A silly idea

About ten years ago, my good friend PJ wanted to start a band. He got together six friends of his who could play a little music. I was one of them. We sat together one night at PJ’s place and had a beer. We didn’t know eachother (well, some of us knew some others of us) and we had no idea about the band we were about to enter. The only thing we agreed about was that we didn’t want to be just another mediocre guitar rock band. We needed a concept - a brilliant idea.

One of the guys raised a question: “What is the kind of music you most hate?” We all answered it. Six out of seven answered “Country music.” One guy – guitar player – said he liked country music very much. The guy who raised the question said: “Ok. Let’s start a country band.” It sounded like the most ridiculous idea in years. I said: “Fine, but since we’re not from the United States we’ll never be real cowboys. So let’s call ourselves The Sissy Cowboys.” Everybody liked the name. We had a country band.

Since I was to be the singer the guys thought it was a good idea that I should write the lyrics for the songs. I started to read a lot about cowboys. And I bought myself a rhyming dictionary. That helped. I would just steal a sentence from a Lucky Luke book and then find words in the dictionary that rhymed to the end word of that sentence. That’s how I wrote songs like ‘Don’t You Dare To Call Me Chicken’, ‘A Real Cowboy Can Never Take A Day Off’ and ‘Carry Ann’s Push Up Bra’.

We've been kind of successful in certain crowds for several years and played in many venues and lots of festivals. And we even made a videoclip (ourselves) for the song 'Sherrif Please Release Me'.

All I wanted to say is: if you have an idea that sounds crazy, you're probably on to something.