Singer Kevin McGuire speaks about the growing country scene in Glasgow at Maggie’s Rock ‘n’ Rodeo in Trongate. The bar, formerly Maggie May’s, recently underwent an entire renovation.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 Yeah, that's a difficult question. Cut that. I'm Kevin McGuire, I'm a country pop artist
00:10 from Glasgow. Well, I mean, I've been a country pop artist for a wee while now in Glasgow.
00:14 I've been trying to hammer country music for a good number of years now and yeah, it just
00:20 seems to be taking off. We've stuck with it. I don't know where this influx has come from.
00:24 I know we've had a lot of success with Wagging Wheel that I've done with George Bowie, but
00:28 this is really, really cool to see. It's great to see that people are finally getting involved
00:31 in country music, which I think has been like a sleeping giant in Glasgow maybe and in Scotland
00:35 in particular. But yeah, it just seems to be going boom and we're so happy to be a part
00:40 of it. I wasn't really brought up around country music. I was brought up around good music.
00:44 My parents had a great taste in music, but in terms of the country side of things, I
00:48 just, during school and stuff like that, I would always come home and I would, I just
00:53 got into country songwriting and the sonics of the sort of traditional instruments and
00:57 I would come home from school and I would like Google the top sort of country songs
01:01 in America and I would download them all and I would sit with my headphones on and just
01:05 listen to them myself. I didn't know anyone else that liked country music, so it kinda,
01:09 it let me feel like it was like my own little world that I was in, away from everybody else.
01:13 It kinda helped me shut things off, so it just grew from that. Started songwriting,
01:18 started playing guitar and it's been ever since. Listen, I think with any genre of music,
01:23 there are always fans of it in the place that you come from. In Scotland and in Glasgow
01:28 in particular, it's been a wee bit of a struggle. Over the last sort of 12 months, we've been
01:33 breaking down big barriers with Waggon Wheel and seeing the response to that, which has
01:37 really let us know that there is an audience here for country music. Even for so many years,
01:42 it seemed like maybe it was looked at a little bit differently or looked at as if it was
01:45 uncool. It certainly isn't now, so we're happy to be a part of this wave and it's only gonna
01:50 get bigger. Listen, we're so happy that there's someone like this in Glasgow now. There's
01:55 been a talk of more places taking this influence and opening up and bringing the country aspect
02:00 and I think it's a bit of fun for everybody as well, whether you like country music with
02:04 a passion or whether you just want a good night out and a chance to kinda delve into
02:09 a different side of things that you would normally do, a little bit of a different culture,
02:15 then it's just for everybody and there's sad songs, there's happy songs, there's line dancing
02:20 songs and hopefully this is the start of many in Glasgow. So Best Friends Since You Came
02:25 Out last Friday, it is, well we've all been loved and we've all been lost and we've all
02:30 been left, so it's a little bit of that kind of story. It's a really southern Nashville
02:36 sounding record and it just kinda tells the story of somebody that you thought was everything
02:41 to you and it turns out that they're not. It turns out that they are, you've uncovered
02:46 the mask and the times that you thought they'd be there for you, they're not there. So it's
02:50 just that story and apart from that it's up to other people to make up their mind about
02:54 the rest of the songs. The great thing about songwriting is and the reason I think I fell
02:58 in love with country, I fell in love with country music so much is that songwriting
03:02 is universal and it's so relatable so everyone goes through heartache, everyone's been loved,
03:08 everyone's lost somebody in their lifetime so it doesn't really matter what genre that
03:11 is I just choose to write in the way that country music is. I love the chords, I love
03:18 the lyrics, I love the lifestyle of it as well. And in terms of particular songs, I
03:23 mean Best Friends Since You, my new single, we did that slightly differently to the way
03:29 we'd normally write a song. Sometimes I'll start with the lyrics and I'll have the chords
03:32 straight away and then I'll write, whereas this time we knew that we wanted a kind of
03:36 upbeat record so the production came a little bit earlier and then I picked the topic that
03:41 I wanted to write about, the first couple of lines just came so really country music
03:46 is all about the songwriting, it's all about having a good time or crying your eyes out
03:50 and I think that's why it resonates so much with people across the world.