January 18th: Kentucky Crusade - Tyler Childers at Manchester Academy 2

Back on the gig wagon after a short break over the Christmas and the New Year period with the first reflection on live music for the 2020CMS project. While the majority of gigs attended is within the locality of the West Midlands, taking a road trip is not an uncommon practice and something that has frequently occurred in January when a wealth of top notch American artists visit our shores for invited events. The majority of these artists tend to miss out the midlands region at this time of year often necessitating the aforementioned road trip where practical. This year the perfect opportunity occurred when a double bill of Tyler Childers and The Local Honeys was announced for Manchester on a Saturday night, thus making travel relatively feasible. 


The ultimate link between these two acts is their Kentucky homeland as evidenced at the end of this show when Childers paid tribute to the Honey's Montana's father who lived in close proximity when growing up. News of the two acts teaming up for UK shows was first heard when seeing The Local Honeys play the Kitchen Garden in Birmingham towards the end of last year. That evening proved a fantastic gig and it was interesting to see how the Appalachian roots acoustic music of the duo would fare in a totally different setting. 

So as the lights went down at the stroke of 8 in a sold out 950 capacity Manchester Academy 2 venue, Linda Jean and Montana set about doing what they do best. A buzzing Saturday night standing crowd is going to be different to playing to 50 in the pin drop intimate surroundings of the Kitchen Garden, but these two Kentuckians did a marvellous job of keeping the audience engaged with a neat selection of informative chat and prime playing.

Unlike The Local Honeys, this was the first time seeing Tyler Childers live, although to be fair his UK dates have been relatively limited as the star of this Kentuckian as soared to levels far above most artists of his country music persuasion. To this extent I was mildly surprised at the turn out and strong rapport the audience had for him. His popularity had been clearly underestimated and in turn he repaid this faith by turning in a captivating performance adeptly supported by a five-piece band. 

Although the sound did stray from pure country into other Americana directions especially soul and rock in places, Childers uses the most compelling of southern vocals to own a transfixed zone and keep a switched on audience in his loop. In a rather unique strategy, he decided to end the ninety minute set with three solo acoustic songs and an encore-free goodnight which hit the right spot on a night where you felt a country artist from the right side of the tracks possessed huge crossover potential. 

£15 a ticket was a great steal for this show (ok any gig road trip has additional costs), but you would have to go a long way find a classier two hours of music than our two visitors from Kentucky delivered this evening. Manchester is not my usual gig stomping ground for the obvious reasons, but the dozen or so times I've made the trip up in the last ten years has yielded some great shows. Tyler Childers and The Local Honeys at the Academy 2 in January 2020 is up there with the best, proving one successful Kentucky crusade. 

Live music is going to jostle gamely with the other activities for 2020CMS, but superb nights like this has set the year on a very promising path.