Rock music too has its own Bible study group. For a long time Nick Cave was its most studious pupil, but for some years he has been experiencing stiff competition from David Eugene Edwards, leader of Sixteen Horsepower. Just like Cave, Edwards, who hails from Denver, Colorado, likes browsing the Old Testament best. Hell and damnation! Where there's weeping and the gnashing of teeth, Sixteen Horsepower makes music. But whereas Nick Cave usually opts for wild rock music, David Eugene Edwards decides in favour of the squeezebox, fiddle and mandolin.

With that he made a big impression when Sixteen Horsepower made their début halfway through the nineties. Gradually it got noticed that the reverend did have a rather limited voice, and that the music, notwithstanding all those different instruments, comes down to the same trick. On Folklore they cautiously take another course. American folk music is supplemented by European tradition, with the Balkans a favourite. Still it all sounds unmistakably like Sixteen Horsepower. Even during the mazurka La Robe a Parasol, sung in French, you think you're in an American methodist church.