The former bouncer who’s become one of Nashville’s biggest stars sold out Spark Arena in minutes. And his show proved conventional wisdom around local country audiences very wrong, writes Duncan Greive.
A few years ago, this would have seemed absurd, unimaginable. Luke Combs, a country artist with scant history of press or radio support and playing in Auckland for the first time, drew 12,000 fans to Spark Arena. While New Zealand has a long, proud history with country, it’s only seldom had the stars come down to support it, and conventional wisdom was that the scale just wasn’t here. This show disproved that thesis – it sold out in minutes, part of a 16-country tour which, according to country promotion legend Michael Chugg, is bigger even than Shania Twain at her peak.
Yet with all due respect to Twain (which is an enormous amount of respect, to be fair), Combs’ achievement might be more head-spinning. Come On Over is an extraordinary record, but its country elements were sanded smooth and Twain was a pop crossover phenomenon in her heyday. Combs has a pedal steel on stage, covers 90s country standards like ‘Dust on the Bottle’ and twangs hard throughout. This is undeniably Nashville country, though in sound and production it has chugging bar band roughness that wraps around his huge bear hug of a voice.
The music is only one part of what makes tonight such a strange, beguiling experience. It’s also the staging, or lack of it. I’ve never seen Spark so sparsely decorated – a big wide black stage, with a desultory catwalk extending a few metres into the crowd. Combs, a big trucker-looking guy with a scruffy beard, wears a black short-sleeved shirt, slim-fit jeans, boots and a silver fern hat which looks straight out of a Kiwi Experience tourist-bait shop. The stage is brightly lit throughout, and the crowd often is too – the effect is less deliberately stripped back than that it just never crossed anyone’s mind to dress it up.
He barrels through a set largely drawn from his four albums, peppered with covers, including a scorching take on Tracy Chapman’s ‘Fast Car’ which sounds appalling on paper but lights up the room live. The song is currently the most-played on NZ radio, but the medium has not driven the crowd tonight – there are currently no major country format stations, despite the genre’s burgeoning popularity (Morgan Wallen, his only current rival in popularity, also sold out his show here in March).
Artists like Combs, who brags during the show about shooting a red stag while hunting in the South Island earlier in the week, are served only grudgingly by parts of the entertainment industry. They don’t make critics’ lists and TV presenters don’t superfan over them the way they might an artist like Kacey Musgraves, who feels more popular despite having a tiny fragment of the fanbase. Combs’ crowd felt drawn from the outer suburbs, if not rural New Zealand. The singer is a rugby fan, chats with All Black Ofa Tu’ungafasi on social media, and showed up to the Bledisloe Cup test on Saturday. This is the world Combs inhabits: music for people who like wrestling and Marvel movies and drive pickups without worrying about climate change.
That’s a population which is typically underserved by the entertainment industry, and can feel like it experiences contempt from cultural or political elites, locally and internationally. it would be easy to draw a line from there to the kind of forgotten white America which propelled Trump to power, and remains his base. There is a queasy quality to the way an N-word controversy seemed to fuel Wallen’s popularity, while fellow country star Jason Aldean bagged his first number one single after releasing a video shot in part at the site of an historic lynching.
It’s inconceivable that an artist like Combs, raised in North Carolina and resident of Tennessee, would not attract a MAGA crowd in parts. But it would also be grossly reductive – Combs seems profoundly and earnestly apolitical, and he and his crowd seem much more interested in the community and continuity of country music. That after a pandemic, and an era in which many entertainment products demanded their audience wrestle with trauma, there is an emotional cocoon in country which can provide a nostalgic shield from the chaos of the tech-dystopia era.
The most powerful and abiding emotion in the air tonight was joy – and it was truly touching watching thousands of 20-somethings, many with their partners, screaming his folksy love songs to one another. Combs talked about writing ‘Beautiful Crazy’ three weeks after meeting the woman who would become his wife, and how it was their wedding dance. Everything about it was corny; it was also tremendously affecting.
That authenticity and embrace of simple, fiercely sung love songs is part of what has made Combs one of the biggest stars in country, and a huge driver of its expanding global fan base. This is a product of the infinite availability of streaming music and the borderless community-building which happens on YouTube.
At an event before the show, Combs’ manager Chris Kappy noted that when he first started working in country it was a struggle to get dates in California added to artists’ schedules, let alone outside the US. Yet he noticed comments on YouTube begging for shows from all over the world, breaking from conventional wisdom that the genre was almost entirely a southern US phenomenon.
Still, it’s one thing to have a viable audience, quite another to sell out an arena at your first attempt. Watching the crowd walk away, with their cos-played Stetsons and cowboy boots, the sense of an unlikely cultural moment appearing out of the ether was manifest. The audience was notably young – its core is 20-something, and thanks to that instant sellout they were all true believers. As they left, smelling of sweat and beer, you got the sense that while the show was ending, this new era for country is just beginning.