Anyone who was listening to independent music back in the 1980s and 1990s might find it surprising to learn which determinedly non-mainstream bands from that era resonate with the youth of 2026. My Bloody Valentine are selling out arenas. Cocteau Twins have influenced everyone from Chappell Roan to Wolf Alice. Mazzy Star’s dolorous ‘Fade Into You’ has now amassed more than one billion streams on Spotify.
Cowboy Junkies divine better than most some dark heart of North American loneliness
Cowboy Junkies could be forgiven for feeling aggrieved not to have picked up a little more of that kind of traction. Before Mazzy Star emerged with a somewhat more acid-fried take on hushed, spectral quietude, in 1988 Cowboy Junkies released the record which remains their Ur-text. Recorded in one day on a single microphone, The Trinity Session offered a new take on narcoticised country-blues, one which found common ground in everything from Hank Williams to the Velvet Underground. The sound was stark, beautiful and bewitching. Five years ahead of Mazzy Star and ‘Fade Into You’, Cowboy Junkies’ version of Lou Reed’s ‘Sweet Jane’ was a masterclass in intense stillness. It still sounds slightly shocking – and pioneering.
Their cover of the Velvet Underground classic recently featured in the final episode of the Netflix hit show Stranger Things, but while it does decent numbers on Spotify these days, that kind of media attention only takes a band so far. You can bet that were Mazzy Star ever to reform they will not be visiting the likes of Bexhill-on-Sea, Ulverston and Milton Keynes, as Cowboy Junkies are on this tour, which is titled Celebrating 40 Years and Beyond.
Perhaps being taken for granted is the price a band pays for never breaking up or deviating too far from its set course. Cowboy Junkies still consists of three Timmins siblings – guitarist Michael, drummer Peter and singer Margo – and childhood friend Alan Anton on bass, the quartet augmented on tour by Jeff Bird on mandolin and harmonica. They still play a mix of rootsy original material, mixed in with covers and traditional songs. The music is more muscular nowadays, and perhaps a little more orthodox in its blues-rock leanings, but it still divines better than most some dark heart of North American loneliness: dive bars, wide open plains, cute boys in baseball caps and good girls longing to go bad. One song is called ‘Missing Children’. Another, ‘A Common Disaster’.
A new three-CD box set, Open to Beauty, celebrates the music the group have made during this century rather than the last. Margo Timmins seemed a little apologetic about this during a fine show in Edinburgh. She promised early on that they would definitely be playing ‘Sweet Jane’ (‘if you’ve just come to hear that’), and later joked that only a few people had walked out (nobody had). In reality, the newer material blended seamlessly into the older work. Songs such as ‘Shadows 2’ and ‘What I Lost’, taken from their latest record, Such Ferocious Beauty, and concerning the fading out through dementia of the siblings’ father, were strong and powerful. A short acoustic set delivered ‘To Love Is To Bury’, a pretty murder-suicide ballad from The Trinity Session which, Margo Timmins informed us with a grin, was once chosen by a fan for her wedding dance.
For all that Michael Timmins writes the original material and the four musicians cooked up a compelling atmosphere, the singer is the key component to Cowboy Junkies’ spell-like aura. Somewhat shy, elegantly silver-haired, she swayed around the stage, dunking her herbal tea bag into her mug in time to the primal rhythm as her voice did unearthly things. Its default setting was a conversational murmur which confided, matter-of-factly, about murder, loss and betrayal – but it was also capable of rising up to a raw holler, as on an extended churn through John Lee Hooker’s ‘Forgive Me’.
By the home straight Margo was on her fourth or fifth brew and it seemed to be having a disinhibiting effect. Having guided us through the restrained beauty of ‘Misguided Angel’ and ‘Blue Moon Revisited (Song For Elvis)’, she belted out the pile-driving ‘Good Friday’, fluffing a line and giggling as some bloke in the crowd bellowed proclamations of love. It wasn’t quite blanket Gen-Z adoration, perhaps, but after 40 years it felt like something to cherish, nonetheless.
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