In a royal park more used to the horses of the Household Cavalry, the rodeo came to town. Tennessee-born singer-songwriter Morgan Wallen was topping the bill at BST Hyde Park, the annual, credit card-sponsored run of festival-scale concerts, making this express American phenomenon with 44m monthly Spotify listeners the first country act to headline.
On election night in the UK – also, handily, the 4th 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 both a mullet and 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-country stalwart, Eric Church. Only in Nashville, etc.
That rep, though, has only deepened the love for him in red-state America – and beyond. Wallen gives good ol’ boy, don’t-tread-on-me energy. Combined with what is fundamentally a route-one, OG Nashville sound and plenty songs about good-time cowboys and heart-breaking cowgirls, it makes for an arena-scale entertainer radiating relatable, happy-hour, more-shots-all-round vibes.
All of which only adds to the sizzle around the star, backed by his “boys”, a six-piece band, five of them guitarists, all head-to-toe in black and sporting directional haircuts. Wallen entered the building with what his set list calls the Elvis Walk, his rock star rhythmic strut from dressing room to front-of-house beamed on to giant screens. Then he was straight onstage and straight off down the ego ramp, a roar from the audience greeting semi-rapped barroom singalong “Ain’t That Some”, amplified by an overture of lasers and pyros.
The sense that this was cutting-edge country was underpinned by the trap rhythms and insistent, hornet buzz guitar riff of “I Wrote the Book”. At heart, though, Wallen is a traditionalist mainlining the genre’s foundational tropes.
The elegiac twang of “’98 Braves” is lost-love-meets-sports, based round the Atlanta Braves’ pipped-at-the-post 1998 baseball season. There were middle-of-the-road laments (“7 Summers” and “Sand in My Boots”, the latter a piano-ballad delivered from a b-stage in the middle of the crowd) and drinking songs galore (“Chasin’ You”, “You Proof”, “This Bar”).
The songwriting and the atmosphere, though, stepped up for a hoedown showdown. The honky-tonk funk of set-closer “Whiskey Glasses” is a modern genre classic. First encore “Thinkin’ Bout Me” was a low-slung boogie, “Last Night” a lusty, boozy singalong. Then, “The Way I Talk”, his 2016 first single, ended the night with a volley of dirty, grungy riffs and a fusillade of Independence Day fireworks.
Those, like the repeated chants of “USA! USA! USA!”, might have been inevitable, but so is Morgan Wallen’s continued ascent. We ain’t seen nothing yet.