Until Rishi Sunak called the General Election, the biggest event planned in London on July 4 was not political at all, or at least not directly. In Hyde Park this evening, the 31-year-old superstar country singer Morgan Wallen is the headline act at British Summer Time. Given that it is Independence Day, this must count as the most American event outside of the States, an evening festooned in stars and stripes and drenched in Jack Daniels’.
Not that you would believe it to read the British press. No artist better epitomises the gap between the US and the UK. In his home country, Wallen is almost as big – by some measures bigger – than Taylor Swift. Earlier this month, he broke her record for most weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart this decade. Wallen has 44m monthly listeners on Spotify; his biggest hit, the irresistibly catchy Last Night, was the most streamed song on Spotify in America last year, and globally on Apple Music. (Chorus: “Last night we let the liquor talk, I don’t remember everything we said but we said it all.”)
Overall Wallen was the most streamed artist in the US behind Swift and Drake. He cannot leave the house in the States without being mobbed by fans and paparazzi. His boy-band handsomeness, plus a run of tabloid scandals, has given Wallen a divisive, Gallagher-esque reputation, a bad boy with a great voice who is partial to a night out.
In Britain, however, Wallen remains practically unknown. While Swift gets as much airtime and column inches as the Prime Minister and the England team, Wallen barely registers. He could walk unmolested down our streets. It does not seem to have impeded him much: his first gig in Europe was a sold out date at the O2 last autumn; his second is Hyde Park.
Even those who know his music might not know much about the man. Partly it is the British suspicion of the genre. Apart from a handful of obvious exceptions, such as Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson, country artists in the UK have rarely given the media coverage their popularity might seem to warrant. But it is also because Wallen hasn’t sought it out: he has never given an interview to the European press.
Last autumn it looked as though that might be about to change. Wallen’s management firm, Big Loud, which represents several big country acts, agreed that a Telegraph journalist could join Wallen on the Houston leg of his gargantuan One Night At A Time stadium tour. The writer would see Wallen in his natural habitat; Wallen would see if he liked the writer, and perhaps an interview could be arranged down the line.
He was wary of reporters. In May 2020, he was arrested after being thrown out of Kid Rock’s steakhouse in Nashville for being drunk and disorderly. In October 2020, during the pandemic, videos appeared on TikTok of Wallen flouting covid regulations to party in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. His ex-fiancée KT Smith had given birth to their son Indigo a few months earlier.
More seriously, in 2021, video footage had surfaced of Morgan using the n-word with friends on a night out, in what he would later call “hour 72 of a 72 hour bender”. Radio stations and streaming services removed his music from their playlists; his labels suspended him. In April, he donated $300,000 to the Black Music Action Coalition; three months later he gave a contrite interview to Good Morning America.
After the initial furore passed, these incidents did little to impede Wallen’s success. While the media debated Wallen’s racist slur, his fans kept buying tickets and listening to his songs. Some fellow musicians criticised him. Jason Isbell, of Drive By Truckers, said Wallen’s behaviour was “disgusting and horrifying” and that the slur was an “opportunity for country music to give that slot to someone who deserves it.”
Mickey Guyton, a black country artist, said “The hate runs deep… How many passes are you going to give?” Others were more forgiving, including the black musician Lil Durk, who released Broadway Girls, a hit song, with Wallen, in 2022. Durk was asked if he thought Wallen was racist. “Nah, he ain’t no racist,” he said, adding that they “had a long talk – he had his public situation, we had [a talk] behind closed doors, and I’ll vouch for him and he good.”
At any rate, in the two years since the incident, Wallen had grown bored of talking about it. He knew that it would be on any interviewer’s question list, but he wanted to move on.
So it was that I found myself backstage one day last November at Minute Maid Park, normally home of the Houston Astros baseball team, being introduced to one of America’s most divisive musicians. In the arena, his fans – some of whom had paid thousands of dollars for the best seats – gathered in cowboy hats and boots. One wore a t-shirt with Wallen’s face behind bars. Wallen’s fans have been quick to defend him. While his music is not political, sticking to familiar country themes of heartbreak, booze and regret, his fans are quick to go on the defensive. They mostly eschewed masks, and have been known to break into anti-Biden chants.
In a button-up shirt, jeans, cowboy boots and baseball cap, the man himself did not seem like much of a bad boy. He first came to attention on The Voice, and he is still a heartthrob. He was friendly, polite to a fault, a little nervous before the concert. He had only been to concerts this big as a participant, he said. He was looking forward to visiting London later in the year. He didn’t seem much like Ozzy Osbourne or Liam Gallagher, more like the kind of man you’d be happy if your daughter brought home. Not an abrasive firestarter, but a young bloke to whom a lot had happened in a short space of time, and who was doing his best to adjust.
I asked Wallen how he was feeling about crossing the Atlantic. “I’m excited, man, I’ve never been to Europe at all, never done nothing like that,” he said, in a friendly drawl. Not bad, starting at the O2, I added. “Nah, it’s alright!” he said.
The crowd – mostly white, but not exclusively so – sang every word gleefully. One man told me that he, like Wallen, was from Norand had travelled to Houston for the show. “There’s not a lot of people from northern Tennessee, so he’s kind of a hero to us,” he explained. After the show Wallen was whisked off to a waiting plane to fly home to Nashville, where he likes to hunt, shoot and hang out with his son.
Wallen was born in 1993, the son of Tommy and Lesli Wallen, in Sneedville, Tennessee. His father was a pastor, his mother a school teacher. Wallen had been a promising high school baseball player before his career was curtailed by injury. Musically he was raised on rock and hip-hop as much as country, he has said that when he started singing, it just “came out country”. After appearing on The Voice in 2014, he signed to Big Loud in 2016 and released his debut album, If I Know Me, in 2018. It went to number 1 in the album charts. So did his follow up, Dangerous, released in 2021, which was the first album since Whitney Houston’s Whitney to spend 10 weeks at number 1.
Our meet and greet seemed to have gone as well as it could have. A month or so later we met again at the O2 arena in Greenwich. His show had been just as raucously received there as it was in Texas. The crowd was noticeable for its lack of London RP voices: instead there were plenty of Scots, Welsh and Essex accents. I wonder if country music in the UK, in a similar way to the US, is an outlet for people who feel marginalised by some of the mainstream culture.
Backstage, I met Morgan’s mother and sister. Like him, they beamed southern charm, wondering – like visitors from the US before them – if the Cotswolds was a sensible destination for a day trip. Morgan had been enjoying the freedom of walking around without being recognised, something that has been impossible for him in the US for years.
Again, we seemed to be inching towards the promised interview. A few days after the O2 we met for a third time at Abbey Road studios, where Wallen recorded a live session, which included a cover of a Nothing But Thieves song, Graveyard Whistling. It sounded good, I said. “Did it,” he asked? “I don’t really like to listen back afterwards.” Once the session was over, he rushed off again. I later read that later that night he was spotted leaving Chiltern Firehouse, the celebrity haunt in Marylebone, with Josie Canseco, daughter of the famous baseball player Jose Canseco. The proposed chat was pushed back again: perhaps we could meet before his headline gig at British Summer Time? Surely that would be the perfect moment to introduce him.
In early April, it still looked like it might happen. Then on April 8, another news story appeared. The night before, Wallen had been arrested after allegedly throwing a chair off the roof of a six-floor honky-tonk bar on Broadway in Nashville, where it had landed not far from two police officers. Wallen was charged with disorderly conduct and reckless endangerment. The Daily Mail reported that Wallen was reacting to the news that his ex-fiancée KT Smith had married her new partner. Later that month, he released a statement saying he was “not proud” of his behaviour.
It was another incident that any interviewer would have to ask him about. My slim hope was that if Wallen was going to have to address his arrest sooner or later, it might as well be to a British journalist, away from the glare of the American press. I was wrong. There was nothing worth doing. The interview was off.
Morgan Wallen is emblematic of the new power dynamic in music. The internet has disintermediated the artist and their fanbase. In the past, a country artist hoping to break Europe would submit to be interviewed by the local press. Previous behaviour – racial slurs, arrests, violence – would be fair game. Wallen has no need. When your first gig in Britain is the O2 and your second is Hyde Park, word is obviously getting out regardless. His fans can stream his songs all they like. They are free not to mind about his scandals. Wallen has obviously decided to let the music, sales and tickets do the talking.
It is a shame Wallen has put the walls up, because he is a more interesting artist than the cartoonish tabloid persona implies. Racism is inexcusable. But Wallen is hardly the first young person to do something regrettable on a night out, let alone one living in the 24/7 surveillance state of modern celebrity. In speaking to such an enormous part of America, his music deserves proper thought and scrutiny.
Country music is arguably the dominant genre in pop music. Taylor Swift’s origins are country; Beyonce’s latest album is country. Countless rappers have made crossover records. Nobody has a better sense than Wallen of how country can be blended with rock and hip hop. By the end of this year, Donald Trump is likely to have been elected president once more. Country is the music of the red states. They have the upper hand again, and they listen to Morgan Wallen.
