in Dublin after spells in the notorious industrial schools, St Joseph’s in Kilkenny and Letterfrack in Galway.

He was fostered by a family in Dublin. He became a member of the Artane Boys Band. In the Gaelic Weekly News in 1968, in an article about the Artane Boys, there is a picture of young Leo.

Receiving a grant from the Arts Council, he studied at the Conservatoire de Bordeaux in France with Jean-Marie Londeix. In 1985, Barnes rose to prominence when he joined Hothouse Flowers.

Ó Maonlaí recalls him walking into Strand Studios in Dublin where they were recording demos for the song Out Walking.

“Leo came in and played like a bird. I’d never heard anyone play like that before. He was a maverick. He didn’t know his parents and that would make a maverick of anyone. Most of us have very clear and definite role models. He had to search out his role models. He was the kindest man in the band.”

Ó Maonlaí remembers one night after a show in Cork in 1987. “I was going through a dark night of the soul. Leo recognised that. He took me by the hand, too up to my hotel room, tucked me into bed and kissed me on the forehead and put water by the side of my bed.”

In a 1990 profile of Hothouse Flowers, Rolling Stone magazine noted that, on the band’s tour bus travelling to Belfast, while Ó Maonlaí was playing tin whistle Barnes was reading a biography of James Joyce’s wife, Nora.

Terry O’Neill, who was the agent and publicist for Hothouse Flowers from 1986 to 1990, recalls Barnes as “probably the most talented musician in the band”.

Allan Gannon, who owned Marlena’s night club in Leeson Street, Dublin, remembers Barnes as regular in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

“Almost every single conversation with him went back to the same thing — the trauma he suffered in the industrial school in Artane. He would tell me: ‘I was in reform school for young offenders, people who had committed crimes, and my only crime was I didn’t have any parents.’ He did learn an instrument, which is how the world got to know the name of Leo Barnes but, by God, did he pay a dreadful price for it.”

Barnes played on US folk singer Michelle Shocked’s 1992 album Arkansas Traveler. He also played with Gavin Friday’s band for a time. “He was one-off,” Friday said, “a troubadour extraordinaire.” Barnes left Hothouse Flowers in late 1995.

According to Tobin, who shared a house with him in Raglan Road, Dublin, in the late 1990s and then lived near him in Bray, Co Wicklow, “he was in contact with his foster mother Kate in Sallynoggin and he had two sisters, Margaret and Mary, one of whom was a nurse in Zimbabwe. Leo was an incredible man. On the outside, he was gregarious, very funny, quick witted and didn’t suffer fools gladly.”

On the inside? “His experiences in St Joseph’s in Kilkenny, Letterfrack and Artane had an immense effect on him. He was a shy and very reflective person. But he was lights ahead of anyone.”

Gillick said: “He was the most modest, private and shy individual I have ever met.”

Tobin remembered a story Barnes told him of registering for the social welfare in the late 2000s. “He had never been on the dole. When he went to sign on in Tara Street they asked him: ‘Do you have any other income?’ He said, ‘I get royalty cheques.’ And they said: ‘Are you part of the royal family?’”

Leo Barnes was, of course, Irish rock royalty.