Nathan Carter: Delighted that the Wagon Wheel is rolling again

Like many musicians, the country star didn't have a happy lockdown, so is thrilled to be playing a series of Irish gigs in the coming days

Tue, 26 Oct, 2021 - 10:50

Ed Power

In 2014 country star Nathan Carter was booked to play five nights at Croke Park, to a combined audience of close to half a million. The gigs didn’t work out in the end, and seven years later he seems faintly traumatised by the affair. Not because he missed out on the residency of a lifetime. But because he was denied a chance to see the headliner for whom he was due to open: Garth Brooks.

“I was more disappointed I didn’t get to see him than that I didn’t get to support him,” says Liverpool-raised, Northern Ireland-based Carter (31). “I’ve been a fan since I was a kid.”

Brooks is finally expected to conquer Croker next year – touch wood and barring unforeseen developments. For Carter, the opportunity to see his icon will be one to savour. Brooks was one of the artists who made him want to pick up a guitar and sing country music. Where other kids grew up obsessed with superheroes, he came of age humming the melody to Friends In Low Places.

“I used to have the VHS tape of him coming in over the arena flying on strings,” he says. “To me, this was like Superman and a country singer rolled into it. It was just literally amazing. If he comes back it would be a gold ticket. Whether or not I got to support him doesn’t matter, I just want to see the man in concert.”

In the meantime, there is the not-so-small matter of Carter returning to the bread and butter of live music. He plays Cork Opera House on Thursday, October 28, having recently starting performing again in the UK. After a long, tough lockdown largely passed in his house in Co Fermanagh, the relief in his voice is clear.

“I didn’t get on too well,” he says of the great deep freeze through which we’ve all lived. “I’m not used to doing nothing. I have to be up in the morning, I have to have a plan, I have to be busy during the day. At the start of the lockdown, there were days I didn’t get up. I had nothing to get up for.”

His first performance since the start of the pandemic was at Eden Court Theatre in Inverness in Scotland in late September. He played four sold-out evenings. By the end he felt he was getting back into the swing. The first night, however, was “very ropey”.

“I used to talk in between songs,” he says. “I used to have stories, anecdotes and stuff to link each song. And I couldn’t remember any of them. It was the same with remembering lyrics and with notes I haven’t really sang in a long time. It takes a while to get back into it. Luckily we had done a couple of rehearsals. Like an athlete, you’re not going to run a marathon straight away.”

Carter is a hugely popular in the UK and the Continent and has a big fanbase in the United States. Yet in a way he is a success story only Ireland could produce. Born in Liverpool to a family with roots in Newry, he started playing traditional music as a teenager before moving on to country rock. He left school at age 17 to perform full time. And until the pandemic he’d barely stopped.

Driven by a powerful work ethic, he would deliver more than 100 concerts every year and was already building a fanbase within the Irish country music scene when he released his version of Old Crow Medicine Show’s Wagon Wheel in June 2012. It would go on to spend 52 weeks in the Irish single charts. He obviously owes the song a lot. Still, Carter believes that by that point he was already breaking through.

“Even before Wagon Wheel, we were selling out little theatres and dance halls. A lot of younger people were getting into the music. It was just through extensive gigging, rather than major radio play or television. My first break was when I released Wagon Wheel and was on the Late Late. But before that it was about touring the old fashioned way.”

Carter has been based in Ireland full-time since 2009. And yet he still sounds as if he’s just off the ferry from Liverpool. “It’s funny – whenever I go home, everyone says I’ve an Irish accent. And here people say, ‘he’s Liverpool’. I feel like I’m in the middle. I’ve made Ireland my home for the past 12 years and I don’t see that changing any time soon I love the place, I love the people, I love the music.”