Y'all get ready for a hoedown with Hayseed Dixie (From Bournemouth Echo)

Y'all get ready for a hoedown with Hayseed Dixie

8:00am Saturday 13th March 2010 in

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“PEOPLE are people and they tell the same jokes about us at home in the southern States as they do about you all in southern England – in Dorset you have that chalk drawing of the man with the huge thing on the hillside, well that just shows you have a long history of this way of thinking!”

Hayseed Dixie frontman(-iac) Barley Scotch (or John Wheeler as his momma knows him) was talking about how much he’s looking forward to coming back to Dorset this month.

“We all get three generations of the same family coming to see us these days, all watching some different aspect of what we’re doing. But one thing’s for sure, we ain’t getting any prettier the longer we carry on doing what we do.”

What Hayseed Dixie do is pick apart rock classics and reassemble them in bluegrass form.

They’ve been doing it long enough to have racked up eight studio albums, the latest of which, Killer Grass came out last month.

But at what point did John decide that what the world really needs is a hillbilly metal band?

“Well, I don’t think I ever had that particular thought,” he says.

“We’ve all known each other for years from playing around bands in Nashville and we used to meet up from time to time and drink beer and play a few tunes and have a wrecking party on my porch. Then one day we all started playing AC/DC songs and I got some microphones out on the porch and recorded it – if you listen closely on our first album you can hear dogs barking an’ all.

“We passed a few CDs around our friends and it just kinda grew from that until we got a label to release it and we thought we might sell a couple of thousand pieces, but we ended up selling 120,000 pieces and we thought we’d better start touring it and here we are ten years later.”

And it’s been ten happy years of playing live, staying up late and having a ball. Their latest jaunt comprises some 95 shows in 20 countries with a set that now includes music by Queen, The Prodigy and Mozart, as well as the DC. They’ve even found room for a few originals, including the notorious track, Love Cabin.

“Hell, that’s just an every day love ’n’ kill song about a guy who meets a girl in a bar then takes her on up the road and kills her.

“But when we played the record to our girlfriends thay all said their mommas could never hear that song – we’re all up in our 40s now so our girlfriends’ mommas are in their 60s. That’s why we figured we’d put it on the bonus part of this album and if you wanna hear Love Cabin, y’all gonna have to mix it yourself – we put all the audio tracks for the songs on the bonus DVD so the kids can go have fun with the songs and put a tuba in for the bass, or add a house beat, or just hear the banjo on their own, just do what the hell they like.”

l Hayseed Dixie play Bridport’s Electric Palace tonight and Bournemouth’s V club on Tuesday.