A Thousand Horses
London 229 The Venue
Country rockers bring a lil’ piece of Nashville to the capital, and attempt to answer big questions at their album release show.
You could probably write a PhD about the average British rock fan’s difficult relationship with music from the American South. Sometimes it seems that the more closely we identify with heartland, denim-’n’-leather rock, the less likely we are to enjoy the unfiltered country sounds we associate with Nashville. It’s as if the only way we can truly enjoy Southern music is when we hear our own influence reflected back at us. We like The Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Blackberry Smoke because we can hear Led Zeppelin’s ambition and bombast in their sound. We like The Black Crowes because they hold up a mirror to the Stones and The Faces. It’s definitely a thing.
On the other side of the Atlantic they have their own country conundrum. Blackberry Smoke are a band as capable of playing pure country as country rock, but Charlie Starr will tell you how unwilling the Nashville cognoscenti is to embrace them. On the right side of the tracks (as far as said cognescenti is concerned) are Midland, a country act not a million miles from the bands we’ve mentioned, but whose schtick is more traditional: truck stops, beer and lonely hearts. It means they don’t pull a UK rock crowd, but they can play the O2 as part of the annual C2C hoedown, where hen parties in pink stetsons sing Rhinestone Cowboy and line dancing is de rigueur.
Which is all a roundabout way of trying to figure out where A Thousand Horses fit. Their intro tape tells you where they want to fit: it’s AC/DC’s Are You Ready followed by Thin Lizzy’s The Boys Are Back In Town. As far as signals of intent go it’s pretty transparent, and the opening First Time, with a riff from somewhere in the Street Fighting Man ballpark, suggests that they are indeed here to rock. They’re surprisingly ragged – for much of the first half of the set, guitarist Bill Satcher is plagued by various electronic buzzes – but in a Crazy Horse way, where it’s not sloppy but feels like it wouldn’t take much to tip over into chaos. New songs Broken Heartland and Drinking Song up the cliché quotient, and Tennessee Whiskey takes it further, but they’re all good – hang around in Nashville long enough, and you either get good or go home – and they’ve got that country gift for rhymes that sound much better in song than they read on paper, coupling ‘Tennessee Whiskey’ with ‘Did you miss me?’. “We just made a fucking record like a band’s supposed to do,” proclaims singer Michael Hobby, talking about their upcoming record, recorded in Nashville (natch) with Dave Cobb (natch). Livin’ My Best Life, the first single, is as slick as engine oil, and tips a hat to Skynyrd with the line: ‘I’ve been breaking in the jukebox with a little Curtis Loew’. Preachin’ To The Choir prompts the first serious arms-a-waving from the audience, while another newbie, Define Me shows the band’s tender side. Burn Like Willie could be Big & Rich, and a thudding My Time’s Comin’ is enlivened when Satcher somehow manages to tangle his guitar lead in his tuning pegs.
The band’s enormo-hit (20 million YouTube views and counting) Smoke kicks off the encores, with Hobby’s reedy southern drawl soundtracking an audience now fully committed to the on-stage action. Yet we’re no closer to answering the questions: Are they country? Are they rock? Does it matter, when everyone’s having such a good time? Probably not.