It's Never Too Late To Teach An Old Rev New Tricks

When you've been at the forefront of a movement for decades — as Texan outfit Reverend Horton Heat have been with the good-time psychobilly since the mid-'80s — you have to think outside the box sometimes to keep things fresh. In Reverend Horton Heat's case this happened recently when founding frontman Jim Heath - aka the band's titular Reverend - built a studio in his Dallas abode and self-recorded their 11th studio album REV, and looking back he couldn't be happier with the rocking collection.

"One of our guests this year is a guy from Australia called Pat Capocci, he's a great guitar player who plays rockabilly in a roots style." 

"I'm actually happier than I was when we first finished it, because when I listen back to it I got really lucky - I got really lucky on that one," he chuckles. "It was the first album that was basically all me recording it - I've done parts of other recordings, but basically this was all me in our studio, except about three songs have parts that we did in a regular commercial studio. I learned a lot - there's some stuff that I might have changed, but most of that was technical BS rather than music."

And in keeping with this new DIY ethos the band have been putting on their own festival in Austin for the last three years, Horton's Hayride combining the music they love with classic custom cars and burlesque. "It's super exciting to run your own event, and I'm really trying to make it something different musically," Heath tells. "It's something really different that you don't get from too many other places, and it's a lot of fun.

"What we've done all three years is instead of just having bands play, we got several frontmen and we'd just fly 'em in and learn their songs. So our set is like three hours long, because we play four songs and then we bring on a guest for three songs, then we'll play a couple or a few more songs and then bring another guest back. We have like four guests, and it's really interesting and fun. One of our guests this year is a guy from Australia called Pat Capocci, he's a great guitar player who plays rockabilly in a roots style. And then we're having El Vez come and play, he's like the Mexican Elvis, and one of our guests is Eddie Spaghetti who's the lead singer of Supersuckers. It's going to be a blast.

"We've been doing this so much over the last number of years, and not necessarily just at the Hayride where it's everybody at once, but we've been doing a lot of tours where we'll take a guest frontman with us, on the road. We've done it with Lemmy, Jello Biafra from the Dead Kennedys, and a guy called Unknown Hinson, Deke Dickerson - there's so many I forget. Between that and the Hayride guests it seems like all we're doing lately is learning people's songs!"