A collusion of trucks snake round a winding dirt track as a four-by-four flips sideways onto one of the corner banks. A gaggle of men sporting shoulder-length mullets gather around to free the two passengers from the crash, and the crowd cheers as one of them sticks a thumbs up from the window to indicate they’re OK. Actually, they’re more than fine – as soon as they’re pulled upright, the pair hop straight back in the truck and immediately whizz off again, mouths still bloody from the crash.
It’s not the first time something like this has happened. Earlier in the morning, a truck with a massive inflatable unicorn rolled over, while another person’s front axle (a big metal rod responsible for steering and absorbing shocks from the treacherous terrain, I’m told) snapped off on one particularly nasty hill jump. You don’t even want to know what happened to the car with a dildo stuck to the bonnet – let’s just say it’s no longer there. But that’s what to expect at Devon’s annual Mudbillys Festival.
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The fever dream child of social media stunt legends Hillbilly Nation, AKA King Billy and The Mountain, Mudbillys has become somewhat of an unruly movement. And it’s not just for young farmers either. There are city boys, geezers and primary school kids – this is a meeting point for anyone who loves motocross, mud and mullets. Or as one of the regulars Alfie describes it, a place for the “strong in the arm, thick in the head to come together”.
Based in the depths of Devon’s countryside, you smell the site before you see it, thanks to the thick smog of petrol from the pack of trucks driving in. This year a 1000-strong crowd has turned up to watch the locals race around the treacherous mud track and perform motorcycle tricks on a 20ft ramp. It’s easy to tell who’s racing by how caked in mud they are, with every person leaving the track covered in a thick layer of brown sludge.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the idea for this outlandish scene came to the Hillbilly Nation crew while on magic mushrooms. “I just manifested it in my head,” says King Billy, who’s worked in everything from digger driving to labouring. “I suffer – actually I don’t suffer – I live with ADHD and it’s a gift not a curse. Microdosing magic mushrooms channelled all of that creativity and madness.”
He met his partner-in-crime, The Mountain, roughly ten years ago at a motocross event and they’ve been besties ever since. As for their working relationship? “Hit and miss,” says King Billy. “I break it, Mountain mends it – I come up with some mad ideas.” A mechanic in his day job, Mountain then gets charged with making King Billy’s wild fantasies come true.
Mountain interjects: “He keeps me busy, that’s all I’m saying.”
Although they’ve always filmed themselves, two years ago the pair started uploading their crazy stunts and stupidly hilarious pranks to social media. They blew up overnight. Whether it was giving sheeps mullets or turbo charging their exhaust pipes to create pillowing soot clouds, fans loved the two’s nonchalant attitude towards life and inherent need to take things slightly too far.
The pair’s notoriety is ever growing and they even appeared on our TV screens in in 2022, when Channel 4 made a documentary about their attempt to turn a limousine into a “swimousine”. Basically, this meant removing the seats and filling it with two tonnes of water, then fitting it with a turbo in order to drive the monstrously heavy vehicle up a homemade ramp to crash land into a row of caravans.
These offbeat dares have earned Hillbilly Nation over 233,000 followers on TikTok and really, many of their fans are more like family. It’s easy to spot who’s part of the megafan fam at the event – a mullet, pair of reflective Pit Viper sport sunglasses and green farmer jackets. “It’s a community of nuts people,” says Mountain, before King Billy playfully corrects him with, “like-minded people”.
Also in that community is Bad Boy Chiller Crew (BBCC), the Bradford bassline collective who nearly beat Ed Sheeran last year for the number one album spot with their laddy mixtape Disrespectful. They started as friends and then became collaborators of the Hillbilly Nation, releasing a YouTube Christmas Special video of the two groups mucking around together.
Today they’re here to get involved with the organised chaos and to complete one very important mission. At last year’s event, they set the world record for the world’s biggest smoke ring, which they did by filling an exhaust with lots of petrol and setting fire to the rev. “We’ve come to set another world record,” says BBCC member Clive about the (soon-to-be-successful) reattempt they have planned.
Our conversation is disrupted by a bunch of petrol heads throttling their engines. I look over and King Billy is on the bonnet of a large truck that’s been modified to have its exhaust pipe come out the front. He sticks his face over the pipe while the driver revs, causing a gust of smoke that flings his cap off into the air. Everybody runs over to watch Billy, whose face is now covered in soot, on his knees bowing down to the almighty smoke clouds. It’s their signal that another heat of races was about to begin.
Just before the second round of racing kickstarts however, pro motorsports driver Liam Doran asks if I want to be taken for a spin around the track. I hesitantly agree while a helmet is thrust over my head and his manager warns him to “go at 40 percent”. Not to exaggerate, but there were multiple times where I thought I was going to die. I loved it.
The crowd cheered as my screaming-self crossed the finish line in one piece.
“They’re good people who like to bring people together with the same interests,” says regular Alfie about King Billy and The Mountain, as I disembark the buggy. “It’s good for your mental health being here, it’s just nice.”
And it really does feel it. Despite expecting to walk into a testosterone-filled man field which was a lowkey dick swinging competition, there’s a proper sense of camaraderie. It even turns out that the scheduled fancy dress competition was an elaborate ruse to help one of their mates surprise his girlfriend with a wedding proposal (she said yes). Half the site is there with their families too, the children of which are eagerly hunting down King Billy and the Mountain for selfies.
“If you look around today, everybody’s smiling, everybody’s rocking a mullet and Pit Vipers and everybody’s happy,” says King Billy. “Everybody’s breaking stuff and no one cares.”
Considering it’s only the second iteration of Mubillys, you get the palpable sense that they’re on to something big. So what’s next? “Whatever he thinks up at night and rings me in the morning saying, ‘Can we do this?’” says Mountain. “I haven’t said no yet.”
So far, making a tractor fly, drag racing a log and the world’s longest slip and slide have crossed King Billy’s mind. Despite how ridiculous each one sounds, I have a feeling they’ll somehow make all three happen. There’s no point in asking “why”, because their “why not” attitude is the charm of it all – especially in a world that feels more serious and bleak by the day. That’s why, when they ask if I’ll be back next year I tell them confidently, “Why not?”
