Tag: nick shoulders

Tuesday 8th July 2025

The Attic, Leeds, England

&

Thursday 10th July 2025

Night & Day Café, Manchester, England

It’s been just under three years since Nick Shoulders last brought his unique brand of catchy country-folk whistling, warbling and yodelling to the UK. Back then, after an excellent set in a packed-out pub in Bolton, supported only by his bass player Grant D’Aubin, I remarked that I hoped the next time he came to these shores he’d have become big enough to justify bringing the whole band. If the crowd isn’t twice as large next time round, I wrote, then there’s no justice in the world.

Fast-forward a few years and the crowd is indeed bigger, if not by an order of magnitude. I attend both the Leeds and Manchester gigs on Nick’s new ‘Pond Hopper’ tour – in my mind, a Barbenheimer-type event I dub ‘Two Shoulders’ – and both sell out. Both teem with Shoulderheads like myself, fans who sing along to ‘Rather Low’, yodel to ‘Too Old to Dream’ and ‘Snakes and Waterfalls’, and shout back during ‘After Hours’.

The band, however, has broken up. Nick announced the dissolution of the Okay Crawdad earlier this year, and it means that when he takes the stage in the North of England it’s not with his distinctive rhythm section of Grant D’Aubin and drummer Cheech Moosekian, but alone. In Leeds he comes out to cheers and immediately retreats back into the green room. “It’s not because I was scared,” he explains later, three songs into his set. “At least, not only because I was scared,” he laughs. “It’s because I have some tea here and I don’t have a cup. So I’m using this candle-holder.”

The show must go on: cup or no cup, band or no band. And remarkably, Nick Shoulders solo sounds bigger than ever. In November 2022, when I heard him in that pub in Bolton, I noted how he could get a goodly sound out of his acoustic guitar, his powerful strumming almost a signature sound. This singing, whistling, yodelling man was and is a singular force of nature. And now, in July 2025, the de facto one-man-band has become a de jure one. When he takes the stage he sits on a stool in a white vest and Crocs, behind two kick-drums. He switches between a Harmony Atomic electric guitar and a banjo, depending on the song. Along with his charming stage patter – “I am an obnoxious yapper,” he tells Leeds – he yodels and whistles and sings. When he opens with ‘Booger County Blues’ on both nights, moving straight into ‘Blue Endless Highway’, it’s a rocking full-band sound, an impressive display of musicianship from the solo Arkansan.

But while there are a great many similarities between the two nights, there are also a number of differences. The Leeds gig is pretty much perfect, with The Attic one of the best small venues I have attended. It’s endearingly rudimentary, converted from a disused commercial garage – its entrance, a wicket door cut into the side of a large roller shutter and marked by a ‘Mind Your Step’ warning sign, betrays these origins. With the stage along one bare brick wall, a bar in one corner and merch in the other, it gives the aura of a rustic barn-dance in the bright evening’s July heat. The only thing needed to complete the effect would be if hay were strewn across the bare concrete floor where tonight’s Shoulderheads will congregate.

The contrast to Manchester’s Night and Day Café is, unfortunately, night and day. If the Leeds venue had a warning sign at its entrance, Manchester almost deserved one. The venue itself is mostly fine; long and thin like a shotgun house, you enter to the bar and make your way to the far end where the stage is set. It’s my first visit to the venue and I’m unprepared for how narrow the all-standing area is. The only Shoulders seen by many tonight – including myself – will be those of the people stood in front of them, and I imagine only the first couple of rows of people have a good view. Due to his one-man-band kick-drum setup, Nick is seated for the entirety of his set on this tour, which exacerbates the issue, but it only seems a problem in the narrow confines of Manchester, not in Leeds.

The other main difference is, regrettably, the crowd. The Leeds gig draws pretty much a perfect audience: engaged, attentive, and locked in from the very start; quiet and respectful when needed and hollering loudly when Nick’s songs take you there. There’s one drunk who, even early on in the night, is already three sheets to the wind and putting on extra sail, but while he briefly accosts me and a few others, he’s an anomaly that’s easy to shrug off. The Manchester crowd, in contrast, has a sizeable minority of people who are stood around talking loudly into one another’s faces, barely engaging with Nick’s music throughout. Bafflingly, some disengage entirely and retreat to the bar, where they generate a loud and obnoxious pub laughter and chatter that drowns out much of the rare and special music we’ve paid to hear.

I’ve written before about the shame and contempt I feel when I’m in a crowd that contains rude and selfish people like this, particularly in my hometown, and I’ll never be able to fathom how some people decide to show up at a gig just to shout their own conversations loudly over the music, let alone how they feel no apparent shame at ruining it for others. It would frustrate me even more if I hadn’t been to the fantastic Leeds gig first, if this jibber-jabber in Manchester was my only experience of Nick Shoulders live after almost three years of waiting. No doubt there’s many in the Night & Day Café who are there to enjoy themselves and enjoy the music, who find it spoiled by a minority of others. Who knows how long they’ll have to wait before they get another opportunity?

This disparity between the two crowds can be seen in microcosm by how the opening set by Gravedancer is received. The artist known on his passport and to his creditors as Baker McKinney knows how to work a crowd; he works his magic on both nights, but only the denizens of Leeds really engage with his humour and stagecraft. They listen to his anecdotes – including a doozey about accidentally playing a woman’s wake in Sheffield under the band name of, uh, Gravedancer – and laugh quickly and readily. Manchester, in contrast, laughs belatedly and only at the most obvious points of humour; that is, when Baker’s speech isn’t being drowned out completely by the chatter. When he gets serious, singing in ‘The Strongest Stuff’ about needing drink to sleep since coming back from the war, the Manchester crowd is yammering away about God knows what and the Devil cares less.

Despite this, both crowds respond well to the fun of ‘Edolph Twittler’ and ‘Pyramid of Titties’, although the Leeds crowd notch a bonus point on the scoreboard by virtue of the one woman who enthusiastically shouts a request to play the latter – and cheers its bouncing arrival. While Manchester gets three extra songs from Gravedancer, and an interesting anecdote about Nick Shoulders, who “I’d never seen mad”, beating up a man who punched his girlfriend (an anecdote Nick cheerily confirms later), Leeds gets the prize of a warmer and smoother-flowing set.

And speaking of scoreboards, my Two Shoulders adventure means I’m in a position to compare Gravedancer’s playful tally on ‘Tall Tails’. “Shoulders taught me how to pick like this,” Baker says as he pulls the song together on his acoustic guitar. “And after two years, I’ve almost got it.” He makes a game of counting his mistakes when playing it, asserting that if it’s less than ten, he’s doing alright. He reaches five mistakes in Leeds, wobbling almost into a sixth, but has got it down to two by the time he plays it in Manchester. I won’t be able to attend their London gig the following night, but presumably the capital finds itself hosting a hillbilly Hendrix.

“Shoulders makes it look really easy,” Baker says after surviving through the song’s picking style. And he sure does: after the one-man-band tears through ‘Booger County Blues’ and ‘Blue Endless Highway’, he’s tripped up not by playing multiple instruments at once, but by something more mundane. In Leeds, Nick has to stop ‘Hank’s Checkout Line’, the third song, just as he approaches his first whistling solo of the night. “I was given a lozenge earlier and just now realised I can’t whistle with it there,” he laughs.

Three songs into each set and Nick Shoulders is already in full flow, bringing his unique “honkabilly rock-and-roll” sound to a cover of Elvis Presley’s ‘Black Star’ and his original ‘All Bad’. That vivid rockabilly sound brought forth by Nick’s electric guitar is further demonstrated on the crowd-pleasing ‘Ding Dong Daddy’, surpassed only by his more idiosyncratic sounds. Playing the song’s solo with his mouth, our Arkansas yodelissimo begins to mewl like a cat. What genre a miaow solo fits into will hopefully be something musicologists debate long into the night. The crowds love it.

“It’s like Arkansas weather here,” Nick says from the sweltering stage, telling Leeds he’d been expecting drizzle. In Manchester, he turns into a weather nerd, talking about how the cold air-conditioned breeze at his back and the hot breath of the audience is creating an odd – and, it must be said, gross – weather system around him. Despite this convection current of the proletariat, Nick determinedly remains a man of the people. As mentioned earlier, my review from a few years ago noted that there’s no justice in the world if Nick’s crowds aren’t twice as big the next time round. But Nick himself is concerned with much bigger injustices.

He introduces a new song written about the Peasant Revolt of 1381 – his “nerdy song about British history,” he tells Leeds – by talking about his interest in radical takes on history. He notes that we’re all related to ancestors who did “terrible, fucked-up things” to people in the past, a point of view that I’ve personally always slightly bristled at. In no small part because, among other things, it condemns us all by guilt of association for no real benefit.

But, commendably, Nick goes on to say that while we’re related to those people, he’s increasingly trying to embrace the fact that we’re also related to the people who were revolutionary, to those who “fought kings, fought dictators, fought people who imposed oppression on others”. This is a wonderful antidote to political cynicism; to remember that we can look to the best examples of our past and not just feel shamed or intimidated by our worst.

I’ve written recently about my perspective on artists who ‘go political’, something I’m wary of regardless of whether I agree with the politics in question. But Nick Shoulders is an example of it done well, and honestly. There’s no doubting his sincerity or his erudition, and he clearly reads up on what he chooses to speak about, rather than blindly reciting self-satisfying agitprop. And he remains, underneath it all, fun. His new untitled Peasant Revolt song, that he’s only been playing so far on this Pond Hopper Tour, is one he tells Leeds is inspired by ‘England Swings’ by Roger Miller. It’s a charming bop about having “a lot of fun in 1381”.

At this point, the setlists of the two nights diverge for a spell. Appropriately enough, it’s a river where the Two Shoulders fork: Manchester receives a rendition of ‘Miss’ippi’ while Leeds is treated to an exciting glimpse of a new song that Nick calls ‘Tatum Spring’. He says the special guest he’s going to invite on stage later – Jude Brothers, his label-mate at Gar Hole Records – “says I don’t write enough love songs. And I agree. But this is one.” It’s a strong and surprisingly affecting song that references a falling star, and how the wandering singer is going to “put a root down where you are”. Nick says it’s going to be released on a new album on Hallowe’en, and I find myself retroactively agreeing with Gravedancer’s set, where from his Pyramid of Titties he proclaimed that Hallowe’en was a bigger deal than Christmas.

From there, the two nights converge again, with Nick dedicating an exuberant ‘Too Old to Dream’ to the grandma who taught him to sing. He slows it down towards the end to show his vocal prowess – and also bark like a dog. There follows a fine and upbeat rendition of ‘Appreciate’cha’.

Then, another fork: serendipity has meant the afore-mentioned Jude Brothers is in Leeds for a wedding – “among other things,” she qualifies, cryptically – and she joins Nick on stage at The Attic for a duet of the classic folk standard ‘Goodnight Irene’. Her clarion voice harmonises well with Nick’s, and when she takes a verse alone, lustily singing “jump in the river and drown”, it draws roars from the crowd and some emphatic punctuation from Nick’s kick-drum.

“I can only hope my songs last as long,” Nick says after finishing the Leadbelly classic in Leeds. Emphasising the staying power of the old songs, Gravedancer is invited back on stage to harmonise with Nick and Jude on the Ola Belle Reed song ‘I’ve Endured’, while Nick strums his banjo. In Manchester, Nick plays alone.

The next fork in the river is one signposted by the man on stage. Granting the Leeds audience a choice, Nick says “you can choose either a song not meant to be played on banjo, played on banjo, or –”  – there are mass cheers – “hang on, I believe in democracy. Or – I could play an old-timey song”. In the roaring plebiscite that follows, we have an answer.

“Fuck me running, you chose the old-timey option,” Nick laughs. Before heading into his version of ‘Hand Me Down My Walking Cane’, he tunes his banjo and says we in the audience must follow the ‘library rule’ when listening to the sensitive instrument. “Thank you for being so calm and studious and, well, English,” he tells Leeds. Judging by the continued chatter, many in Manchester haven’t heard of the library rule, and regardless a decision there has already been made. “Someone on Facebook asked that I play this,” Nick says to Manchester, before entering a charming banjo-pluckin’ version of ‘Rise When the Rooster Crows’.

It’s the final fork in the road. From here on out, the setlists in the two cities re-align. Nick remarks how he still gets a kick out of how many people respond to, and sing back to him, the political lyrics of ‘Bound and Determined’, his next song. He prefaces the song with a political introduction: Manchester, the ‘Cottonopolis’ of the Industrial Revolution, is reminded of its historical interdependence with the Southern trades of the American empire, while Leeds is told that until 1828 only white property-owners in America were allowed to vote, and so all their laws and precedents stem from that time. When he says he hopes there is movement politically to unpick historic injustices, it is this already-established cartel of laws and precedents which he wishes to go.

Startlingly, Nick then tells Leeds that he hopes to “live in a world after America”. Perhaps influenced by recent events in American politics, it is nevertheless a disappointing claim. Nick praises England and the countries he has visited in Europe on tour for being so well put together, but it’s worth noting that while he has said 1828 was the year the vote was extended to males without property in America, in Britain the year was 1918 – the end of the First World War – when the same right was extended, with residual restrictions removed by 1928. One hundred years after America. Some of the songs Nick has sung tonight are older than universal suffrage in England. And while he may be tired of a land of “fucking F-150s” – “that’s a truck,” he clarifies – it shows there are some ways in which America has genuinely led, or at least shone a light, and for all its faults we should be reluctant to let it pass from this world.

I much preferred Bruce Springsteen’s stance on America and its ideals when he played Manchester a couple of months ago, and while this is not meant as a criticism of Nick’s own perspective, it is an observation on how an artist can rightly respond to political disillusionment with greater art. Nick Shoulders is an admirable artist, and it would be a shame to see this friendly and hopeful soul on a path to political nihilism, however benign. Punk rebellion is all well and good, but it often falls into the trap of seeing rebellion, or a rejection of societal norms, as good in and of itself, or even as the end goal. But to paraphrase what another remarkable songwriter, Leonard Cohen, once wrote, those who provide the bonfire should also provide the piss. A serious rebel must provide a real alternative. And a punk worldview that rejects the centuries-long American experiment because of its latest political anomalies might provide catharsis but also encourages complacency. People who can’t pay attention to one of Nick’s songs for more than thirty seconds before blurting drunken talk into the face of the person next to them are unlikely to change the world, let alone for the better, while concertgoers who can’t keep their own vapid conversations low in a room of live music are unlikely to be truly altruistic socialists at heart. A stance and worldview that welcomes such people so long as they whoop and holler when Trump is invited to go fuck himself is not likely to be one that ends up providing remedy to any of the world’s problems. Songs like these, as Nick Shoulders has shown in both Leeds and Manchester, can well catch fire and resonate with people. But this is why the note of caution needs to be struck. An artist needs to continually reflect on their worldview to ensure they are on the right path, that the resonance they provide remains a valuable one.

As though in rebuttal of the criticisms I now pen, the Manchester audience manages to sort itself out for the final stretch of songs, shouting back as lustily as Leeds does for the rowdy crowd-participation song ‘After Hours’, and yodelling through ‘Snakes and Waterfalls’. Leeds still holds the crown, singing a whole verse of ‘Snakes and Waterfalls’ by itself. “That is sick,” Nick remarks, and he breaks out his array of bird whistles, from whippoorwill to cardinal.

The whippoorwill’s call is often said to signal impending death, and while nothing so extreme happens tonight, it does announce we are approaching the end of the set. Before we end, there’s a version of ‘Rather Low’ that on both nights shows Nick Shoulders at his best: catchy, energetic and fun, filled with whistle soloes and imitations of trumpets and matched by fine music, clever lyrics and a dancing crowd.

As Nick Shoulders stands for the first time tonight and gets up to leave, Leeds immediately roars for an encore. It fixes him in place and he stays on stage. “Thank you for not making me do the adult peekaboo,” he says.

An applauding Manchester roars for the same, and both crowds are treated to Nick’s a cappella single ‘Apocalypse Never’. To Manchester’s credit, it is as silently respectful as Leeds when Nick weaves his solitary spell. You can hear a pin drop in both cities, but Leeds inadvertently breaks its studiously adhered-to ‘library rule’ when a shutter near the bar comes crashing down, drawing a wry smile from Nick.

“Like the waters we will rise,” both crowds sing, but it sounds more special in Leeds because of what the crowd has given the artist in return. While there’s been plenty of avid Shoulderheads in Manchester, there’s also been a few bad apples who’ve tarnished our night. Leeds, the old Yorkshire enemy, has shown us how it’s to be done, how a fine and engaging crowd can make or break a night. In The Attic, ‘Apocalypse Never’ resounds as something truly great and hopeful and inspiring. You can believe the world will change. As he leaves the stage, Nick Shoulders grins and raises his candle-holder of tea, crowning a perfect set.

Setlist (Leeds):

(all songs written by Nick Shoulders, unless noted)

1. Booger County Blues (from Home on the Rage)
2. Blue Endless Highway (J.R. Cheatham) (from All Bad)
3. Hank’s Checkout Line (from Okay, Crawdad)
4. Black Star (Sid Wayne/Sherman Edwards) (from Lonely Like Me)
5. All Bad (from All Bad)
6. Ding Dong Daddy (Traditional) (from Okay, Crawdad)
7. Peasant Revolt (Lot of Fun in 1381)* (unreleased)
8. Tatum Spring* (unreleased)
9. Too Old to Dream (from Okay, Crawdad)
10. Appreciate’cha (from All Bad)
11. Goodnight Irene (Huddie Ledbetter) (unreleased)
12. I’ve Endured (Ola Belle Reed) (unreleased)
13. Hand Me Down My Walking Cane (James Bland) (unreleased)
14. Bound and Determined (from Okay, Crawdad)
15. After Hours (from Lonely Like Me)
16. Snakes and Waterfalls (from Lonely Like Me)
17. Rather Low (from Okay, Crawdad)
18. Encore: Apocalypse Never (single)

Setlist (Manchester):

(all songs written by Nick Shoulders, unless noted)

1. Booger County Blues (from Home on the Rage)
2. Blue Endless Highway (J.R. Cheatham) (from All Bad)
3. Hank’s Checkout Line (from Okay, Crawdad)
4. Black Star (Sid Wayne/Sherman Edwards) (from Lonely Like Me)
5. All Bad (from All Bad)
6. Ding Dong Daddy (Traditional) (from Okay, Crawdad)
7. Peasant Revolt (Lot of Fun in 1381)* (unreleased)
8. Miss’ippi (from Okay, Crawdad)
9. Too Old to Dream (from Okay, Crawdad)
10. Appreciate’cha (from All Bad)
11. I’ve Endured (Ola Belle Reed) (unreleased)
12. Rise When the Rooster Crows (from Home on the Rage)
13. Bound and Determined (from Okay, Crawdad)
14. After Hours (from Lonely Like Me)
15. Snakes and Waterfalls (from Lonely Like Me)
16. Rather Low (from Okay, Crawdad)
17. Encore: Apocalypse Never (single)

* track titles unconfirmed

My other concert reviews can be found here.

My fiction writing can be found here.

Sunday 6th November 2022

The York, Bolton, England

rakehelly – ˈrāk-ˌhe-lē

adj. – wild, dissolute, raucous

It’s a dark, cold Sunday evening and, like many people across England tonight, I’m standing in a pub drinking pilsner and contemplating the unhappy thought of having to go to work on Monday morning. But unlike the rest of the country, save the fifty or so people who gradually fill The York in Bolton over the next half an hour, I have something to look forward to before the weekly grind begins again. In this small, unassuming pub, with a cold wind blowing through the open door, I’m waiting for Nick Shoulders to take the stage.

Among my friends and co-workers, I’m known as the country music fan – itself a true oddity in England – and for weeks I’ve delighted in telling them that I’m going to this gig. Not in the vain hope that they’ll be turned on to the catchy melodies and intelligent lyrics of this great artist – all evidence to the contrary, country music is little more than line-dancing and ‘Cotton Eye Joe’ to them – but because I enjoy the look of confusion on their faces. “I’m going to see a guy with a mullet who yodels and makes trumpet sounds with his mouth,” I say, and they look at me as if I’ve recited a haiku in Yiddish. “Well, enjoy,” they reply, as they back away slowly and wonder whether to inform H.R. about my imminent mental breakdown.

My joy in seeing them trying to process this is surpassed only by my delight at being here myself tonight. I’ve been to two excellent gigs in recent months – Sierra Ferrell’s bewitching show in June and Charley Crockett a few days ago on Halloween, but this is the one I’ve been looking forward to the most. Despite my anticipation, I’m also slightly worried. This is a pub, not a dedicated music venue; at least one sad, heartfelt song by Gravedancer will be drowned out by chatter tonight, and there are two blokes loudly discussing Manchester United’s loss to Aston Villa a few hours earlier. Tonight’s musicians will all successfully tap into the energy in the room tonight, but it’s a fragile energy.

Nevertheless, the night has an endearingly non-premium feel to it. Rather than a “backstage”, there’s an area of the main room cordoned off for the musicians – we see Grant D’Aubin, Nick’s bass player, reclining there with an acoustic guitar as the pub begins to fill. When Nick emerges from behind the cordon of amps and merchandise boxes (presumably to go pee), he moves through the crowd to do so.

A tall, bearded man with long hair takes the stage. He strums an acoustic guitar and begins to sing in a heavy-metal growl. At first, I think he’s a roadie gone rogue, as I thought Gravedancer (a.k.a. Baker McKinney, who I’ve seen walking around) was the only support act on this tour. But the metalhead introduces himself as Mike West, a country singer from the Wirral, and he’s the first of tonight’s pleasant surprises. He has the unenviable task of being the support act to the support act, but his enthusiasm proves infectious.

West is the co-founder of Rogue Country (and consequently one of those responsible for bringing the incredible Sierra Ferrell to the north-west back in June), and he says he was only meant to be in the audience tonight, so he’s stoked to be up on the stage. He makes the most of it, delivering an energetic set. His heavy-metal singing (at one point, he mentions with pleasure that the road he took to get here tonight was called the A666) proves surprisingly flexible, and he succeeds in knitting the disparate crowd into a genuine audience. Highlights from his set include his latest single, ‘Mothman’, and a new song called ‘How to Build a Guillotine’. The latter, which West describes as “like if Ernest Tubb had been in the French Revolution”, is particularly creative. It’s currently unreleased, but hopefully not for long: it’s something of an earworm, and I want to hear it again.

At one point, West congratulates the audience. Watching Nick Shoulders live in such a small venue, he says, is something we’ll be able to brag about in years to come. He’s not wrong. It’s been a surprise to me to go to these gigs – Ferrell, Crockett, and now Shoulders – and see large numbers of people singing along to songs that I thought only I knew. The crowds might still be small – as I mentioned earlier, I think tonight’s crowd numbers fifty at most – but that’s more than the 42 who attended the Sex Pistols’ first punk gig in nearby Manchester, eulogised in the film 24 Hour Party People.

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The punk analogy is an appropriate one. The more devoted Shoulderheads will know that Nick started out as the drummer in a punk band, and there’s a rebellious attitude tonight – even the odd protest song – that sees metalheads, hardcore punk rockers and country fans all in the same room, with none seeming out of place. Tonight might not be an epoch-making moment like that Sex Pistols gig, and Shoulders is unlikely to ever push to the front of our culture, yodelling away on The Late, Late Show in an Ed Sullivan moment, but Mike West, in highlighting our bragging rights, has put his finger on something. Even before Nick Shoulders takes the stage, there’s a vibe in the air, a sense of things coming together. Heavy metal, punk, protest and country – the harmony of the revolutionary and the traditional might be just the sound we need in such crazy and divisive times.

Next up is Gravedancer, whose mix of traditional country music and heavy-metal appearance is even more incongruous than that of Mike West. Tattooed, skin-headed and with a beard longer than the A666, it’s startling when Gravedancer runs through a set of tender, emotionally-raw songs picked pensively on an acoustic guitar, including the beautiful self-penned ‘Azalea’. So complete is this effect that when he announces he’d like to sing a traditional English folk song, it receives a quiet and respectful reception from the crowd. I don’t think everyone gets the joke, but I wouldn’t want to live in a world where Arkansas skinheads can’t play ‘Mr. Blobby’ straight-faced as a wistful guitar-pickin’ song.

It is, finally, time for Nick Shoulders to take the stage. He wears a vest and a big fur hat; with his hair hanging down to his eponymous shoulders it looks like he’s wearing a Davy Crockett hat. He’s accompanied by Grant D’Aubin, his bespectacled, moustachioed collaborator from his band the Okay Crawdad, who will provide harmonies and play stand-up bass for the rest of the night.

Nick picks up his acoustic guitar and begins his distinctive powerful strumming. Backed by Grant, he launches into his first number, ‘Lonely Like Me’. It’s one of his earliest released songs and a fan favourite, so naturally the crowd begins to sing along. Nick seems touched by the reception; at multiple points in the night he’ll mention that it’s a trip to come over to the other side of the Atlantic and hear his Arkansas yodelling songs sung back at him.

There’s a lot of positivity in the set, and Nick is not only thankful for his fans but is keen to spread the love: Grant D’Aubin, Gravedancer and Mike West all receive praise from his microphone tonight. At one point, he’ll even urge people to check out his uncle, the late Pat M. Riley, a classic crooner whose music can be found online. The infectious joy in Nick Shoulders’ outlook on life is evident in every whoop, whistle and odd sound; it’s in every catchy hook and yodelled lyric of his music, delivered in that unique high singing voice.

The second song is a cover of a Sixties song by Tom O’Neal, the foot-tapping ‘Blue Endless Highway’. It’s a catchy, up-tempo number with a great bass line and harmonies from Grant. At first, I think it’s an unreleased original that I mentally note as ‘Highway Patrol’ (after the lyric “lookin’ in the rear-view mirror for the highway patrol/The highway patrol”), but a Google search a few days later will correct me. Nick and Grant have combined well on it, and the only reason the crowd haven’t sung along as they have with ‘Lonely Like Me’ is because of its unfamiliarity. If it gets a studio recording, it might well prove another fan favourite.

It’s followed by another recent Nick and Grant collaboration, a cover of Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass’ which they will soon be releasing on a new EP with The Lostines. It has some great harmonising, and the slower swing of its music is remedied by its follow-up, the hyperactive, oddball ‘Ding Dong Daddy’, which sees Nick whistle a solo and make uncanny trumpet sounds with his mouth.

We’re offered a hint of the future with a song that Nick announces will be coming out on his new record next year. He describes ‘All Bad’ as a bit of “toxic positivity for your Sunday” and dedicates it to “everybody in here who is just doing the best to hold the fuck on for dear life”. After three cover songs in a row, ‘All Bad’ is a great reminder of Nick’s growing stable of well-crafted original tunes. Behind the punk-like energy of his music, the oddball whistles and yodelling, and the positivity and personal charm, there’s an artist of serious calibre. After the shout-out to uncle Pat, there’s a rendition of the clever original ‘G for Jesus’, another song characterised by fantastic lyrics.

It’s been a great opening salvo from Nick, but due to the nature of the venue that fragile energy in the crowd remains. The energy is there, but it’s hard to find, and needs a watchful eye when found. Nick admits he’d been worried about singing tonight as he’d caught a cold in the unfamiliar climate – welcome, Nick Shoulders, to the north-west of England in November – but he’s in fine voice regardless. Nevertheless, there remains the danger that the energy might disperse, that entropy might be a factor tonight. Nick Shoulders on stage tonight is not so much rakehelly as rakehelly blue: raucous, but with a slight apprehension. I get a sense tonight that it all might collapse at any moment if the next song doesn’t hit right, or the few dozen people in the crowd move too far apart. The music’s been propulsive, but with a nervous fragility, like a freight train held together by loose bolts.

“There’s a spider hanging on the ceiling!” Nick shouts, laughing excitedly. It’s been less than a week since Halloween, and the pub hasn’t taken its decorations down. Hanging from a ceiling fan directly above the audience, there’s a giant toy spider spinning round and round. Tickled by the sight, it perhaps inspires Nick to launch into ‘Turn on the Dark’, which he introduces as a “haunted house song”. It’s a magnificent number – and tonight’s only representative from Home on the Rage, Nick’s most recent album. As Nick whistles and Grant performs a solo on his bass, the spider whizzes round and round and the crowd’s heads nod up and down.

Not for the first time, I marvel at how much sound can be made on stage by two slight men possessing only a guitar and a stand-up bass. But Nick Shoulders can get a goodly amount of sound out of an acoustic guitar; his powerful strumming has become almost a signature sound. Accompanied by his high and powerful voice, the amplification of these great songs is undeniable, influenza be damned. Hopefully the next time Nick Shoulders tours in the UK he’ll have become big enough to justify bringing the whole band, but even without them he can make plenty of glorious noise. ‘Turn on the Dark’ has banished any nervousness, an act of aural feng shui. The music’s becoming so good that I begin to doubt the fragility was even there at all, and was just a figment of my agoraphobic imagination.

One song that would have benefited from the full band experience is the next number, ‘Too Old to Dream’. The studio version has the most enthusiastic lead guitar since George Harrison on the Beatles’ first album, and Nick’s whistle solo tonight only goes so far to compensate. But it’s still a great song with strong bones, a highlight in a night that is increasingly becoming full of them.

“How many of you are NOT millionaires? Raise your hands,” Nick asks, introducing his next song. He’s mentioned in the past how he feels a connection to the earth back home in Arkansas, and asks if anyone knows about the history of “the fencing-in of the commons”. He gets blank stares from the crowd and responds, “you should look it up, it’s your history, by god”. He’s referring to enclosure, by which access to the free ancestral land of England was gradually whittled away over the centuries.

As a former history student and compulsive Googler, I’m probably the only one among the yeomen and rakehelly vagabonds tonight who’s keen enough to actually look it up, b’god. Even among a harmonious crowd of heavy metal, country and punk enthusiasts, an interest in the legislative history of progressive feudal land appropriation might be a tad ambitious from Nick. Those class battles are so old and obscure, and the landscape of the north-west changed so fundamentally by the Industrial Revolution, that many don’t even know there were battlefields here.

But there’s method in the madness, and Nick’s prompting sets up the next number. Introduced as “an old cowboy ballad that we totally fucked up”, ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ is an old Roy Rogers song that Nick has furnished with his own lyrics and context. It’s something that he’s done before to great effect, with both ‘Rise When the Rooster Crows’ and ‘New Dying Soldier’ (neither of which get an airing tonight), and ‘You Won’t Fence Us In’, Nick’s new hybrid traditional/original, is another success. It’s a credit to his craft and versatility, that something once sung by Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra is not out of place as a protest song sung by an ex-punk rocker in 2022.

This resolute and affirming protest song is followed by one of the best moments of the night. I’ve always thought ‘After Hours’ would be a great bar-room song, particularly that rollicking sing-along ending, and so it proves tonight. As we approach what would traditionally be last orders in this pub tonight in Bolton, Nick leads the crowd in a boisterous rendition of this fan favourite. It’s hard to imagine a song getting a better reception, but then Nick begins the oddly doo-wop-style singing that opens ‘Snakes and Waterfalls’, and the familiar notes get a similar reception.

It’s followed by ‘Bound and Determined’, which Nick says was inspired by the fact he’s always “troubled by authority”, and the song’s an emphatic conclusion to tonight’s protest element (which was kindled by Mike West’s ‘Guillotine’ song and brought to flame by ‘You Won’t Fence Us In’). It’s another great example of Nick’s intelligent and catchy songwriting, and there are at least half a dozen other songs of his that would have received a good reception tonight, if we had time.

It’s time for tonight’s closer, and there’s one song that is unavoidable. Nick Shoulders might die where he stands if he hears ‘Wagon Wheel’ again, but I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of hearing ‘Rather Low’. Nick holds the opening “welllllll” for a long time – his head-cold now well and truly over, no doubt because of adrenaline rather than Lemsip – before launching into his signature song. He encourages the audience to “sing along if you know it” and everyone does know it. He’s saved the best till last, which is quite a thing to say when the set’s been filled with so many catchy numbers that people have been singing along since the opener.

As the crowd cheers and applauds at the end, Nick whoops into the microphone. I’ve previously described Nick Shoulders as seemingly nuttier than a shaken sack of squirrels, and even before a small crowd and nursing a cold on a cold night in England far from home, he’s delivered a propulsive, versatile set filled with whistles, yodels and a big fur hat. Earlier in the night, he introduced a song by saying it was a “mental health check” for us, and at no point had it occurred to me that this was an oddly sane thing to hear from a guy who’d been making trumpet noises with his mouth. Perhaps Gravedancer, recalling the sober reception of the ‘Mr. Blobby’ song, would appreciate how the abnormal and ridiculous has seemed normal among tonight’s crowd of Shoulderheads.

At the end of the night, I go outside and lean against the wall to make a phone call. I notice movement in my peripheral vision; behind me, Nick Shoulders is inside, collecting his jacket and his various pocket shrapnel from the cordoned-off area of the pub. I doubt he’ll remember this show – the smallest on the tour – but Mike West was right: there won’t be many more dates like this in Nick’s future. If the crowd isn’t twice as large next time round, there’s no justice in the world. This whooping, mulleted yodeller is building a devoted fanbase and backing it up with quality tunes. His fame’s growing rapidly, though it probably doesn’t seem like it to him as he packs up and leaves the small northern pub. But the night is special because it might never be like this again. I find myself hoping Nick might look back fondly on playing for a handful of drunk English misfits (and one very dizzy toy spider); I’ll certainly look back fondly on being one of them.

My lift arrives, and I’m gone, taking the A666. Take me home, Bolton Road.

Setlist:

(all songs from the album Okay, Crawdad and written by Nick Shoulders, unless noted)

1. Lonely Like Me (from Lonely Like Me)
2. Blue Endless Highway (J. R. Cheatham) (unreleased)
3. Heart of Glass (Debbie Harry/Chris Stein) (from Heart of Night)
4. Ding Dong Daddy (Traditional)
5. All Bad (unreleased)
6. G for Jesus
7. Turn on the Dark (from Home on the Rage)
8. Too Old to Dream
9. You Won’t Fence Us In (based on ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ (Cole Porter/Bob Fletcher)) (unreleased)
10. After Hours (from Lonely Like Me)
11. Snakes and Waterfalls (from Lonely Like Me)
12. Bound and Determined
13. Rather Low