Words by Rhys Buchanan
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A gentle air of defiance is buzzing around Glastonbury’s Woodsies Stage. It’s the unreasonable hour of 11am on the final day of the 2025 festival, and clusters of pals are plotting schedules over morning coffees, while others crack open breakfast ciders. It might have been a battle to stumble out of their tents and over to the stage, but these early-risers are about to be rewarded with one of this Glasto’s most magical moments.
Westside Cowboy, NME 100 alumni and the most talked-about band at tastemaking bash The Great Escape a month prior, have been the new name popping up around the site all week. It only takes a few seconds of their set opener (and debut single), ‘I’ve Never Met Anyone I Thought I Could Really Love (Until I Met You)’, to see why: the ramshackle slacker-rock anthem’s soothing harmonies instantly purge any cobwebs among the weary masses.
“It was such a blur,” drummer Paddy Murphy reflects now, seven months after the four-piece conquered Worthy Farm, flanked by his bandmates beneath a myriad of fairy lights that adorn their tour bus. “We’ve had a couple of those real jump-up opportunities where you look out, and you wonder how you got there.” Despite the weight of the occasion, he says the band approached it like any other show: “It was still us running about with a load of gear on our backs, getting there minutes before we needed to, then plugging in and playing.”
Just a few months before their game-changing moment at Glastonbury, the Manchester band had already gained a rapid word-of-mouth buzz and triumphed over thousands of entries in the festival’s annual Emerging Talent Competition. It’s through this contest that they were hand-picked to take the hallowed Woodsies slot – which has long been a rite of passage for rising artists – by festival bosses Michael and Emily Eavis.
“The novelty of playing to people hasn’t worn off, whether that’s Glastonbury or anywhere” – Paddy Murphy
In the time since Glastonbury 2025, Westside Cowboy’s momentum has only continued to snowball. They’ve announced their signing to Island Records imprint Adventure Recordings, racked up more live miles, including their first US shows, and sold out their biggest headline gig so far, at Scala in London, months in advance. Even as the pace picks up, there’s still a humble sense of caution in the way the band speak about things that mirror their lovable charm onstage.
“The novelty of playing to people hasn’t worn off, whether that’s Glastonbury or anywhere,” says Murphy. “It always feels a bit like someone’s had a word, like, ‘Let this little band have a go.’ It never quite feels certain and real – it’s like somebody’s going to turn the lights on, then we’re going to have to grab our stuff and leave.”
It’s unsurprising that there’s been an adjustment period for Westside Cowboy after becoming one of British alternative music’s most thrilling new bands. Originally, they formed with a simple desire: to cut loose and have some fun. Murphy, Aoife Anson O’Connell (vocals/bass), and Reuben Haycocks (vocals/guitar) first met at Freshers Week at Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music in 2021, later recruiting Jimmy Bradbury (vocals/guitar) after hanging out at the local guitar shop he worked in.
Like any other music students, they instantly threw themselves into the local scene, going to see shows and starting bands of their own. It wasn’t Westside Cowboy, though, that first came out of these new friendships. Haycocks and Murphy started a pop-leaning noise project called DieKaiDai while Bradbury and Murphy were in the surf-punk trio Katz.
Eventually, both of these projects reached their natural conclusions. “We’d just overcomplicated everything,” Murphy explains. “We weren’t playing prog metal or anything, but we were taking things a bit too seriously. We were in the guitar shop one day, and Jimmy said, ‘Do you want to make a band called Westside Cowboy?’ We didn’t have any songs, we were just going to have some fun and play some old rockabilly covers and stuff.”
It wasn’t long before the band started bringing original material to those jam sessions, quickly amassing the material for their debut EP, ‘This Better Be Something Great’, co-released via tastemaking indie labels Nice Swan and Heist Or Hit last August. As well as big grunge-tinged epics, it also contains simpler, more heartfelt songwriting that speaks to some of the outlaw greats they originally bonded over, like hard-living icons Jackson C. Frank and Hank Williams.
Early on, the band gave their sound the tongue-in-cheek label ‘Britainicana’, owing to their hazy blend of American country and classic British indie. The EP does cover a lot of ground, spanning tales of lovelorn gunslingers on the jittery Ramones-esque ‘Alright Alright Alright’ to the haunting British folk of tearjerker ‘Slowly I’m Sure’.
It’s a release that also effortlessly dispels the slacker-rock genre tags that were initially thrown their way off the back of their aforementioned first single. “I do think the whole slacker-rock thing isn’t true,” muses Bradbury. “But that first single is as much us as any other song we’ve written. I really love the atmosphere of that track specifically. I think it encapsulates our ethos quite well in terms of it being really simple and a bit stupid.”
“As soon as we stopped putting pressure on ourselves to make something great, the stuff that came out was much more authentically us” – Reuben Haycocks
The song’s playful abandon hits instantly, as they rowdily yell their band name before a note is played. “For us, Westside was all about bringing the fun back into the music generally,” Haycocks notes. “In a songwriting sense, we were taking everything a little less seriously. As soon as we stopped putting loads of pressure on ourselves to make something great, the stuff that came out was much more authentically us.”
That feeling from those early days, messing around in the guitar shop or rehearsing in Murphy’s bedroom, is still what guides the band, even as they tour the country on a run of sold-out shows, or prepare to support Geese in the EU and UK in March. “It’s a really incredible feeling playing in front of all these people, but we’re trying our hardest to keep what we had at the start,” says Haycocks. “There’s not much that I’ll remember more fondly than that original feeling.”
As well as the innocent magic of blossoming musical connections, that “original feeling” also carried a sense of apprehension, their bedroom rehearsal space a vessel for both delicate ballads and noisy, rollicking haymakers. “You’d be surprised at how loud we used to play in there,” laughs Haycocks. “We waited for so long to get a noise complaint, and it just never happened,” Bradbury adds. “Loads of our friends’ bands on the local scene would rehearse there as well, like Holly Head and TTSSFU. There was a real communal feel to it. It was a special time.”
As the operation has scaled up, Westside Cowboy continue to find comfort by leaning into the community on their doorstep. Taking their music further afield – including last year’s headline shows in Los Angeles and New York – strangely left them feeling closer to home. “We try not to get too lofty with things like that,” Murphy offers. “I actually think it makes us proud of the place that shaped us.”
“We’ve been so lucky to be able to meet people who have helped us see things from different angles,” says Haycocks. One of those eye-openers was producer Loren Humphrey [Geese, Lana Del Rey], who helmed their recent second EP, ‘So Much Country ‘Till We Get There’. “He’s definitely opened new doors. It’s still trying to keep that approach of four people playing in a room, but the sound has changed a lot. It’s allowed us to experiment and be more comfortable with some of the decisions that maybe another person has made.”
“We like the idea that our songs are a vehicle for people to come together” – Reuben Haycocks
The band have also found guiding hands in some of their touring pals, like Black Country, New Road and English Teacher. You can draw clear parallels to the rise of the latter, with whose guitarist Lewis Whiting the band recorded their debut EP – before signing their own deal with Island Records, English Teacher also made a big impression on Glastonbury’s Woodsies Stage. “We’re really lucky to be around in a time where so many artists are keeping their convictions at the centre of it all,” Haycocks says of their peers. “I think that’s really inspiring.”
Like those peers before them, Westside Cowboy are also hoping to capture a sense of timelessness in their songs. “The one throughline of both EPs is us trying to make music that can stand up with time, so people can sing it long after they’ve forgotten who the hell our band was,” says Haycocks.
Anson O’Connell echoes this, while insisting they’re still very much figuring it out. “There’s a musical reason why we’ve only done two EPs, and we haven’t done a record yet. We’re still exploring all of our influences for better and for worse, and I think something whole will be forged, but with Cowboy, it’s about making something as natural and less forced as possible.”
Whatever the magic formula is, so far, it’s clearly working. The band’s most recent hometown show at the 500-capacity Gorilla felt like a culmination of their whole journey so far, with friends, family and the local scene pouring into the celebrated venue. Bradbury is clearly moved as he recalls the crowd singing along to ‘Strange Taxidermy’: “[It] was written as a folk song on a guitar in a bedroom just down the road, and it was always meant to be sung by lots of people. We all came away from that gig feeling very emotional – it felt like we all came together as a room full of happiness and joy.”
No matter how wild the highway ahead gets, you get the feeling that togetherness and community will always be crucial to Westside Cowboy. “We like the idea that our songs are a vehicle for people to come together,” Haycocks concludes. “Even if we’re old, grizzled and doing 10 nights at the Castle Hotel in Manchester, that’s never going to leave us.”
Westside Cowboy’s ‘So Much Country ‘Till We Get There’ is out now via Adventure Recordings.
Listen to Westside Cowboy’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.
Words: Rhys Buchanan
Photography: Andy Ford
Label: Adventure Recordings
Location: Unit 7 Studios