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Can country make it in Britain?
By Jon Lusk

Published: March 14 2009 00:39 | Last updated: March 14 2009

More than a few eyebrows were raised when US country duo Sugarland and British soul singer Adele gave a joint performance at the Grammy Awards ceremony last month. It was an unlikely pairing – and, coincidence or not, both acts left the building clutching trophies.

With Sugarland about to embark on their first-ever tour of Europe and the UK, where the popularity of country music is at a historic low, the pairing looks like a rather smart marketing move.

Yet it wasn’t the result of any record company agenda to disassociate Sugarland from their country roots, according to lead singer Jennifer Nettles, who insists that the band themselves suggested it to the organisers.

“As opposed to ‘disassociate’, I would say it’s more to open us up, to say: ‘hey this is what we do, we love all kinds of music and we play all kinds of music’,” she says. “We embrace it, and I think our fans do too. We want to broaden ourselves and quite frankly we want other people to hear our music and see how it’s accepted.”

Although Sugarland are currently the most successful duo in country music in the US, they’re a long way from being household names in the UK, just like their more famous labelmate Taylor Swift. The 19-year-old country poppet was the biggest-selling artist of any kind in the US last year, and she’s also keen to conquer European and UK markets. Her new album Fearless was released in the UK this week and she plays London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire in May.

Even though the UK market for country is best described as a “niche”, there are almost 30 specialist radio shows and three magazines (Upcountry, Country Music People and Maverick) devoted to it. But the lack of coverage by the British mainstream media suggests that country music has something of an image problem.

Alan Cackett, editor of Maverick, says country is now at its lowest ebb in the UK since the early 1970s, when it was often on television and high in the pop charts. The last country star to make it really big internationally was Shania Twain, whose Come On Over album sold 4m copies in the UK alone – after it was remixed as a “pop crossover” product in 1999.

One problem that Cackett identifies is that country music is not being marketed to young people, and the average age of most country music gig goers certainly bears this out. Indeed, whether country music is even being marketed at all is an issue for most mainstream (Nashville) artists, who almost never get covered by the broadsheets.

“They would if ... the people who run the record companies were to get behind these artists. Generally speaking, the people who work at the major record labels are not into country music. And you cannot sell what you don’t listen to or believe in,” Cackett observes. “The newspapers need somebody in PR or the record labels hammering at their door, that is where the root of the problem lies.”

Perhaps many of those in record company press offices are too young to remember when country was big in the UK. There’s also the inevitable metropolitan bias of the media – there are naturally more country music fans per capita in Scotland, Ireland and East Anglia than in London, due to a combination of country music’s Celtic roots and its small-town or rural sensibility. But as a result of swingeing cuts at all the major labels – triggered first by the impact of the internet and now by the recession – they don’t have the budgets to employ country music specialists like they used to.

This means that magazines such as Maverick often don’t even get sent promotional copies of new country releases. Or simply that artists don’t get a UK release at all. Of those who do, there are examples, such as the misleadingly named Keith Urban, whose label didn’t want to market him as “country”.

Negative stereotypes about country music’s supposed redneck connections and snobbery about the perceived lower-class demographic of its fans are also part of the problem. Cackett explains that when CMT (Country Music Television) was briefly available in the UK on Sky between 1993 and 1998, advertising agencies preferred to place car ads on the History and Geography channels even though CMT had more viewers than both put together.

“They said the demographics were all wrong but to me they were totally wrong, because I know that the majority of my readers are professional people. They’re not ‘white trash’,” Cackett insists.

At least one of the majors is compensating for its lack of expertise by channelling its UK country releases through a specialist. For the past couple of years, Universal has been licensing its country acts to the independent label Wrasse Records, which made its name by doing a similar thing with world music. Though Universal has decided to promote Taylor Swift in-house, Wrasse has handled press for a string of Universal’s other country artists, including Hayes Carll, Jamey Johnson and Sugarland.

Many US country acts (and, crucially, their managers on commissions) are put off by the huge disparity between what they can earn in the US and what they can earn in the UK, and so never make the trip over. Ian Ashbridge, Wrasse’s co-founder, hopes that the willingness of Sugarland and Swift to travel will help break them in the UK and rejuvenate the audience demographic. And with the pound weak, visiting the UK is becoming easier.

“That’s not to be underrated. It makes more sense for them to jump on planes,” he says. “They’re not going to lose their shirt in doing so, and they’ll give it a go.”

Ashbridge also makes no bones about “de-twanging” country singles (remixing them so that they have less of an identifiably country flavour – for example, by replacing steel guitar with other instruments) to make them more palatable to mainstream UK radio. Whether this questionable strategy is driven by tastemakers such as BBC Radio 2 or by the record companies themselves, it’s certainly inspired by Shania Twain’s cross-over model.

While Nettles thinks that Sugarland’s music holds up on its own, she’s not opposed to singles being “de-twanged”: “If you remix it, that’s fine, as long as the song itself, and the structure stay true to the integrity of the song, then remix it all you like, but I don’t know if it’s necessary to do those sorts of things.”

Nor is she worried about having to pay her dues all over again in such tough markets outside country music’s natural stronghold. “We have to be smart, you know,” she says; “ ... like we’re doing a few shows on the military bases [in Europe] and that’s a nice supplement. I believe if you can go over first time and just break even, much less make money, then that’s a success, and you really have to look at this stuff like an investment.”

Sugarland play the first of five UK dates this year at Shepherd’s Bush Empire on Monday, and start a US tour in April.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/a8af977e-0...0779fd2ac.html