Hobo Jones & The Junkyard Dogs

Greyhound, Blandford

Hobo Jones & The Junkyard Dogs are one of the most original bands that you will find on the pub and festival circuit today.

They are 3 guys Wino Tyrone, Miser Bill, and Davey Malone who are from Maidstone in Kent, who at first sight look like three dusty old tramps busking on a stage. These three guys are all very rich with talent and skills in entertaining any crowd young or old, with their skiffle style of reworking old classics. Their story starts when they bunked over then fence at the Levellers Beautiful Days festival in Devon where they busked their way around entertaining all onlookers. They impressed Levellers front man Mark Chadwick so much he invited them to support his band on tour. Their popularity has just grown and grown with lots of performances at large prestigious festivals, such as Cambridge Folk Festival, Bearded Theory and Glastonbury, as well as invitations back to Beautiful Days.

Hobo Jones & The Junkyard Dogs 1–2

Today the band have the task of entertaining a difficult, hard to please crowd on a sunny Sunday afternoon on the outside stage at the Greyhound Pub in Blandford. The 1st part of their set contains songs by Johnny Cash, The Levellers, and one of their major influences Lonnie Donegan. Their set up is really simple with a one string tea chest bass, a washboard and a simple acoustic guitar. This low tech equipment is really all they need to put on a great show and they soon have everybody’s full attention; as well as some really cute innocent heckling from a 4 year old child, who asked them to play a Mickey Mouse song. How could they refuse, and the results were hilarious.

In the second half of their set they really up their game with some great performances of well known songs done in their own original style. Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb”, Green Day’s “American Idiot” and a Levellers classic “One way” all get the full Hobo Jones treatment, much to the delight of the fully engaged audience. The set ends with a much deserved encore, where the band brings out a case full of pots and pans and invite the audience to bang them altogether to their final tune “Momma Don’t Allow”. The noise is deafening but everybody is having great fun . The whole show provides some great music as well as plenty of laughs with some great interactive and sometimes risque banter. If you have not seen these guys before get yourselves along to one of their shows, I promise you won’t be disappointed.

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