Has Britain mysteriously succumbed to the charms of country and western? The audience for Morgan Wallen’s show at London’s O2 Arena looked like they had turned out for the world’s biggest barn dance: young women in cowboy hats and boots and young men in check shirts and trucker caps worn backwards. Twenty thousand of them.

The dedicated country fanbase in the UK has never previously been characterised by youth and fervour. This didn’t have the demographic of “Whispering” Bob Harris’s regular Radio 2 listeners raised on a diet of Emmylou and the Eagles. It was more akin to Ed Sheeran fans indulging in cosplay. Young couples clung to one another mouthing every word of songs about recovering from broken hearts by downing shots of Jack Daniel’s with the good ol’ boys. Groups of women held up phones and sang along with ballads about loving baseball and driving a Silverado truck.

It is hard to overstate how huge a superstar Wallen is in the US. The 30-year-old had the biggest streaming song (Last Night) and number one album (One Thing at a Time) of 2023, even beating Taylor Swift. We all know America loves its country music. And while Last Night topped Apple Music’s global song chart this year, in Britain, Wallen has never had a whiff of a hit. Nevertheless, those personalised algorithms that push music out to receptive listeners have clearly found their way to enough fans to sell out London’s biggest arena. Perhaps Ed Sheeran’s appropriation of Irish folk tropes and Swift’s Nashville roots have softened listeners up for country tropes. “This is my first time in the UK,” admitted Wallen, Tennessee accent curling like the Mississippi. “I like to go on first impressions, and what I seen so far, I think we’re gonna have a damn good time together.”

My own first impressions were of a performer with the fashion sense of a garage mechanic and a moustache that went out of style somewhere around 1985. He has a strong country voice, thick and pliable, capable of gliding to a keening falsetto in moments of romantic longing. His relentlessly formulaic songs are all played in major keys and feature so many alcohol and car brand names one might suspect sponsorship arrangements. They are replete with the satisfying puns of the genre, typified by final encore Whiskey Glasses, in which the glasses are both receptacles for alcohol and a way of seeing the world. “Poor me, pour me another drink,” is the opening line. 

Stylistically, Wallen’s main musical advance has been to blend country with the beats of hip hop and skittery production of trap music, often considered “urban” musical genres. It is a subtle modernisation, much of which evaporated in a live setting, where twin electric guitars pushed the sound towards raucous country rock.

In the US, Wallen nearly derailed his career in 2021 when he was caught on video using a racial slur. Yet despite some debate about racism in country music, the controversy doesn’t appear to have affected Wallen’s popularity (the artist apologised and said he was seeking counselling). The 20,000 British fans singing along with Ain’t That Some certainly didn’t seem to be deterred, bellowing heartily to Wallen’s admission that “I know its cliché to sing Chevrolet, cold beers and Fridays / But that’s just the way it is out here … Ain’t that some C-O-U-N-T-R-Y s---?” It is indeed.

No further UK dates