The Cain Pit are an enigma, and they’re embracing it. The self-described ‘punkgrass’ – pop-punk meets bluegrass, for the uninitiated – band from Norfolk have become a fast favourite in the psychobilly scene, with their brand of almost-Dark-Country filling the nation’s venues with creepers and flat tops. “I don’t get it, but it’s great,” vocalist Daryl Blyth laughs, “I think it’s just because it’s fun, it’s fast and it’s kind of what psychobilly boils down to, isn’t it? We’ve got a bit of the roots there anyway but people seem to just have been having fun. We haven’t had a full record yet but people seem to be jumping around and doing fake hoedown dances so yeah we can’t complain. I think it’s gotta be the upright bass. I slap it and we do have a few dark songs which people seem to grab on to. It’s pretty cool; we’ve got the psychobilly fans but then we’ve also been playing like folk festivals, which is nuts really because they’re on opposite sides of the spectrum. The folk festivals we’ve been playing, we’ve been turning up and it’s been proper like English folk and songs about fairies and wizards and all that kind of stuff. Every gig we’ve done we’ve been a little bit worried about how people are going to react to us but we’ve gone on stage and people have been really up for it, they’ve been going crazy so yeah, we’re chuffed.” Only a few weeks before our chat, he was in Spain on the main stage at Psychobilly Meeting in Santa Susanna, which was a welcome surprise. “Yeah, it was crazy, to be fair. As the Cain Pit it was our first time like overseas playing. You know it’s just such a great atmosphere, everyone is just really up for it and yeah we had a blast. I mean, we were the token non-psychobilly band so we weren’t sure how people were gonna accept us as such but people really loved it, it went crazy so yeah we were really chuffed with it.”

The Cain Pit have a lot to celebrate. At the end of June, they released their second EP, ‘Joy’, and it’s a brilliant record. “We’ve been having lots of great feedback from people,” as Blyth explains. “We’ve changed the sound slightly from the previous EP that we had out last year.” He’s talking about their first release, ‘Sorrow’.  “I think it’s because this new EP, it’s more of a mix of everybody’s input. When the band started the songs were just written between myself and my cousin Scott so now we’ve got everybody in the band and everybody’s putting their input into it so it’s more of an actual sound of the band, I guess. We’ve been performing probably live coming up to two years now so it’s the songs that we’ve been performing live and people have been singing along to and stuff, so it’s great to actually get them out on physical media and on streaming and all that kind of stuff!”  

It’s not just the recordings that we’re loving: The Cain Pit are taking on Youtube too. “We always have these massive meetings for any video that we do so when the band started we set this task to try and make a video for every song that we’ve released. For ‘The Devil’s Side’, we we didn’t really know what to do. I know that I wanted to have some sort of devil-y kind of soul thing happening but then also the other guys wanted to do like a white background situation and I think we were just spitballing backwards and forwards and we just came up with this idea. Luckily Joe. who plays acoustic guitar and harmonica in the band, he lives in like an Edwardian Victorian house and it has all these kind of gnarly features and it kind of lent itself to having something quite dark in the video and we just kind of ran with it.” 

“[The Devil’s Guitar’] was the first song of the new EP and we were like, do we really need to be in the video? Because we’ve been in every other video, we were just exploring like new ideas and we wanted to have this sort of animated thing. It was actually a puppet and we just found a guy on Fiver and we gave him the idea of the song and we wanted to use the skeleton puppet that he had in it. He had some samples and stuff and he was like, ‘fine, fine’. So he sent us the first video that he put together and it was dreadful… it was so bad and it didn’t make any sense. He put this video together of domestic abuse and it was not fitting with the song at all and I think he was throwing just everything at the wall to see what would stick basically. We were like, well, we’re kind of screwed because we can’t use the whole [thing], it’s not like three and a half minutes worth of material there to use.  Jamie, my drummer, he does a lot of video editing and he sliced up all the good bits, then we ended up going to like a random village hall in Norfolk where we’re from and just decided to just fill something sort of low budget with just some red light. It just came together really, so it kind of worked, so yeah. 

A lot of the songs I write are quite personal and I wanted to actually write a song that was more of a story. Obviously people like Johnny Cash and Hank Williams and people like that, they’ll sing a song of a story and that was kind of like the idea of the song. The song is about a cowboy and he’s a bit down on his luck and he’s a bit of a drunk. One day some bandits come to his town and he finds out that they kidnapped his wife and so he finds some of these bandits, kills one and it just so happens that one has a guitar that he can play. He uses his guitar travelling the country singing songs of his tale to try and find his wife: that was the idea anyway!”

The big question is: where did the idea of combining bluegrass and pop punk come from? “So, basically, the idea originally was it came from just from Covid. Me and my cousin Scott, we’ve always been in out of bands together. I mean, we were raised on like rockabilly stuff from our dads playing in rockabilly bands together and stuff like that, and obviously we found our own when we got older. In the late 90s early 2000s [there] was that Green Day Blink 182 thing that we kind of grabbed onto. Anyway, fast forward to Covid, we were just messing around with trying to record remotely and the idea was we were doing punk songs, we were doing ska songs, we were doing country songs… it was more for our own thing, and I suggested to do some original stuff –  let’s just see what happens combining our rockabilly influences and more of the pop punk influences. 

I think a lot of new psychobilly bands, they really get in on the gnarly horror kind of stuff, and I didn’t see a lot of bands combining them or [using the]  sweet melodies of bluegrass with the pop punk thing and it was just to explore that a bit more. I mean, you have folk punk bands but I think we’re also different from a folk punk band. A lot of folk punk bands, they can be quite political sometimes.  The English folk punk bands are quite… you can tell they’re really English Folk with bits of punk. It was just an experiment really, and then when we got Isaac in, he’s the banjo player, it just really came together really to be fair.

Isaac is very bizarre. He’s a very bizarre human. I’ve known Isaac for ages, he was on our local scene in Norwich. He was with another guy but they were both playing acoustic guitar and they were doing sort of comedy songs; I actually knew his mum more. She plays the fiddle: I’m also a drummer and I had done some sort of skiffle, blue-grassy gigs and she would come and play the fiddle. And anyway, one day when things were easing off for Covid, she brought him to a gig to play banjo – I didn’t even know he played the banjo! –  and he just shredded! He is young and it’s so rare for somebody to play and also to be that good at banjo because he plays properly: he picks it. A lot of people just strum a banjo but he does all the rolls and all that kind of stuff and I think he got so good because he was living on his own. The only thing he was interested in was banjo, Warhammer and he had a job at a miniature train museum and that was all he’d done. That is all his life was for ages. He lived in a flat and he couldn’t practice banjo in a flat because banjos are pretty loud and so he would go to a random field near where we would live and he would practice banjo for hours in a field. I mean, it doesn’t even sound real but that’s actually what he would do. Here’s the thing I should tell everyone: the first full band practice we had with Isaac, he didn’t have any shoelaces in his shoes and he used old banjo strings to tie his shoes up! Yeah, we were pretty lucky when we got with Isaac.”

The band are wasting no time getting started on their next EP, and with a secret tour booked they’ve got plenty to look forward to. “We’ve got a few dates supporting a really decent band in October and November so that’s pretty cool. At the moment, we’re right in our next EP so we want to get that out next year hopefully. This next EP will be completely box fresh, all brand new songs that none of us have played together before. I don’t know what it is going to happen basically. We know like the songs that the audience really gravitate to. It’s kind of exciting really. It’s really exciting for everyone to get proper involved. My drummer is a metal drummer and it would be really great to hear him put some metal stuff in it.  Joe, my acoustic guitarist, he’s into real like Heartland, Americana kind of stuff so I don’t know, we’ll see what happens. It might turn into a hip hop album, who knows?” It’s unlikely, but considering how fast the Cain Pit have risen, anything is possible.

Kate Allvey

Buy a copy of ‘Joy’ from The Cain Pit’s bandcamp here