From Dubbing Films To Running A Travel Tour Business: Ali Barter Plays 'Two Truths & A Lie'

It’s not too often that you come across an artist who appears to have a full-time musical hustle but quietly also has a very unique passion that is completely unrelated.

Meet Ali Barter - you’ve heard her over the years crafting ‘90s-influenced feminist, indie rock tunes that would fit perfectly on something like the 10 Things I Hate About You soundtrack. Her newest single Ur A Piece Of Shit is no different.

But as we chat, I discover Ali leads a double life as an Indian travel guide. Wait, what? Yep. We don’t often consider the need for artists to decompress from the pressures of being a touring muso so for half the year, Ali puts aside her life as a musician to manage and conduct tours of India in a business handed down to her by Mamma Barter. At the time of our chat, she’s packing for a trip to Vietnam and India for a travel conference.

This column was a special one, because where people are often reticent to speak about religion, Ali is super honest and I find myself relating to a lot of it. On top of that, I’ve visited family in India tons of times but rarely get to speak to someone in my line of work with such an innate understanding of it.

Welcome to… Two Truths & Ali.

Truth

Ali: Well, my first truth is that I used to do voice-overs for Hong Kong films. So I would do the English dubbing.

Uppy: Yeah, wow! How did you get into that?

A: I had done a bit of acting over my time – I’m not a terribly good actor – it hadn’t really taken off in any major way. But sometimes when you do a commercial or a TV show, they would invite you in to dub some lines that may have got missed in a scene. Like, words glossed over. And I went in and I was just really good at hitting the marker on time! Which apparently is quite difficult to do, I think that must be from my having to sing in time or something.

U: Riiiight.

A: So you’d watch a little line go across the screen and you’d have to say the words exactly where they are so they’d match the visual. Then they said, ‘we have this extra work! I don’t know if you’re interested but we need someone to come in and do some female parts for these films.’ I can’t remember any of the names of them, this was a long time ago, but I had to speak in an American accent really high-pitched! They wanted really high-pitched American accents for these girls. I remember doing one film and it was about a girl who had an animated beetle that was her friend? And they had a superpower together or something. It was all proper action movies, real people, and I was the girl who had this little beetle friend. It was funny – it was a good way to earn like, $30 an hour or something when I was 18.

U: I’m glad you mentioned you had to do an American accent because I was wondering, would these Hong Kong films want a girl with an Aussie accent?

A: Yeahh, and an American accent is really hard to do. I’m not sure how good it was. I didn’t do MANY of them. I probably did about five.

U: Five films?

A: Yeah, it was pretty funny.

U: And did you watch them back afterwards?

A: No, they always said they were going to have like, a movie night and get all the actors in to watch the films because I really wanted to see it.

U: Yeah, of course!

A: But no, I never got to see any. And I can’t remember the names of any of them, or I would’ve spent time online searching like, ‘film with girl and beetle, Hong Kong cinema’, blah blah blah.

U: Did you say this was back when you were 18?

A: Yeah, I would’ve been 18 or 19.

U: That’s so wild. I was chatting to KLP last year for this column and she’s written for K-pop and stuff too! It’s super different, even culturally and the style is obviously quite… peppy!

A: Especially with songwriting, I’ve done K-pop as well and they like specific intervals.

U: Right!

A: Like, from one note to another, there’s something in their musical history and their traditional music that makes some intervals more preferential to others. So we’d write a line and the Korean producer would be like, ‘that’s great, but we’re gonna make that one note a semitone higher.’ It just hits this place that the Korean audiences really like.

U: That’s really interesting! Maybe that’s the key to making a K-pop hit?

A: I know! And if you wanna make it, that’s the biggest market; K-pop and J-pop.

Truth

A: When I was a kid, I desperately wanted to be Jewish. I’m an only child and my mum was sort of Uniting Church, not really religious, and my dad was a lapsed Catholic. He was conflicted about it and we would go to mass like, once a year. But we lived in Caulfield in Melbourne which is a really Jewish area, so when I was a kid - 8, 9, 10, 11 – every Saturday I’d see all the families get dressed up and walk down the street to Synagogue and on Friday night they’d have their big hats on and beautiful clothes and they’d all be together, going to Shabbat dinner, and I was obsessed.

U: You wanted to be a part of it.

A: I wanted to be a part of it SO bad! I was an only child so we didn’t have any traditions or family things, but there was a while there that I was reading a lot of Jewish books and going to the Jewish Holocaust Museum and I always wanted to get invited to Shabbat dinner by my Jewish friends but I never got invited.

U: How mean!

A: But that’s a life goal, I wanna go to Shabbat dinner.

U: Do you feel like you resonate with the religious components of Judaism?

A: In the religious things I had growing up, in Catholicism, I always liked churches and all the rituals and all the symbolism. I always loved watching the altar boys ring the bell, and the fact that you had a little wafer to eat, and drank “wine” in inverted commas or whatever. So I’ve always been drawn to ceremony and rituals, so I think that was why. And the fact that there’s a special day? I know that some strict Jewish communities can’t use the phone [on Shabbat]. I grew up in this world where I had no rules, no rituals. The most ritualistic thing we did in my household was that on Sunday my dad would listen to Frank Sinatra and read the paper and eat salami. And I really like that, I think that’s great, but yeah, I didn’t have any special rituals.

U: It’s really interesting to hear the other side, you know, I bet a lot of those Jewish kids were wishing they DIDN’T have to do these things on the weekend. And yet, you were this kid wanting that commitment to something.

A: Yeah! And a REASON to do it. They obviously had a reason to do it. In some communities, people fast – they’re fasting for god, they’re fasting for their husbands, they’re fasting for prosperity. If I fast, A) it’s probably because I wanna lose weight, and B) there’s no reason that makes me need to do it, there’s no greater reason outside of myself. I’ve always been like that with religion or culture. I’m searching for SOMETHING I guess? And it’s so interesting that I was doing that as a kid.

U: Yeahh.

A: That’s continued to be in other areas of my life – negative things like drugs and alcohol, or through music, or through travel, or through exploring things. It was all there when I was a kid.

U: Would you consider yourself religious now or?

A: I would say spiritual? The only religion I can get behind is Buddhism and that’s because it’s more of a philosophy and that makes sense to me.

U: You seem really interesting in the way your spirituality presents itself, I relate to it a lot. You look for a higher power, but don’t really ascribe to one? I feel that too.

A: It’s a thing. Our generation has choice and we know too much but we also want something. We still want that.

Lie

A: So I run a small tour company taking tours to India.

U: Oh cool!

A: Yeah, my mum has done it for 20 years and now she’s kind of retiring and I’m taking over. But when I do business in India and they see the name Ali, they think it’s a man.

U: Yep! You’re Ah-li.

A: Ah-li! Yep. So my lie is that – because India’s very much a patriarchal society – I use that. So when they write back, ‘Dear Mr Ali…’ I’m like, ‘good! You think I’m a man.’ And then I rock up and they’re like, ‘Oh… where’s your husband?’ And I’m like, ‘Nope! This is it!’

U: [laughs] This is me!

A: So this is my manipulative lie, pretending to be a man when I do business in India.

U: Yeah, no, I get the slight need for that. Even in 2019… they just sometimes seem to not accept there being women business owners – obviously that’s not a blanket rule but I can totally see why that it would help a little bit to be Mr Ali.

A: Yeah! It can get me into trouble too like when I order an Uber in India and they’re looking for a man on the street.

U: Ahhh, true.

A: But the benefits outweigh the confusion and so… that’s my lie.

U: Obviously you know that if you ever wanted to fix it, you’d just add another ‘L’.

A: I know… I’ve been told that too. In Australia maybe, like it does happen in Australia as well.

U: So is this trip you’re about to go on to India one of those tours?

A: It’s not a tour, I’m going to an Incredible India travel bazaar, like a conference, in Jaipur. I’ve not been to one of these type of things before so it’ll be interesting. It’s nice having something outside of music that’s a passion that I can get to do as well. Music’s amazing but it’s very… it can be very stressful and it can be so unpredictable.

U: Yeah, and I’m not a musician, but I feel like it would be hard to egg on creativity a lot of the time? Whereas, your tourism, it’s structured and rigid. You create a tour, you take them.

A: Totally.

U: How do you juggle both? If you take over your mum’s business, will you step back from music a bit?

A: No, because it works really well. So I say to my record label, ‘I will need six weeks each year to do a tour or familiarisation trip or whatever’. So at the beginning of the year, I was like, ‘I’m away for these dates, and then I’m your bitch for the rest of it, whatever you want from me.’ So that’s what’s happened. I’ve got a chunk of time now and then around August/September and they’re like, ‘cool, can you fly from Mumbai to Hamburg because you’re playing a show?’ or  ‘can you go Nashville to India?’ and we just make it work. It fits really well, it makes me calmer knowing I have islands of non-music. With music, you’re performing all the time, you’re always on show, you’re exposing yourself, singing songs you’ve written about your life. You have to be on all the time. So it’s good having these moments where I can be like, ‘I’m gonna put on my businesswoman hat and shake hands and talk about something that has nothing to do with my personal creation of something.’

U: No one knows you.

A: No one knows me, no one gives a fuck – not that they really give a fuck in Australia either, but a little bit!

Ali Barter’s brand new single, Ur A Piece Of Shit, is out now.

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If you’re a musician and have some stories to share and some secrets to tell – be it hilarious or heartbreaking, humiliating or honourable – send us an email at twotruthscolumn[at]gmail[dot]com.

We might be telling the whole world about the time you accidentally killed your brother’s pet snake and replaced it without anyone knowing in no time.