I'd been blown away by Hayseed Dixie's performance on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury Festival 2005, so when I heard that they were back on tour in the UK again, I felt that this would be the perfect opportunity to witness them in more intimate surroundings. With the Bridgwater Palace just down the road, I dusted off my dungarees, donned my finest Stetson, and with my cowboy boots polished and my air banjo freshly stringed and finely tuned, I loaded up on cheap bourbon ready for a heady night of rawk and roll. With virtually immaculate timing, I arrived shortly before 8.30pm to find the venue jammed. Within moments, opening act Mary McBride and her two-man band took to the stage. Mary McBride I must admit I don't know much about Mary, apart from the fact that she was born in New Orleans, raised in Washington DC, and has spent the past 15 years in Brooklyn, New York.  | | Mary McBride |
This is only her second visit to the UK, and this was her first date outside of London. She is most recently noted for performing a song on the soundtrack to the recent Oscar-winning contemporary western Brokeback Mountain. She opened with Weathervane, the first track on her most recent and second album By Any Other Name. From then on, she treated us to 30 minutes or so of drawled bluesy alt-country rock, including an outstanding version of the Terry Anderson/Dan Baird song Bottle and a Bible. She dedicated it to the seven years she spent at Christian summer camp in Texas as a youth, and twisted it from its honky-tonk roots to provide a slow-burning almost gospel-like rendition. Mary has a strong voice, ideally suited to the music she plays, though I felt both she and her band mates remained a little too static on the stage to provide the gutsy backdrop the performance would have benefited from. The set also included Old Lea Johnson, If You Lived in My Town, One-Eyed Dog and the beautiful Falling (which, like much of her material she said, was written on the train between Manhattan and Brooklyn), before she closed with a version of Amazing Grace. Although a few people tapped their toes throughout, and she received a decent round of applause, I felt that to many Mary McBride had just proved to be a distraction before the main event, and that's a shame. Southern-fried hillbilly outlaws  | | Hayseed Dixie |
Hayseed Dixie, a bunch of hillbilly moonshiners, do I believe actually come from Nashville in Tennessee. But oh no, ladies and gentlemen, these good-time fellas sure do want to hype up their stereotype as freakish, drunken, southern-fried hillbilly outlaws, so every biography I've come across suggests otherwise, stating they're from the fertile valley of Deer Lick Holler, deep in the heart of Appalachia. This scarily brings to my mind the sort of wild, and yet not-so-wonderful, southern American outback so hideously portrayed in the 1972 John Boorman film Deliverance. Their music is a bastardized version of bluegrass, known as rock grass, a term which, so the story goes, they coined after allegedly finding a crashed car wrapped around a tree, with a box of AC/DC albums left intact on the backseat. Leaving the driver for dead, they looted these albums, and after a few spins of the discs on a record player, which only played at 78rpm, they were inspired to form their own band. From that moment on, the legend that is Hayseed Dixie was born. There were loud cheers as Hayseed Dixie arrived on stage, immediately launching into AC/DC's Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. This was the first of a number of covers by that band which were aired tonight: Highway to Hell, Whole Lotta Rosie and Back in Black also made appearances later. After a couple of numbers, lead vocalist, fiddler and guitarist Barley Scotch raised his arms in the air and proclaimed that all great songs have just four key components: "drinking, cheating, killing and hell". This just about sums up the whole Hayseed Dixie philosophy. It is obvious that the lads have a great enthusiasm for their art, and they were all over the stage. Hyper-fast fiddles and blurry banjos From the off, guitarist Dale Reno, who was sporting a fine pair of particularly fashionable and down-with-the-kids Converse trainers, ran around, strutting his stuff with the energy of a man half his age, while his twin brother Don Wayne Reno attacked his banjo relentlessly. The audience took a little longer to warm up, but after a few tunes the sparsely attended dance floor soon filled. The throng of smiling people started to move, linking arms and good-naturedly throwing each other around in a frenzied hoedown - a momentum which carried on for the rest of the show.  | | A typical audience-member |
Much of the material tonight was from the most recent album A Hot Piece of Grass. But with, I believe, five or six albums worth of material to choose from, there was plenty of other stuff on offer. The mammoth set included such yee-haw versions of, amongst others, Motorhead's Ace of Spades, Detroit Rock City by Kiss, Black Sabbath's War Pigs, J Geil's Centrefold (which in my opinion was the low point of the set, though the sordid tale of his High School Romance, which Barley preceded it with, was hilarious, if not altogether PC), Fat-Bottomed Girls by Queen and even an excellent version of Green Day's folky-punky protest-song Holiday, which, dare I say it, improved on the original. The guitar solos and licks found on the original versions of some of these tunes were replaced by some hyper-fast fiddle work and blurry banjo-plucking. Instead of a drum kit on the drum-riser, what else would this quartet of drunken buffoons have but a refrigerator stuffed full of a variety of bottles of English ales - that's certainly not a sight you expect to see everyday, but it sure made me smile. The other visual highpoint, I guess, must be bassist Jake Byers' sideboards, which were the most magnificent I'd seen outside of a furniture showroom!  | | Hayseed Dixie |
Besides their obvious love of the cover version, it is also true that the Dixie can pen a tune with the best of them, although unsurprisingly their songs should be not taken too seriously. The puerile Moonshiner's Daughter for example has the immortal lyric "she's a moonshiner's daughter, she makes me liquor all night", while Kirby Hill is a tongue-in-cheek tale of moonshining and pot-growing. An hour and a half later, the set was over, but after a short break they were back for an encore which began with one final AC/DC number, Big Balls. This developed into an extended jam session while Dale went offstage and dragged back a large disco ball (which he proceeded to swing around and sit on), and a six-foot promo bottle of vodka. They then finished off with Duelling Banjos which featured in the film Deliverance, which I referenced earlier, and was co-written by the Reno brothers' father! After the show, the guys ventured into the audience to meet and greet their fans and to sign memorabilia etc. I guess that pretty much everyone who attended went home satisfied by another winning Midnight Mango show. | 
