SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Country music has long been an influence on indie rock - think Wilco. Well, a new wave of indie rockers is, once again, turning to the banjo and the pedal steel. And as NPR's Danny Hensel reports, it includes British bands.
(SOUNDBITE OF BROWN HORSE SONG, "WRECK")
DANNY HENSEL, BYLINE: The band Brown Horse is from Norwich, in the rural eastern part of England. Patrick Turner and three other musicians began as a quartet playing traditional British folk music before the pandemic.
PATRICK TURNER: Coming out of the lockdown, we were suddenly going to a bunch of shows again. We caught Drive-By Truckers and Wilco playing at festivals, and we were like, maybe we should kind of plug in.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WRECK")
BROWN HORSE: (Singing) Driving up the country, take another look around.
HENSEL: Finding your voice when you're a Brit who's into country music can be tricky.
TURNER: I've always thought it'll be so great to, like, sound like one of these old country bands that I love. But I think I'm not going to go and write about, like, being in America or whatever.
HENSEL: So Patrick Turner writes songs inspired by the landscape surrounding Norwich.
TURNER: On this most recent tour, I kind of foreground one of the songs on the new album, "Wreck," by kind of saying imagine a kind of really cold, wet Louisiana with medieval churches sprinkled all over the landscape.
HENSEL: Brown Horse isn't alone. Other rising bands in the U.K. are drawing on Americana, like Little Grandad, Wyatt and Vegas Water Taxi.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BRAT SUMMER")
VEGAS WATER TAXI: (Singing) Daddy's where she goes when she's feeling low.
HENSEL: Vegas Water Taxi is led by Ben Hambro, who fell in love with the earnestness of American country.
BEN HAMBRO: As someone from a very, very small island, that densely populated island, there's a real sense of wonder when I listen to any American artist about just space and distance. And there's a real romanticism to that that I find very, very compelling.
(SOUNDBITE OF VEGAS WATER TAXI SONG, "BRAT SUMMER")
HENSEL: They're based in London, and their album this year features songs with cheeky, urbane lyrics about Ozempic in "Brat Summer."
HAMBRO: I find life endlessly and tragically hilarious. And I think these songs are a way of processing the world that we now live in.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BRAT SUMMER")
VEGAS WATER TAXI: (Singing) Joey and the boys cutting through the noise. Fill my pockets...
HENSEL: It's not so easy being a British country band. For one, Hambro says, try finding someone in the U.K. to play the pedal steel guitar.
HAMBRO: There's probably about two people who play pedal steel in London - or in the U.K., anyway. And I think I found 50% of them (laughter).
HENSEL: And Patrick Turner of Brown Horse jokes that the genre is a hard sell to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.
TURNER: On paper, what we do, I think I'd be the first person to say that that sounds (laughter) not great. But then you kind of see the show, and you're like, oh, actually, this kind of rocks, and the songs are good.
HENSEL: It might seem strange to hear British bands reinterpret country music, but there's a long history.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DEAD FLOWERS")
THE ROLLING STONES: (Singing) Well, when you're sitting there in your silk upholstered chair.
STEVEN HYDEN: I think the greatest example of a British band playing country is The Rolling Stones.
HENSEL: Steven Hyden is a music critic out of the Twin Cities who's a fan of alt country and hosts the "Indiecast" podcast.
HYDEN: And when you hear songs like "Wild Horses" and "Dead Flowers," you, on one hand, hear the scholarship that Keith Richards did with country music. But you also hear the irreverence that Mick Jagger brings, where he's often putting on this, like, mock Southern accent.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DEAD FLOWERS")
THE ROLLING STONES: (Singing) Send me dead flowers on my wedding, and I won't forget to put roses on your grave.
HENSEL: The Beatles and The Kinks also released country records, as did Elton John and The Mekons. Hyden says today's bands are a sort of back-to-the-land movement - songs that reject the sounds of the last decade.
HYDEN: There was this era of post-punk music coming out of England and Europe, more broadly, that was very European-sounding and very complicated that I think it did lead to this next generation of bands that were reacting against that, in the same way that a lot of the country rock bands of the '60s were reacting against the acid rock bands of the day.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WISTERIA VINE")
BROWN HORSE: (Singing) Burnt myself on the hot iron. I went running...
HENSEL: Brown Horse just wrapped up a tour of the U.S., and Hambro hopes to bring Vegas Water Taxi stateside soon. Though he worries that, just as British audiences don't get the music, American audiences won't get the lyrics.
Danny Hensel, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WISTERIA VINE")
BROWN HORSE: (Singing) Bored half to death in assembly. I dreamed the classroom was empty. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.