charliehallion talks love, violence and prostitution with the rockabilly star


Following a stint across the UK with Ukrainian gypsy punks Gogol Bordello, 25-year-old troubadour Dan Sartain has developed a canny knack of garnering devout fans on this side of the pond to worship at his alter of Americana. Looking like Elvis before the pies and pills, the pasty-faced and pencil ‘tached former gas station attendant serves up twangy, reverb-soaked mariachi alongside rough-and-ready rockabilly, but not as we know it. With a bottle of bourbon in hand and sweat dripping from his floppy fringe and running down his gaunt cheeks, Sartain’s honest and bare-knuckle lyrics transport us from his hometown of Alabama and deep into the desert at El Paso.


“We’ve had a real stressful day and I’m all hot un’ sweaty,” drawls Sartain in his distinctive southern style. “So, if anyone fancies giving me a smoke, I’ll make it worth your while!”


As he plucks the strings of his beat’-up ol’ guitar with his teeth to Alice Cooper’s ‘Second Coming’, the chicks start swooning and the temperature rises to equatorial levels - leaving us guys wondering why we’re nowhere near as suave as the new kid in town.


Isn’t it the case that you first got into Rockabilly music as a teenager, gelling your hair back to rebel against your parents’ very liberal attitudes?


“My parents like ‘Crosby, Stills and Nash’, ‘The Eagles’ and ‘The Beatles’ [He rolls his eyes around and takes a long drag of his cigarette, then his pasty face beams into a smile]. Everybody wants to make their mum cry when they are a teenager; I did it by becoming a greaser and getting all these old cars. When I was about 13 I started playing at the High-Note Club before these crazy, receding hair-line, hair-metal bands; their mic-checks often ended in a note like this: “Check 1, Check 1, [high-pitch, Justin Hawkings-esque squeal.] All these all ladies started buying my drinks ‘cause they thought I was cute. That’s when my career really began.”


Your songs talk about the dangers of romance and the struggles of fidelity. Is this taken from personal experience?


“I’m satisfied with love right now and I’m listening to songs, which aren’t about love. I listened to a lot of Chris Isaac, and pretty much all the best Isaac songs are about love and in minor chords; so I made my songs about love and in minor chords. I’m satisfied with love so I don’t want to complain about it anymore. I’d rather write about, you know [refills his whiskey on the rocks] spacey stuff…”


Despite your age, you deliver your songs with the wisdom of a man who’s lived a lifetime, taking the rough with the smooth; and you’ve been described back home as “more talented than a thousand talented dudes”.


“I’m more talented than two thousand talented dudes. Nah. I don’t know. 90% of the time when you see a band that are complete strangers: they’re gonna be bad. The guy that wrote that has seen thousands of bad bands open for his band. So it was a surprise for him that one of them was good. That was my band.”


You’ve been christened by NME as a post-punk Johnny Cash for you’re energetic live performances. In fact, is it true that once you dealt with some stage invaders by shaking a broken bottle at them?


“It was a gig with well over 2000 strangers. They looked like four frat-guys and they mooned me from the stage, I turned around just in time to see it. So I ran up and kicked one of them real hard in the ass. I broke a bottle and started imitating Mike Tyson before that Lennox Lewis fight. At first I thought that it was terrible, had to sit down for an hour after the show. Now I think it’s one of the best gigs I’ve done: I’m proud of it.”


Your unique looks and your pasty complexion have often been commented upon. Is it true that this is because you sleep in a coffin, or is it because you like to sit at home watching your favorite Rambo movies?


[Laughs] “Dude, I don’t sleep in a coffin. You know, some people tell me I’m dark. In fact, one of the most common questions I got when I was young was “What are you?”. People couldn’t quite work me out, so, instead of asking something like “What’s your bloodline?”, they just came out with: “What are you?”. I dunno! My grandmother on my mother’s side was a prostitute, so I could’ve come from anywhere. Honestly.”