Meet “the guitarist who plays standing up” at the Festival of Chichester

Zoe Barnett’s distinction is that she is “the guitarist who plays standing up” – as you will see when she returns to her home city of Chichester for a recital with her mother and fellow guitarist Linda Kelsall-Barnett.

They will be offering a Festival of Chichester concert on Friday, July 8 at 7.30pm at Christ Church, Old Market Avenue, an evening promising a wide range of repertoire to include works played on 19th-century guitars and more recent compositions on modern instruments. Tickets £12 and £5 from the Festival of Chichester online.

Zoe has just completed her undergraduate degree at the Royal College of Music and is now continuing there for her masters and embarking on a solo guitar career.

“I actually did five years there because I got an injury to my back in my final year. My spine was twisted. It's all sorted now but because of it I ended up playing guitar standing up and that's what I do now instead of sitting down. It is a really big thing for me now, a big part of my development and my individuality. It's basically more comfortable. It keeps my back aligned and it's just how I am but personally I now find it just a lot more engaging to be standing up and I wish that more people would do it! It gives me more freedom to play and move around and I don't think I'd be working on the way that I am trying to work, trying to develop the performative of side, if I weren't standing up.

“My injury is manageable now. I have figured out how to handle it. But some people have been saying would I go back to playing sitting now. But I don't think I that I would do that now. The college have been really supportive and it's nice that people now notice me is the guitarist that stands up!”

Zoe comes from a remarkable musical Chichester family: “Music was just 100 per cent around me. My mum was a founding member of the West Sussex Guitar Club and we spent most weekends just performing or being surrounded by guitars. My sister Tamzin was a guitarist until she had an injury when she was 12. She started getting pain in her fingers from playing and she figured out that if you're singing then you don't have to use your hands so she became a singer instead. But I continued with guitar. I started when I was very very young. There are photos of me when I was two or three with the guitar. I was just surrounded by it and it was hard not to just pick up a guitar, but it was absolutely my choice. I've just finished at the Royal College now and I'm doing the masters there and it is very exciting. It's an amazing environment to be in. For me it's about going on the stage and performing what I want to put in front of the audience. I find it really rewarding to get up on stage and present what I've been practising and to do it with this little wooden instrument. It's crazy. It is just an inanimate object but you bring it to life.”