Detwanging country music: how Nashville took the UK

Riffs that echo Metallica's Black Album, an encore that references Born to Run, and a band of session musicians straight out of 80s rock central casting; an Eric Church gig reeks of classic rock right down to the lead man's aviators, stubble and Jack Daniel's and Coke.

But Church is a rising star of country music. Not bluegrass or Americana or alt country. He is a star of straight-up, hat-wearing Nashville country, albeit one who prefers a Von Dutch baseball cap to a stetson.

If it is hard to decipher what makes Church country rather than rock, the same applies to the audience at his gig at the Shepherd's Bush Empire in London, the last on his short British tour early this month. There are only a handful of wide-brimmed hats and no more than a dozen of the 2,000-strong crowd hold their cowboy boots aloft, as is standard ritual during Church's ode to pointy-toed footwear, These Boots.

Country's audience is evolving, and in the UK it is growing. Traditionally, Music City's biggest stars have rarely made the trip across the Atlantic, but that's changing: in the week Church appeared in the UK, he was the biggest-selling artist in the US with his fourth album The Outsiders.

"We have a No 1 album in the US," says Church, 36. "In the week we release that album, we pack up and go to Europe. And a lot of people are going: 'Why would you not stay?' I believe music is universal – I don't believe it's American or English and I am going to see if that's true. I want to put that belief to the test."

Church is not the only country music star sounding out the UK. His support act, the Nashville trio the Cadillac Three, have performed in the UK four times in the past year. Kacey Musgraves, whose album Same Trailer Different Park was one of the critical successes of 2013, came twice last year. This weekend a plethora of country's biggest names, including megawatt star Brad Paisley, will showcase their wares at Country 2 Country, a two-day festival at the O2 Arena in London. It is Europe's biggest country showcase, now in its second sold-out year.

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These stars are getting unprecedented radio support. Country 2 Country's media partner is BBC Radio 2, Europe's most popular radio station with more than 15 million weekly listeners. There was a point this past year when Radio 2 had five Nashville tracks on playlists simultaneously; the station controller Bob Shennan cannot recall a time when country figured so prominently. Paisley's The Mona Lisa is now on Radio 2's A-list; a rather belated breakthrough for an artist with 15 years of success at home under his belt.

So what has changed? It's the music, stupid, says Shennan, who also sits on the Country Music Association's board. Radio 2 has always been about "timeless, melodic, accessible music", he says, and that's what the current country scene offers. "Nashville is one of the most striking examples of a musical scene that we have been able to mine on behalf of our audience and feed that appetite."

However, the Nashville sound crossing the Atlantic isn't that of pedal steel guitars and twanging banjos. With its powerpop leanings, The Mona Lisa doesn't sound typically country to British ears. Church's biggest hit – the melodic rock anthem Springsteen – has more in common with its titular hero than Nashville. "Some of the most successful country songs of recent years have in a way avoided some of the trappings of country music in terms of their lyric or their sound," Shennan says. "Our head of music [Jeff Smith] talks about a lot of the songs being 'detwanged', and that kind of rock hinterland of Eric Church is really a blurring of the lines."

If the music has evolved, so has Nashville. Veteran broadcaster Bob Harris has covered the Nashville scene for Radio 2 since 1970, and says it's not just that Britain is embracing country, but that country is embracing Britain in a way it never used to. He recalls asking the honky-tonk star Alan Jackson for an interview as recently as 10 years ago: "His exact words were, 'Why would I want to do that?' There was that insular thing going on in country at the time."

It took a teenager to change the record. In 2005, Scott Borchetta signed the then 15-year-old Taylor Swift to his independent label Big Machine. Exploratory trips abroad were scheduled alongside plans for Swift's rapid US ascension. She travelled to the UK three times in 2009, the year her second album, Fearless, became the biggest seller in the US. She played Shepherd's Bush Empire that May. By November she was in Wembley Arena. Her Red tour this year took in five sellout shows at the O2. The lesson from Swift: if Nashville wanted to be all conquering, it needed to see the world.

"There was very much a plan in place from the beginning," says Borchetta. "When we set out on our journey together we felt that if we kept her on these shores she would get bored. I felt she could be an international artist. In talking to the family pretty much from the start, I was able to ingrain in them that we would need to go early and often."

Swift showed Music City that a youth audience could be brought into the fold, if its acts were willing to evolve and tour. So Big Machine signings such as the Cadillac Three – marketed as the "Nashville Nirvana" – made good on promises to tour early and often. Church's trajectory in the US was marked by consistent touring, building up a fanbase of white males in their 20s when country radio didn't take to his rockier sound. "Taylor Swift's plan is a great plan. If you come and play, you take some of that chance out of it," says Church.

What established acts on the Nashville circuit will do in the wake of this new wave remains to be seen. Last year's Country 2 Country headliner was Tim McGraw, an artist with 40m album sales. That he came to the UK at all is significant, but it remains unlikely that many stars of his stature, so deep into their careers, will make a concerted effort to break into new territory.

"They have to want to do it," Borchetta says of the established acts. "Part of the problem is that you have to get them early in their career. Once they start making a lot of money here [in the US] and get into a groove of playing 50 to 60 dates a year, they play the big outdoor sheds [and] they are making so much money they say: 'I can't take four or five weeks off to go and lose money in Europe.'"

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The exception to that rule may be Paisley, the Nashville star who looks and sounds like old country, but opens his music to other styles – even if, as on his duet with LL Cool J, Accidental Racist, it sometimes feels like an awkward fit. However, Paisley – an ardent Anglophile – insists that country's traditional values remain at the core of what Nashville is selling overseas. "It's exotic to you guys, a delicacy," he says. "In my own country there's nothing exotic about me. I'm a cowboy-hat-wearing country singer."

The new country sound is perhaps best embodied not by an artist, though, but a TV show. More 4's US import Nashville, a glossy tale of love and betrayal in the music industry, is having a spin-off effect on music sales, with its soundtrack having sold 150,000 copies in the UK. It's a sexy portrayal of Music City in tune with the new spirit of country – all girls in denim cutoffs, and ice-cold beers on the car bonnet – markedly modern motifs for one of music's most conservative genres.

"The themes of the songs from contemporary artists reflect the lives of people their age now," says Harris. "There's been one very specific change in terms of lyric-writing in country. If you go back to the 50s, there's a lot of songs about the consequence of bad behaviour – like hanging out with women and then coming back to your wife – there's a cause and effect that the song sees through. Eventually you have to repent for your sins. Now that doesn't apply. The general rule is there's no consequence, let's just party."

Nashville's record industry hopes that party is just getting started here.