Meet Westside Cowboy, the guitar band bringing ‘Britainicana’ to the masses

When Rolling Stone UK sits down with Westside Cowboy at a North London pub, they immediately regale us with a trip to the cinema the night before to watch a 40th anniversary screening of Back to the Future. “It’s the best film EVER made,” vocalist/guitarist Reuben Haycocks says as he nails his colours to the mast.

A great choice, but one that feels even more on brand when you consider that the Manchester group have spent the last year riding a wave of industry excitement sparked by a self-coined genre called Britainicana. The group describe it as offering a lyrical celebration of the mundane paired against 90s alt-rock guitars (think Pavement and you’re halfway there). Even their name, meanwhile, is taken from cowboys in 19th century New York who were paid to accompany newly built trains through towns so that naive locals wouldn’t get hit by them.

But it’s also true that the group, who formed at uni, manage to cram in improbable flavours of folk, alt-rock and even their well documented love of skiffle. It all results in a thrilling sound which has allowed them to win Glastonbury’s Emerging Talent Competition contest in 2025. In 2026, it feels like the year could be theirs for the taking.  

Read our interview with Westside Cowboy and listen to ‘Don’t Throw Rocks’ via our Play Next playlist on Spotify below.

Your latest EP So Much Country ‘Till We Get There lands in January. Excited to have another taste of the band out there?

Paddy: We are, but these things move so quickly that sometimes it’s like remembering that there’s music that we know exists that other people don’t really know exists! We’re moving onto other things and doing live stuff and in our heads I think mainly what we’re thinking about at the minute is recording and writing an album.

It’s crazy that for so long we played gigs with just one song out, which was cool because we could just play whatever we liked and the rest was just up in the air. Now we’re getting to the place where it’s a new excitement where people will actually know more of the songs. We all remember being kids at gigs and nothing beats when a band plays a song that you’ve listened to the day before and really got into it.

Reuben: To reiterate Paddy’s point, it’s a different phase in a band’s life. I think this year, in our own minds we’ve been the plucky newcomers proving ourselves – the underdogs, you know. People now know what we sound like and they might end up coming to watch us rather than coming to watch a different band, and we’re proving ourselves to them. It’s just a totally different headspace that we’ve never experienced before.

But all the right things are happening. You won Glastonbury’s Emerging Talent Competition earlier this year!

Aoife: It was incredibly surreal. We performed in this village hall in the middle of Pilton and it was a plug-in-and-play situation, but with Michael and Emily Eavis there. We won, but there was nothing open and we ended up having this horrible vegan Dominos, sitting in an Airbnb. We were tired, hungry and would just occasionally let out these weird giggles. It was a mad way to end a crazy night, but it was a really cool thing to win.

You formed at uni and all played in different bands before. What’s the key to your chemistry together?

Aoife: We’ve found people who fit into our world nicely. Our sound man is Paddy and Jimmy’s old bandmate Ben, who is an amazing friend and a great sound guy and has what we call ‘cowboy ethos’. Cole, our tour manager, fits into that too. We want people to slot into – and not disrupt – the cowboy magic.

Paddy: We’ve had times when we’ve been a bit daunted by what’s going on and everything happening to us, but then we’ll realise we just haven’t played music! We’ve been talking about fucking emails. That’s a necessary thing, but we realised it was because we’d been on tour with Black Country, New Road for three weeks and it was amazing.

So it’s all about the music?

Jimmy: We got home after those three weeks, seeing all these amazing places, but we really wanted to be back in Manchester. We’d been a bit nervous about writing the album, or about what people are going to think about the EP. We decided to have a practice in Paddy’s bedroom, off the cuff, and within two hours we’d finished two songs. We were just like, ‘Wow, all the stress of the past three weeks was just because we weren’t in our natural habitat’.

And how did you settle on your sound, what you’ve come to call ‘Britainicana’?

Reuben: If you put four people in a room without any pressure to do anything and they all have different experiences and relatively open minds, I think the product of that will inevitably be better than going in and wanting to make a proper thing of it. Folk music, Americana, skiffle, it’s all there.

Finally, how are you describing ‘Britainicana’ and what would you relate it to?

Aoife: The clearest example we always use is the TV show The End of the Fucking World. That feeling in the show of when things were made and how it had no solid time and no solid setting. The humour and uncanny-ness of that show is so British, but it’s filmed through this American lens and in these strange landscapes. I think our music reflects that vibe too.