Sasha and Digweed hit Nashville

Sasha and Digweed hit Nashville

7 April, 2008 | 1.24PM

• Section: Music News Topics: Sasha & Digweed Tour 2008
• Written by: Industry Boy

‘Real Country Music Lives Here’ reads the sign above the door of Ernest Tube record shop in downtown Nashville.

The sun is shining in a perfect blue sky, it’s 76 degrees and there are cowboys strumming guitars and singing on every street corner.

A horse drawn carriage clocks past, towing a couple of tourists - there might as well be tumbleweed blowing about, so deep are we in Middle America.

Nashville, is the ‘home of country music’, so for Sasha and John Digweed, two underground electronic house DJs from England, it is a pretty strange place to play tonight.

Especially when you compare it to Washington DC on Saturday night and New York last Friday, which are both fairly safe electronic music hotspots, and major world cities in their own right.

With a population of just 600,000, Nashville is certainly one of the weirdest dates of the tour.

“I guess you prob-ly think I sound kin-da count-try,” says a helpful tourist guide in a yellow tshirt, who’s floating around on one of those motorized walker things.

“Up there yule find a Starbucks.”

WIFI is the elixir that I so seek, and if there’s one thing the global corporate coffee shop company is good for, it’s free Internet access.

Before he leaves, he spins around on his wheels and says, “So is Tony Blair a wanker?”

Rather disappointingly the Starbucks in downtown Nashville doesn’t have WIFI, but the guy working there passes me onto another coffee shop around the corner that does.

In the shop I meet an excited Chinese American girl called Kanya Lai who’s heard of Sasha and John Digweed.

“Oh so you’re with Sasha and Digweed?” says Kanya, who works in a Thai restaurant and art museum in Nashville.

“My friend told me you guys were playing at City Hall tonight.”

I ask her what’s it like living in Nashville. She used to live in London, so she can offer some comparative insight.

“I used to hate living here because it’s such a small town and you always think the grass is greener in the bigger cities, but recently I’ve started to like Nashville,” she says.

“Nashville is a manageable city, and there are lots of independent restaurants and bars here, plus people are very friendly.”

They certainly are. In the last 20 minutes three strangers have offered helpful and smiley assistance.

I ask Kanya if Nashville has a history of electronic music.

“Well maybe I’m not the best person to ask, but I think the scene here is really small.

“There’s raves but not that many events for electronic music.

“The club scene here is predominantly hip hop, top 40, and of course country music.”

That doesn’t explain the local hype surrounding Sasha and John’s gig tonight.

The boys are the main artists featured in the region’s biggest newspaper The Tennessean, and in a positive article the newspaper explains [supposedly to its readers who may be unfamiliar with electronic music] that “stylistic distinctions notwithstanding, the one indisputable thing about Sasha and Digweed’s mixes is that they bring people together.”

The word is that the pre sale tickets have already sold out too.

Tonight then, should prove to be an exciting musical experiment. If Sasha and John Digweed can bring Nashvillians together and demonstrate the unifying power of the music, then perhaps, in a few years they might add a small extension to the sign of Ernest Tube’s record shop: ‘Real Country Music Lives Here (and a little, happy bit of electronic music)’ might be too long though.

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