The guys at Whippoorwill posted a great review of our Sheffield gig on their Facebook page. Here’s the review in full;

Whippoorwill’s successful blues and country night came to the Green Room on the 17th, showcasing two very different groups of musicians.

Tongue placed firmly in cheek, mariachi band Pancho Ballard and The Banditos kicked off the evening with a song about a Mexican wrestler. Complete with sombreros, “Ay Carumbas!” and cardboard cacti, you (almost) felt transported to the streets of Guadelajara.
“We’ve travelled a great distance to be here tonight…We’ve come from Bolton”. The most authentic mariachi band to come out of the North West of England you’re ever likely to see.
Pancho Ballard set the tone for the evening, ensuring everyone was in high spirits for the main attraction; The Water Tower Bucket Boys. The guys from Portland, Oregon, had folks on their feet dancing to their toe-tappin’ bluegrass Americana, turning the Green Room into a small scale barn dance! It was a real coup for Whippoorwill to catch the Bucket Boys on the European leg of their tour, however, these events have seen a fair few big names take to the stage, having brought C.W. Stoneking to The Stockroom in May, and they’re looking to attract the best blues and roots artists to the city very soon.
To hear about upcoming whippoorwill events, go to their myspace page: www.myspace.com/whippoorwillsheffield

The article was published on Exposed magazine. I’ll post some photos of this gig as soon as they’ve been developed.

Tags: Facebook, sheffield, whippoorwill

Free music anybody? Certainly amigos, as our debut album is now completely free to download from our website (and Five Songs For Oscar may well follow it). All you need to do is right-click on El Bandito Muerto to download it.

We’ve decided to make it free because it doesn’t really cost us anything to let you have a digital download and we’d like as many people to hear it as possible. With that in mind, you’re welcome to share the album with your friends, on file-sharing networks, torrents – whatever!

This leaves me feeling slightly guilty about the people who have actually paid money for the download. When we work it out we’ll try to sort of some sort of special gift to those of you who’ve already paid money for it. Also, the CD version is still for sale over at www.cdbaby.com/ballardmusic2 if you’d rather have a proper physical copy.

Speaking of recordings, we’ve been busy writing songs for the next E.P. The subjects range from a child neglected by his father, to a drunken soldier trying to forget painful memories all the way through to an Argentinian tango about Parkinson’s Disease. So far it’s going really well and we’re all very excited about it.

We’ve also been looking for a studio to record Mexican Boy in the Snow in. The song has been a live favourite for quite a while now but we’ve never recorded it. We intend to release it as a Christmas single this coming December and so decided to go somewhere nice to lay the tracks down. We’ve found a few awesome looking places and I personally am extremely excited about going into a studio for a couple of days and being a proper band!

Keep checking the site and don’t forget, you can follow us on Twitter (@pbandbanditos) and we have a Facebook page – just search for Pancho Ballard and the Banditos.

Oh, and before I forget, we’ve got a merchandise store! It’s over at Reverb Nation and it’s got a few great t-shirts with more on the way – http://www.reverbnation.com/store/index/artist_458517

And that, I promise, is everything!

Gracias amigos.

Tags: Christmas, Facebook, free download, Parkinson's Disease, Reverb Nation, Studio, t-shirts, Twitter