“They tell us we’re too rock’n’roll for country radio.” You’d better believe it. Meet the hard-drinking outlaws of the US alt.country scene.

WORDS: Henry Yates
When he was nine years old Cody Braun was inducted into the family business. To this day he considers himself lucky that his family were in the business of rock’n’roll. “My father was in a band called Muzzie Braun And The Boys, and me and my brothers went on the road with him,” the Reckless Kelly multi-instrumentalist recalls. “I’d grown up in rural Idaho without a TV, and by the time
I was 11 I’d already played The Tonight Show. It was definitely an education. We soon figured out the girls would wait for us if we snuck out of the hotel after our parents were asleep.”

Having tasted rock’n’roll and found it good, the die was cast for Cody and his brother Willy. “We’d been in the business so long we couldn’t imagine doing anything else,” he admits. “Sometimes we’d have plans of going to college, but we never made it a month without starting a band.

“Reckless Kelly started out as the Prairie Mutts in Oregon,” Cody continues, “but then we moved to Austin in 1996, and I guess we feel like Texans now. There’s not a better state to live in as a musician. It’s part of the culture; people bring their kids to the dance halls, and they develop a much keener sense of music than people in other states who listen to an hour of radio a day.”

It was in Austin that Reckless Kelly forged their musical identity:
a hard-drinking blend of alt.country and heads-down rock fuelled by Cody’s instrumental wizardry (he plays fiddle, mandolin and harmonica) and Willy’s muscular vocals, which sounds as vital on their new album Bulletproof as on their 1998 debut Millican. “I guess I think of us as an alternative to the shit they feed us on country radio,” Cody shrugs. “Traditional country is pretty bad right now. We don’t get played much – they tell us we’re too rock’n’roll.”

That accusation could certainly be levelled at Bulletproof. “This album is darker and more rock than stuff we’ve done in the past,” says Cody. “It’s definitely one you can stick in your car and haul ass to. There are all kinds of themes – heartbreak songs, songs about the road. There’s a song that Willy wrote about Hurricane Katrina, and one for the soldiers in Iraq (American Blood).”

Heavy stuff. But don’t hit the ‘po-faced political band’ panic button just yet. “We’re not a political band,” Cody insists. “There’s so much crap going on in the world, and we just want to give people a good time when they’re out. It’s definitely good drinking music.”

• Bulletproof is out now on Yep Roc.

STAND AND DELIVER

Cody explains the band’s name: “Willy and I couldn’t remember exactly who Ned Kelly [pictured] was, but we liked the name, so we threw Reckless Kelly in the hat. The plan was that we’d come up with a better name later but we never did. And once we realised he was an Australian bank robber from the 1800s we just thought it fitted our outlaw image really well. Do we have outlaw credentials? Well, we’ve all spent nights in the clink.”