The day before the gig, we were practicing in the drama room at Sir Robert Borden High School. During a break, we were listening to the CKCU Radio when an ad for the concert came on. "Come on down to the Sandy Hill Community Centre and see four great punk bands," the announcer exclaimed.

With a repertoire that included Neil Young, America and Bruce Cockburn, we were about as far from a punk band as you can get. When the kids started pulling out their green hair when our lead singer and rhythm guitarist produced an acoustic guitar, we figured we were in for a rough night. But when we launched into Rebel Rebel, the kids started moshing (ironic because a racist comment by David Bowie was one of the reasons RAR was formed). We had a great time and I was hooked.

Playing in bands was a lot of fun, but I was always more of a writer than a musician and I wanted to put my poetry to music, so I took up the guitar when I was 19 and started writng songs. That would soon be interrupted by the birth of my first son and subsequent marriage to his mother. For around five years, my guitar sat in its case until the marriage disintegrated.

By 1990, I had enough songs to put together an album. My brother Ken Barker and I recorded Planet For Sale in our parents' basement on a four-track. It was atrocious, but it got us rolling. We sold maybe 100 copies.

The following year, we released another cassette, Regent Street. Recording at the old Sound of One Hand Studio, it was much more professional and featured some great guest musicians including Juno-winning blues guitarist Drew Nelson and members of The Born Again Pagans. Regent Street enjoyed limited success, but did get a fair bit of airplay on college stations (even making it to #13 on CKCU's Top 25 Albums) and led to an appearance on the former CBC Radio program The Performers. Supported by a mini-tour of eastern Ontario with my band Who's Abbado?, we sold close to 500 copies.

In 1995, we hit the studio again to record our first CD, The Forest for the Trees. At the same time, we put together The Thom Barker Band, featuring myself on acoustic guitar and vocals, Ken on keyboards and bass, Christian Chénier on lead guitar and Scotty MacCormack on drums. For the next couple of years, we played extensively around the Ottawa area and Forest got me a slot in the 1996 Ottawa Folk Festival , still one of the highlights of my performing career. I'm still flogging The Forest for the Trees and estimate its circulation at approximately 900 units.

I moved to Austin, Texas in 1997. I was working in the high tech business, but kept writing songs and played bass in a couple of cover bands for fun. When Ken got a job at the University of Texas in 2000, we put together a new version of Thom Barker Band, which we called Bubba Algorithm. We did a few gigs at clubs and played the 2001 Texas Music Festival before I decided to move back to Canada.

Just before I left, in the fall of 2002, we recorded all my acoustic guitar and vocal tracks for the upcoming Twice the Usual CD. Since then, Ken and Christian have been recording all the keyboards, bass, percussion and electric guitar parts, mixing, re-mixing and tweeking. Now, after more than a decade in the making, Twice the Usual is just weeks away from release.