A Rising Tide: Barry Can’t Swim, Can Conquer Touring (Cover)

When Joshua Mainnie, better known as Barry Can’t Swim (the name comes from a friend named Barry, who happens to not know how to swim), set out to produce music, he envisioned incorporating a live show complete with a full live band. That vision has come to life on his new tour which features a six-piece band that includes a drummer (Cameron Easton), keyboardist (Hannah Jacobs), three violinists and a cello (Bolt Strings) who are helping bring his jazz-influenced and house-inflected electronic sounds to dance floors across the globe. 

The Edinburgh, Scotland native’s current run comes in support of his upcoming album, Loner, set for release on July 11 via Ninja Tune. On this trek, Mainnie, who now lives in London, is trying to find the right balance between previewing songs off his upcoming album and his acclaimed back-catalog which includes his award-winning 2023 album When Will We Land.

“I want to play loads of new music, but I realize a lot of these shows are coming before the album is fully out,” Mainnie tells Pollstar. “So it’s finding a bit of a balance. There’s a fair amount of new music in there, for sure. But I didn’t want to have too much. If it were me, and I was going to a show, it would be exciting to hear new material that you don’t know. 

“But at the same time, it’s harder to connect with it when you’re hearing it for the first time live,” he admits. “By the time we’re playing the shows, there will be three of the tunes that are out, and there’s going to be three that are unreleased.”  

Among his new songs is the club banger “Still Riding,” which samples Kali Uchi’s 2015 breakthrough single “Ridin Round.” The track has 12.4 million streams on Spotify since its Sept. 24, 2024 release, which has helped him land higher profile shows.

He started this year off in Australia with festival plays including St. Jerome’s Laneway Festival in February in Melbourne and a headline show of his own at Liberty Hall (1,200 capacity) in Sydney on Feb. 12. In March, he went to South America for a run of shows at Lollapalooza Argentina, Chile and Brazil and Festival Estéreo Picnic in Bogota. He returned to North American in April with his full live band, which began in Boston on April 15 at Royale Nightclub and includes two nights at the 6,300-capacity Shrine on May 2 and 3. He’ll return to festivals throughout the summer with appearances slated for Bonnaroo in Manchester, Tennessee; Fira Montjuïc/Fira Gran Via in Barcelona; Best Kept Secret in Hilvarenbeek, Netherlands; Rock Werchter in Belgium; Lollapalooza in Chicago; Osheaga Music and Arts Festival in Montréal; Rock en Seine in Saint-Cloud, France, and All Points East in London.

Throughout the summer, he’ll also have headline dates at Rough Trade East in London on July 13 and Rough Trade in Liverpool on July 18 and wrap his current run of dates on Aug. 23 at Clifton Downs in Bristol as part of the Forwards Festival. As this story was going to press, Barry Can’t Swim was announced for III Points in Miami on Oct. 17.

Mainnie says he appreciates the differences of festival versus his headline shows which offer fans different experiences. “Sometimes, when you’ve done so much of one thing, I’ll start missing the other,” he says. “For example, when I play festivals, I love it. It’s so great. But, when you’ve done a lot of festivals over a period of time, and then do a small underplay and people are right there, it feels amazing. But then, when I was coming through DJing, doing quite a lot of those shows, the first time you get to do a big stage festival feels amazing. It really just depends on what I’ve been doing. I don’t have a preference, it’s just nice to mix it up.” 

While Mainnie got his start playing piano and and other instruments, he fell in love with dance music while studying music at Edinburgh Napier University and hitting the nightclubs in Edinburgh’s Cowgate area.

Mainnie and his manager, Oran Barton of Attention Management, met in 2019. Barton discovered Barry Can’t Swim while digging through SoundCloud. He was enraptured with the track “Because I Wanted You To Know,” which eventually became Barry Can’t Swim’s first single. At the time it had only a few hundred plays.

“I messaged Josh saying, ‘Hello, I would like to hear more. He sent me a bunch of others that were in his folder and they were all amazing,” Barton tells Pollstar. “I was like, ‘Who is this guy that no one’s heard of sitting on all these amazing songs?’ It was probably about two months later we met in person in Brighton. At that point, I realized he’s Scottish and I’m Irish, and we quite quickly got along from there.” 

“Because I Wanted You To Know” was released officially in early 2020, unfortunately just in time for the global pandemic. Still, agents Len Chenfeld and Latane Hughes at Wasserman Music joined his team in the back half of 2021. Barry Can’t Swim’s touring career began as soon as London reopened with Mainnie initially performing DJ sets, though a live show was always his goal. On Oct. 20, 2023, he released his debut album, When Will We Land?, on Ninja Tune, which snagged him a shortlist for the Mercury Prize (along with winner English Teacher, Charli xcx, Nia Archives and more) and led him to being a Brit Award nominee for Best Dance Act in 2024 (along with winner Calvin Harris, Becky Hill, Fred again.. and Romy).  He went on to win BBC Radio 1’s Dance Award for Best Album and DJ Mag’s ‘Breakthrough Producer’ award

With those accolades, Barry Can’t Swim stature has grown massively with 3.1 million monthly listeners on Spotify and his most popular track, “How It Feels,” hitting 68.6 million streams, which first appeared on his debut album, Loner and was released as his first single on Aug. 22, 2023.

The full band will be appearing on all Barry Can’t Swim tour stops throughout the year, with the exception of shows that are specifically branded as DJ sets.

“The cost of touring live is quite a lot to set up,” Barton says. “You need a lot of backing behind you. It made more sense to start with DJing – especially in London – as you can quite quickly pick up gigs. Josh’s selection and abilities as a DJ helped a lot for just getting the name out there touring and trying to get some money.”

Mainnie debuted his band at Coachella in 2024 and at San Francisco’s Portola that same year. He is currently touring with the band in North America.

His keyboardist, Jacobs, who produces music herself under the name Jakes, is also a member and composer of Pecq Band and Mainnie enlisted her to produce parts of Loner.

On the booking agent’s side, Chenfeld was the one who first found Barry Can’t Swim, discovering his catalog on Spotify. Wasserman Music’s UK team was already in touch with both Barton and Mainnie, and were able to help connect him to the pair. 

“It’s been exciting because we brought him in right as things were opening up at the end of the pandemic, which was a unique time for any artist to be entering into the live atmosphere,” Hughes says. “We brought him with soft tickets; his heart, influences and inspiration lies in underground dance music. We wanted to bring him into the U.S. in that context, soft ticket underground dance clubs and just DJing. So that’s how it began, but we noticed early on that there was a little bit more electricity around him as a human being and his particular brand of music than some other acts in this space. It seemed like he had something a little extra.” 

Barry Can’t Swim’s first reported date to Pollstar’s Boxoffice took place on May 28, 2022. He headlined Headrow House in Leeds, the 150-cap room selling out and grossing $2,131. In just three years he’s grown to headline and sell out 2,000-cap rooms: his most recent reported date to Pollstar’s Boxoffice taking place Feb. 12 with a show at Liberty Hall in Sydney, where he grossed $45,164 with 2,000 tickets sold.

The team held off on debuting the live show until they felt the demand was there. Mainnie continued DJing as Barry Can’t Swim as his star power began to rise, he and his team waited for the perfect moment to strike, which would come with the release of his much- lauded When Will We Land?, in October 2023.

“When we were able to move this from clubs and soft tickets to hard tickets, we did not do it first with the live set because we were still waiting for that larger moment,” Chenfeld says. “We made the call to move [Barry Can’t Swim] into hard rooms because there was an album and we felt the demand, and I think there was that shift from him being somebody who would play nightclubs to somebody that would eventually be playing very hard ticket spaces. That came after the album, but ultimately getting to that live moment took a second longer.”

Debuting the live show remained in the back of the team’s minds the entirety of Barry Can’t Swim’s debut album cycle, and they were keeping their eyes on the opportunity to prove to fans what the show could truly become. That moment didn’t come until April 2024, when he landed a slot on the Coachella lineup. From there, he headed to Glastonbury, playing an epic set while breaking the attendance record at the festival’s Park Stage. 

He would perform the Coachella again in 2025 on the Quasar Stage, performing a three-hour DJ set alongside Salute and 2manydjs during weekend one. By weekend two, he was in New York City performing a three-night run at Terminal 5 (3,000-cap) on April 18 in Manhattan and two nights at Brooklyn Steel (1,800-cap) on April 19 and 20. Looking ahead Mainnie is greatly looking forward to his upcoming two nights at the Shrine Expo Hall (6,300 capacity) in Los Angeles on May 2 and 3.

“I’m really excited to play the Shrine in L.A. [on Sept. 15, 2023] because I played that before as a support slot for Ben Böhmer,” Mainnie says. “It’s a really cool venue.” 

When he’s on tour, Mainnie logs into his Strava app (a social networking app that tracks exercises and utilizes GPS to map out bike rides and jogs) and goes for a run around whichever city he’s landed in. He describes the exercises as a collection, where he documents things like playing tennis in Brazil or jogs in Mexico.

Mainnie keeps the atmosphere of where he’s playing in mind when preparing for his live performances. His current North American show focuses primarily on his live show, fit with the full band. But, while on his South American festival leg, he recognized that he was playing electronic stages, and fit his sound to match the rest of the stage’s lineup.

“They were quite late shows at nighttime,” he says. “I made sure that the sets were more clubby tunes to keep up the energy.”

Mainnie, Barton and the rest of the touring crew have been flying from show to show on their current run, utilizing local suppliers to rent the stage gear for his production. For Barry Can’t Swim DJ sets, the team is looking for venues that provide an experience of their own, with a show , for example, at Svn West Rooftop in San Francisco (2,500-cap) on April 25 ahead of plays that include The Warfield in San Francisco (April 26, 2,300-cap) and on the other side of the Bay Bridge at Fox Theater in Oakland (April 27, 2,800-cap). “It’s more about vibe than size,” Hughes says. As they move forward with the tour, Barry Can’t Swim DJ sets will become more complimentary, the live show now taking center stage. 

“What I love about DJ sets is they’re so spontaneous,” Mainnie says. “A live set, so much goes into it with the production and rehearsals, that when it comes to actually playing a show you have the set and you play it. We do mix it up, to be fair, depending on the run. For example, this run now in North America we’ll be playing the same show across the board. It’s different to what we’ve done in South America. Whereas, when I’m DJing, it just completely depends on how I’m feeding off the crowd and what they’re reacting to, and responding to that.

“I get a bit more nervous before DJ sets because of that reason, actually,” Mainie continues. “People usually are more nervous playing live. But, with DJ sets, there’s a bit of uncertainty going into them. Although I find that quite rewarding, it’s also a bit of a challenge because I’m going into it a bit blind. You don’t necessarily have a feel for what people are going to be into.”

At this point in his career, Mainnie and his team feel he’s paid his dues in DJ sets and can now focus primarily on the live concept. “We’ve got a feel for the demand in each city and the energy, and we’ve also learned enough about our own show to know how the room best sits,” Barton says. “I think it’s a balance. Sonically, the music sits very light, but you’re trying to bring that energy of club music at times and keep that revved-up feeling.” 

Throughout varying parts of Barry Can’t Swim’s show at Brooklyn Steel on April 19, the string instruments would appear, slowing the music down. At other points, Mainnie would dance on stage and move over to join Jacobs to share the crowd’s high energy. In the back of the room, a group of fans arrived dressed in lifeguard gear and floaties. Lasers danced over the audience throughout the show, his stage set up simple yet effective and highlighting Mainnie on a platform with a keyboard of his own. 

“There’s a big LED wall behind them, but it’s not used throughout the entire show,” Chenfeld says. “So, there’s moments where it comes in and comes out. But there’s a big lighting structure that is like a picture frame, in essence. It’s just incredibly well-timed and in sync with the music. When you have your own show and your own music the entire time [compared to a DJ set], there’s more opportunity to plan. So it’s fitting exactly what they’re looking for with this album.”

Hughes chimes in to note the set is more “in your face when it needs to be,” but will also pull back and present a more psychedelic vibe. “This is an act that plays jazz-influenced,, nods to funk, disco and world-influenced roots.”

For Mainnie, he shares that he’s particularly fond of the final third of the live set. He curates the ebbs and flows throughoutthe set to give the crowd moments of rest before throwing them back into dance floor-driven songs to get the crowd jumping. By the end, he’s ready to let off all the energy.

“For the last 20 minutes, it starts quite strong and then in the middle, I play a bit more of the downtempo and chill tunes, which is intentional,” he says. “You want to have those moments in a show where it’s peaks and troughs, and people get a breather. But that means that, at the end of the show there’s a lot of the big moments and they all happen back to back. It really feels like the energy’s built towards that. Whenever I’m playing and I know that bit’s around the corner, I start to get a bit of a buzz.”