Insert Corny Pun Here

I've got to go out in exactly one minute. Here's a shit old review of a great great gig.

HAYSEED DIXIE, The Zodiac, 11/04

The oddest thing about Hayseed Dixie is how much they remind me of crap British comedians. The front man has the sort of rainbow dungarees that the fat one out of Hale & Pace would wear when performing th Playschool sketch, whilst the guitarist on the left closely resembles Bobby Ball doing a gag about Austrian homosexuals. The other two look like they haven't changed haircut since their days in Cambridge footlights. Anyway, this is a response of my twisted mind, and is completely irrelevant.

The point is that hayseed Dixie are a red hot bluegrass fourpiece who turn their attentions upon 70s heavy rock, most notably AC/DC (geddit?). And they're spectacular. I notice that my colleague gave a rave review to Trash Fashion recently. You could apply the same criteria for success to Hayseed Dixie:

1) Make sure that, now matter how deep the irony, the music you borrow is ultimately ace

2) You won't get anywhere in this game unless you can play like the devil

And play they can. Winner by a nose is the electrifying finger-picking of bebereted (it IS a word) banjo player, who could make the very rock Gods who wrote the songs bow their heads in admiration. Thier take on revivalist hymns and traditional Appalachian numbers indicates that, behind the jokes, they could easily have been a straight American roots band.

Trouble is, if they did that, they wouldn't be able to fulfil their quest to get staggeringly drunk every night, which is a noble quest indeed, There isn't much more to say, in critical terms: Hayseed Dixie came with a job to do, and did it impeccably - "Fat Bottomed Girls" and "Walk This Way" being tweo personal highlights. In addition to this the drinks flowed, the Zodiac soundcrew quite rightly got the praise they deserved onstage (the monitors engineer was even handed beers periodically by the band) and the crowd loved it (Oxford pasty, my cotton-pickin' hiney!).

The Dixies offered us the best sort of cabaret: good mindless entertainment that, on closer inspection, turns out to be deeply thought out. Yeehah!