Sometimes, their originality put them in all sorts of awkward situations.
Rednex was the brainchild of a
creative collective in
They started to play around with various ideas and the mix of country and dance music came alive, and the project was named Rednex. The musicians, who were featured as artists were called Ken Tacky, Billy Ray, Bobby Sue, BB Stiff and Mary Joe, though she has now been replaced by a new female star of the group -Whippy.
The team decided, not only to give the band a dirty country
image, but also to make up a completely outrageous biography. The first bio
explained that the band was from
"Billie
Ray and Ken Tacky are cousins, Billie Ray and Bobbie
Sue are half-brothers cos they have the same father.
My cousin's aunt is sister to Bobbie Sue's cousin's uncle. Since my family
moved there, no one has come in from the outside, so everyone in the town is
related in some way".
This made-up story was sent out as the official biography.
However, Waltons shenanigans aside, there was doubtless more truth
in the fact that Euro-dance producer Pat Reniz had a
large hand in the project. Rednex enjoyed massive
success with "Cotton-Eye Joe", a
The saga and success story of Rednex
is legendary within the entertainment of music. From the isolated village of Brunkeflo City, Idaho came 5 outstanding music performers
to go straight from a farm in the most rural area of USA, to a hypermodern
studio of Stockholm, Sweden, and then on to be world famous pop stars. Their
similarity elsewhere is unheard of. Their debut-single, "Cotton-eye Joe"
shocked the world and rocketed up the charts in 1994. It went no.1 in 12
countries and on the Eurochart Hot 100. The single
went to become the best selling single in
For most bands this would have been a dream coming true, but
for Rednex it was very turbulent. As their village
has not had contact with the outside world for150 years they had no knowledge
of the industrialized world. Many things came as a shock to them. "It was
a real shock to me, especially when I shot a wall socket for not stop staring
at
The music-scene was turned upside down, suddenly the idol of the teenager was a dirty, ugly, screaming mad redneck with snus (snus is similar to chewing tobacco - editors remark) on his teeth, but the civilization was a difficult task to handle for Rednex and the band went rebellious. "We got homesick, simple as that. We were always served s**t like lobster or foie gras, but never the good old bark bread with bean-stew." says Billy Ray. "Yeah, I mean, you get kind of bored after having smashed yet another Hilton-suite. I was just longing to smash our old saloon.", complains Bobby Sue. "And practicing shooting American tourists outside your hotel, instead of magpies, just isn't the same sport...", says Ken Tacky. They started to get out of control and were arrested on a numerous occasions after having smashed one hotel room after the other, consuming alcohol on stage, appearing naked on television, throwing urine at the audience etc.
This huge overnight success led to the press and media swarming around Rednex, trying to find out the details and the truth about the band with this highly extraordinary background.
To increase tension and excitement, the band decided to keep
secret their true identities. They did no interviews or appearances in the
beginning, apart from a few rehearsals by phone at small local radio stations
in
It was easy for Rednex to hide at first, as the band had dust all over their faces and were not easy to recognize without make-up from the few official pictures that were sent out. Their dirty make-up also helped preserve their secret identities in the award-winning low-budget video, where, during the recordings, no hotel was affordable and the band had to sleep on the kitchen floor in the apartment of the cameraman. Their clothes were bought very cheap at second hand shops and were ran over by a car on a gravel road to make them look old, dusty and used.
When news reporters got hold of the band, they didn't talk,
and responded with nothing apart from grunting, shouting and drinking to keep
up the image of being inbreeded, uncivilized beasts from the deep woods of
Meanwhile, in the studio, whose location also remained secret, the producers and the band finished recording the debut-album "Sex & Violins". The sleeve featured a stream of urine going into a pot, where the faces of the band members were floating. The sleeve was banned in most countries and were sold in brown paper bags.
The pressure was getting more and more intense and it became more difficult to remain secret. At their first gig, reporters and fans tried every possible trick to get close to the band and complete turmoil followed , but the touring agency mounted a wall of bodyguards and managed to keep the myth alive. The band members never went official without make-up and their torn-up cowboy clothing.
Finally, someone (still unknown) who knew the team sold the story to the press. Their passport pictures were published and their true identity was revealed. However, Rednex kept their image of being a truly partying hillbilly techno band and did sell-out shows with a positive energy and interaction with their audiences throughout the world. Their image was, to a certain extent, revolutionizing as they were not striving to fit into the establishments demands of being clean and beautiful, but the opposite, striving towards showing an ugly and dirty image, which is as original today.
After having toured the world for 2 years they, relentlessly, went back to the wilderness. All efforts by the producers and the record company to bring them back was useless, and so the years pasted. "Honestly, I'm glad we had a pause. Their longing for home got unbearable. The band were so out of place in the end that, in order for them to let me even get close to them, I had to first bath in manure. This was not improving my overall sex life.", says Ranis (f.k.a Pat Reiniz) their producer and discoverer.
However, 5 years later, they are back. The band is very reticent about the reasons why. They are not willing to comment on them again meeting the modern world, but their official reason of comeback is that they need the money. After Rednex came back to Brunkeflo they brought with them some modern equipment, and now it apparently needs some costly improving. "Cousin Jeremiah spit into the Pentium-processor that runs our home-brew-apparatus", says Billy Ray. "Yeah, and our platform for the chopper was taken by the flood this year.", says Bobby Sue. "My electric ax has run out of petrol.", says Ken Tacky. Hard times has brought them back to the scene.
This time they present a new star. Mary Joe is no longer with the group, and they are introducing a new girl singer, Whippy. She was not easy to convince, as she did not want to leave the village at first. "When we gave her a brand new pink chain saw to play with, and promised that she could bring along her whip, she was OK.", explains the record company spokesman, Philip Hollman. The drummer looks to be the same, though he is not the most talkative of them. According to the other band members he has now become a reverend, and calls himself Reverend Stiff.
"It feels better now, when we have had time to prepare ourselves for Rednex's sudden change of environment.", says Hollman relieved. "Last time we were overworked with administrative problems due to this problem, such as clearing Billy Ray's pitchfork through customs, trying to find B.Y.O restaurants with roasted pig-ears on the menu, teaching them the alphabet so they could write autographs, trying to get the tour manager into therapy and all sorts of things. But this time, we have even managed to get the bands agreement to set up a web page about them at www.rednex.se." smiles Hollman. "However, it was not without complications, as the band try to write with a felt pen directly on the screen to do the site, but it's a start."
It looks promising for Rednex and
"The way I mate". The video is for the first time shot at location in
Apparently, everyone in Brunkeflo is related to each other, which unfortunately hasn't added a great deal of refreshness in the genetic evolution over the last 150 years. However, according to Ranis, who claims to be their distant relative, there is one gene that has been cut to perfection, and that's the musical gene. Since this was revealed 5 years ago following the bands huge success, many producers have been trying to find this musical gold mine. Though yet, no one has succeeded. The location is a well kept secret by the producers and the record company. "It is not so much to protect the villagers from the shock of encountering an exhausted Frank Farian, that has just wobbled his way through the woods, " explains Ranis "but more to preserve their unique culture and society. At first, we chose not to write lyrics about what the band told us about their style of living. It simply sounded to horrendous to be true, but now having visited the village on many occasions we know better, so we will try to document their special way of behaving on the forthcoming album, before it changes."
So they are on the road again. It's a heavy task to make a follow up to one of the evergreens of dance-music, "Cotton-eye Joe", but the band looks determined to do it again. This time, equipped with mobilephones, laptops and agendas, though it doesn't look to me that they have really got a hang of the technique yet. They look more interested in having a good time and playing their violins and banjos, as they sing their way through a few bottles of Brunkeflo home-brew , but isn't that what music really is all about?
What once originated as a playful fluke in
Scarlet (female vocals), Dagger (male vocals), Joe Cagg (vocals + guitar) and Jay Lee (violin + guitar) have all been previously involved with record-releasing projects and touring as entertainers. They are the 5th set of performers in Rednex since the start, 10 years ago, which now makes a total of 11 performers in total.
The amount of members in Rednex
varies from day to day. The original squad that started the project is today
living in various countries and several people has
invited themselves into the project, creating what is today an international
creative collective. Some people has left or taken a break and members go in
and out as they please from their original work which constitutes of producing
web sites, TV & Radio, DJ, computer arts, design, media etc.
Fantastic News, germs & gals!!!! Today we came back from
The Director Peter Jackson became a huge fan of Rednex 10 years ago when “Cotton Eye Joe” was a big hit in
New Zealand (his home country), and when they started to secretly prepare Part
4 just before Christmas, he called and asked us to participate as “the new
creatures”. Obviously, we have not been allowed to say anything to anyone about
this, but last week we went to
Note: this was
released on April 1St!
Discography:
Sex And
Violins (Internal Affairs 1995)***.
2000 Farmout Jive
2003
Cotton Eye Joe