the Rag and Bone Men

The Rag and Bone Men take their name from the junk collectors who roamed the streets of medieval england, gathering rags and debris for reuse, as well as bones of the dead for glue manufacture. In effect, that is what this band still does. The Rag and Bone Men collect various strands of music from several older eras to create their own original songs. Their original ballads develop complex stories on a variety of topics: the anguish suffered by a murderer who’s guilt overcomes him yet cannot refrain from his serial killings; a gang of cockroaches who fumigate the homes of people by stuffing their chimneys with straw; a brick layer who becomes disenfranchised with the popularity of wooden homes and takes to throwing napalm-frosted bricks through windows; the beggar who wishes not for food, shelter nor clothes, but begs day and night only for money with which to buy himself a set of golden teeth. The Rag and Bone Men are a four-piece consisting of Vince on accordion, John Henry on guitar and rubbish bin bass, Shannon on fiddle and Max, picking banjo and octave mandolin, who spins their tales of murder, brick-throwing, beggars and thieves, whores and cockroaches. The Rag and Bone Men's take on classic musical cultures combined with tales of the macabre and mundane creates a captivating atmosphere capable of stripping the most eclectic of audiences of preconceived notions of style, bringing all together in a unified, foot-stomping frenzy.