THE Bluecoat may be 4,000 miles from Nashville, but on Saturday it will be transformed into the home of honky-tonk for its Above the Beaten Track music festival.

Headliners Mike Badger & The Shady Trio, led by The La’s co-founder, will be joined by bands playing a mixture of Americana, country and western, folk and blues.

They include acoustic pop band Dead Cities, soloist Dave Owen playing old and new classics, blues singer Anna Tai Hogan, bluegrass group The Loose Moose String Band and DJs Blazing Saddles, who are also performing at Daresbury dance festival Creamfields this weekend.

Mike Badger and the Shady Trio are regulars at the South by South West showcase in Austin, Texas, and have recently toured the UK.

He describes their self-written material, a mixture of rockabilly and country swing, as “good time music”.

Badger says first hearing American country music star Hank Williams was “a pivotal moment in my life”.

“I had never heard anything so honest,” he says. “I was round at a friend’s house and listening to the song, I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry, and when I heard the lyrics ‘The moon just went behind the clouds to hide its face and cry’, to me it was like William Blake.

“I see my life as divided into the time before I heard Hank Williams and the time after.”