Boom times for the UK’s Stetson manufacturers. Taylor Swift’s seismic stadium shows caused a nationwide run on dinky, pink, one-gallon hats. Shania mania swept Glastonbury , stampeding the supposition that the world’s greatest festival meant one thing, western headgear another, and never the Twain shall meet.
Now, in central London’s grandest royal park, courtesy of America’s other greatest country superstar, the rodeo has come to town. Tennessee-born singer-songwriter Morgan Wallen topped the bill at British Summer Time , the annual, credit card-sponsored run of festival-scale concerts – the first country act to headline here. On election night in the UK – also, handily, the 4 th of July, this meant a three-line whip for every American and Americana-leaning fan in town, voting with their cowboy-booted feet and raising a raucous beer or three to this crossover sensation.
Country is very much having a moment an ocean away from its heartland, and much of that is down to the 31-year-old who’s shaken up the genre with deft deployment of hip hop-style production, trap beats and, on recent collaborative single “I Had Some Help”, Post Malone . Wallen comes trailing the blockbuster success of third album One Thing at a Time (a 36-track juggernaut that spent 19 weeks at No 1 on the Billboard charts). That, and a bad boy reputation that’s involved drunken use of a racial slur and, most recently, the throwing of a chair from the roof of a bar owned by another bro-c.
