Photo: Rob Blackham

“Alright, mate?” The ubiquitous phrase of my homeland. It can mean, ‘how are you doing?’ ‘what’s happened?’ ‘you feeling okay?’ or even ‘what the f*** are you looking at?’ It’s a Swiss-Army-Knife of a phrase, and is more about the inflection and facial expression it arrives with than the actual syntax of the question.

I come from the Old World, a place out of a Turner painting or an old story that is now sung in barrooms across America to the accompaniment of clawhammer banjo. An ancient land, and one
with it’s thousands of years of customs, history, horrors, triumphs, and secrets. It’s verdant green
nooks are still there if you know where to look, but slowly, the concrete tendrils of highways and
fast-food restaurants are spreading across it as they are in any other place.

I recently did an ancestry test thanks to a fascination with the story of my great-grandad, and I
couldn’t have been more proud to come from a long (long!) line of blue collar folks who have, until recently, always clawed just ahead of urban poverty; dockworkers, tradesmen and fierce
matriarchs.

I was born in London in December 1997 (I always tell people that I had a difficult paper route as a child) to thirty-something-year-old parents who worked hard and who were paying off a small
cottage in a grey suburb of South London. It was originally my Dad’s place together with his mum, and my own mother had moved in a few years before; from the small front porch, you could almost spit to the places where my paternal ancestors had lived, worked and died over the last century or so.

Dad worked the railway, specifically the famous London Underground (or The Tube) as we call it
and Mum worked for the same company but in the offices. Dad worked on the trains by day and
by night, and it seemed to me that Mum might as well have run the whole damn show with all she did. I recently found out they met when my Dad was called in for a minor disciplinary. Dad was the youngest of six children, and Mum was the middle of three, with another three half-sisters. I was their first sprog to arrive.

My Nan, who lived with us, was already approaching her eighties and did a lot of the babysitting
whilst my folks worked, and she still remembered the terror of raising children in London as the
docklands burned beneath the weight of German bombs during the Second World War. I was
obsessed with history from a very early age, and I think she has a lot to do with that.

I remember a surprising amount of these early London years, and I look back now at a time of
love and a time where I never went without. Dad’s drinking wasn’t even in my periphery as a child, and to me, the weeks at the hospital with my Mum were just part of the routine.

You see, a few years before I was even a thought, my Mum had travelled away on a girls’ trip over
the Christmas holidays (vacation, to my friends across the Atlantic). The group developed an ear
infection from the pool, but all seemed well. Six months later, Mum collapsed and it was found a
tropical parasite had eaten most of her lungs. She was pronounced clinically dead at one point,
and despite her heroic recovery, she was told she’d never have kids. Well, I arrived on the scene
and five years later, so did my brother, Frankie; how’s that for miracle siblings?

London isn’t the picture book, Victorian theme park that fiction and international imagination have conjured up and honestly, I’m not sure it ever was. Things got a little dicey just after the turn of the millennium, and so my parents packed up our home there and we moved out to rural Essex.

As I write this, I just got back from my first tour in the US, and I spent a lot of time in Kentucky; it reminded me a lot of home. Although Essex is on the coast, it is a green patchwork of farmland,
hills and marshland. History stretching all the way back to Ancient times is all around, and my
childhood was one of rainy days playing video games (we’re in England here after all. It rains…a
lot), hazy summer days of riding bikes, swimming in the river and building dens in the woodland
near our house.

Music was always the language of our house. We’d wake on a Saturday morning, and if we heard
Simply Red or Neil Diamond, we knew Mum would be cleaning, the windows and doors thrown
wide making the floor a little too cold to stand on in our bare feet.

Music was also one of the few ways I felt that I truly connected with my ol’ man, too. I remember
hearing Tom Petty for the first time in the passenger seat of his small car, on our way to pickup
takeout food and with the heating on full. I also recount vividly the first time I ever heard the song

Highwayman, and being obsessed with the story being told by those four horsemen of the
apocalypse. My life was changed, and the next day whilst Dad was out at work, I practically
scaled the large cabinet of CDs in our living room to find the case and squirrel it away up to my
room. I listened to it on repeat most of that day.

I was surprised with a small classical guitar when I was around 9, and despite my love of music,
the natural proclivity was markedly-absent. I tried to learn the guitar two or three times before it
stuck and landed at last.

Dad and I connected sonically, and we connected over movies. I was brought up on Hammer
horror films, the classics of great directors like Scorcese, Hitchcock and Leone. The Western was
a genre I quickly became enamoured with, and I guess the rest is history!

My Uncle Alan is probably a big part of why I love the American West and sing about and paint so many things to do with it. In a past life, he’d been a butcher’s apprentice and then a plasterer.
Born in the north-east of England, he was the first person I ever met who wore big buckles, had a
shock of slicked-back hair in the fifties style and loved everything to do with America – he loved
big cars (going so far as to purchase a former Sheriff’s cruiser and importing it), country and
western music, and I suppose inevitably, John Wayne.

When I was very young, we went to their house and to my fascination (and my Dad’s amusement), he’d bought a scale-model of John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn in a huge display case right next to his television; it talked if you pressed a button, I think it might have called you ‘pilgrim’. Wild, right?

I can never really answer the question when it’s put to me: “why do you love American music and
the West so much? You’re from England!”

It’s a valid question, and is a source of much consternation to me; sometime it feels like I don’t
deserve to love the history and the people and the music of the place since it doesn’t form any of
my heritage.

I left high school in 2016 and spent a number of years touring before heading to university to
study fine art in 2019. In 2022, I wrote my final paper just on that subject of what interests me so
much about a nation over 3000 miles away. The essay looked good, and got the highest grade,
but you bet I didn’t come close to answering the question.

I guess it was a cumulative effort, a conspiracy on the part of my Dad, my Uncle and Mr
Eastwood growing up, or at least in part. Maybe I’ll never know, but I do know that I’ll keep
digging at it, picking away at the question on canvas or on recordings, getting to know the people
there and other ethnographers trying to figure it out for themselves. I can’t wait to return to the US very soon.

I started taking music seriously again in 2022 because the art was a little quiet. In 2023, the art
got real busy again, and now in 2024 the music is, too. I’m on the road a lot of the time.
Charley Crockett said once that “sometimes you have to leave a place you love to find yourself
and realise what you love about it”.

I don’t get to be home very often anymore, and I’m certainly not griping about the opportunity to
pick my little songs around the world, especially when my recent visit to Appalachia felt so much
like a homecoming. When I do fly back to the nest, though, I always make sure to bathe in the
nostalgia of the place, and the memories and events, good and bad, that happened there to make
me who I am today.

Make no mistake, though, I’m still immensely proud of my own history. I’m not talking about the
overarching history of kings and queens, empire or war necessarily. I’m talking about the personal history, my family’s part in all that, and even when I’m reading my history books or pacing around a museum as I often do, I’m interested in the the ordinary man who are often called to do extraordinary things. I love my ancestral obligation to love ‘pie and mash’, and of the long-line of Brownings who have ardently supported the claret and blue of West Ham United.

The plane from Nashville touched down a few days ago and now I return to some routine, back
painting and recording in the studio. I head out and grab a coffee.

“Alright, mate?”

I’m home.