Up the country: I like that it takes the three Americans, two Englishmen and a Welsh from the Waco Brothers in order to make some damn fine drunk tavern music. Of course, I’m partial since two of the members are also in the Mekons — objectively the best fucking band on earth. This might be more down the country than up, but that’s how it is: “the Fox River flows wherever it wants to go / past prefabricated homes, geodesic domes.”

Is’s election day in Sweden so what better than a cover of something a bit more political?  I’m not one for black-and-white dichotomy when it comes to politics, I am a liberal pinko-commie Swede after all, but I hate that our multi-party system has been hijacked and turned into the all too damn popular two block —the dynamics have been shot all to hell even if truth to be honest, some of the parties were kind of cooperative holding-hands and giggling before too (but never during the election’s propaganda phase).

Neil Young wrote Revolution Blues and he’s kind of conservative. The Waco Brothers that do this cover are anything but; British punk expats raised in the union trade and American fringe musicians that dabbled in any genre that never really touched Top 40.

The Waco Brothers - Take Me To the Fires

It’s a bit like a setup for a bad joke: three Englishmen and a Welsh walk into a Chicago bar, decide to use their musicality (all of them were in other bands at the time) to get paid while drinking beer by playing country covers. Then they recruit two Americans to the band and figures, what the hell, let’s write some own songs too.

And we talk honky-tonk country here, fuelled by alcohol and defiance mixed with old-school British punk sensibility. They’ve stepped up drunk on the bar stage, gotten even drunker on tequila as the gig progressed only to at escalate into a mosh-pit to Folsom Prison Blues. If you play in pubs, then this is how it should be.