In case you haven’t looked at the UK Country Festive Fifty 2024, here’s a clue as to who is the fastest rising star in the UK country firmament. Having started the year as a quarter of the Girls Night In tour, which came to this same West London venue in February, she helped present BBC Radio 2’s coverage of CMA Fest and played the festival herself. Sometimes Kezia Gill, henceforth ‘Kez’, has time to sleep.
Kez put out the cherished duet How Long Have You Known with Jade Helliwell back in May, which was followed by appearances on songs by Ward Thomas (Quarter Life Crisis) and BOWEN YOUNG (Hair of the Dog). In between, she headlined The British Country Music Festival headliner, featured in a writers round at Nashville Meets London, and appeared at both Black Deer and Rock N Ribs festivals.
Come November, she gave her band a rest for a solo tour where she played her songs in an acoustic fashion; the second leg climaxed with two dates back at West London’s Bush Hall, weeks after it was announced that she would be playing in London and Glasgow for Country2Country 2025. She is also high up the bill for Roadhouse Weekender 2025 and the inaugural In It Together festival in Wales. Maybe she’ll sleep on the plane back from Australia, after she plays CMC Rocks in late March.
For this pair of London shows, which serve to cap off what must be the most successful year of her career, there was a Nashville-based Aussie opening the evening. Blake O’Connor is not billed for CMC Rocks but he might well be playing alongside his partner Sinead Burgess, for whom he has already opened on her own UK tour early in November.
Since he played Buckle & Boots in 2019, Blake has grown a mane of hair and put out a brilliant album called Finding Light, some of whose tracks were written with Sinead, who herself supported Kez in the first leg of this tour. Especially good were the driving rocker Cover Me Up and the harmonica-assisted set closer, while his cover of Bennie and the Jets was perfect for a Friday night crowd.
I bumped into Kez when she was watching Sinead and Blake play the Icon Stage in the middle of the shopping mall at C2C back in March, since when she has gigged in the Middle East(!) and returned to Nashville to record a new album with Alyssa Bonagura, who also worked on her friend Jade Helliwell’s recent EP. Alyssa, who divides her time between Nashville and the UK, was in attendance at Bush Hall.
Kez sold out this first date so added a second one for Saturday night, which conveniently means she and her team can celebrate a magnificent year in the capital city. ‘I was supposed to be here,’ she said, with the stress on the ‘here’.
In 2020, as she told a rapt seated audience who laughed, jeered and shouted ‘cheers!’ in all the right places, Kez was supposed to be moving to Nashville to work on an album with a very hot producer. She would leave Britain behind and head to Music City with her husband Lloyd, the Crafty Cockney from Canvey Island, Essex, a place which is one of few in the UK outranked by Kez’s hometown of Derby. Then, of course, there was ‘an unprecedented global pandemic’ and Kez lost her livelihood.
In a 90-minute theatre show that ought to be part of any welcome pack at a sixth-form college or university course, Kez summarised her life in the music industry, one where metrics were king and disappointment was a guarantee. ‘If you’re not present, you’re past’ was one of many take-home points in a show which delivered tears, jeers and songs about whiskey.
In fact, I didn’t realise until the show itself that this gig was a nostalgic communion: for 18 months in 2020-21, Kez entertained a Friday Night Crew with whom she would interact, laugh and cry. Three years after she wondered if she would ever have a career in music, one which she had tried to walk away from at least three times, she was able to look back on the Best Worst Year, as she sang in the song dedicated to the Crew.
I’m loath to spoil much of the evening because Kez can take this show on the road every year and add new material as she goes. We begin with a GCSE music assignment to write a song, which helped Kez win a competition that took her to London. She learned, at an early age, that though her voice was terrific, she needed to have commercial appeal. She paid her dues in Lanzarote, singing ‘Sweet Caroline, three times a night’ seven days a week, making her passion a living but eventually losing her spark.
There are many things about this magnificent show that were memorable, but the through line was how easy it is to become disillusioned with what’s left of the music industry. It reminds me of Gareth Southgate who famously said he loved football as a game but hated football as a business. Knockback after knockback was punctuated by the show’s chorus: ‘It’s happening! This is it!’ (There’s her new album title, if she’s still looking for one.)
Kez held up a rare copy of her very first CD, recorded in 2013. She joked that ‘nobody needs to hear’ what was on it, but rather sweetly she pulled out a track from the ‘song abyss’. She played each of her songs about whiskey, admitting that she had written Whiskey Over Ice ‘in ten minutes’, and took Dead Ends and Detours down a key to give it more gravitas. Country Song, meanwhile, was completely reinvented to reflect where Kez was at when she wrote it; she admitted to falling into depression and to masking her true feelings with alcohol, and she thus decided to head back to the UK to hit the open mic circuit.
Then came a series of events that would tell the teenage singer/songwriter how absurd life is: she drove up to Glasgow to play for no money at a gig headlined by Phil Vassar, a renowned country songwriter completely unknown to her, and then she was asked to play at 12pm on a Sunday at a country festival on a farm. I was there and became a Kez convert that day, where she found the fanbase she was looking for. She was accompanied by The Good Old Boys, a set of musicians her dad’s age whose tight playing supported one of the best voices in the UK.
After releasing an EP in 2021 featuring the magnificent Live It Up, Kez recorded her Misfit album in 2023, a review of which you can find here. Dear Me was that album’s closing track, one which shared the broken piano arpeggios and ballad form with the very first song she composed, two decades previously. She cleverly interpolated one of pop music’s most enchanting melodies into a song where she looked back on the girl who wanted to do exactly this: sing in front of a room full of people, listening to her stories and melodies. In March she gets to sing them in the O2 Arena.
If Kez can get through Local Man’s Star, a tribute to her late dad, in the arena, I will be very impressed but not surprised; a performer of her calibre will be able to push aside her emotions. Kez failed to do that at Bush Hall, when someone held up a light from their phone, which suddenly made her emotional. The sniffing and snuffling of performer and audience was testament to how everyone in the room knew the power of a performer singing a song with the chorus ‘the reason I sing I owe to him’ in a packed hall.
I had known that this show was a compilation of moments from Kez’s life, a musical autobiography, but her visible struggle to get through the song united the entire room with her. She really is a star, and the most glittering one in the UK country firmament. It reminded me of Ashley McBryde’s Country2Country debut, the moment a star was born; I have thought for many months that Kez is the UK’s version of Ashley, and not just because of the voice, tattoos and stage patter.
It’s the connection both acts have with their audience, a mix of ages and genders, that makes them beloved. It’s also the vulnerability, bringing the backstory to the front of the stage and using their experiences to articulate the human experience; no wonder Ashley made a cameo in Wild Rose, which is being turned into a musical that lands in Edinburgh in Spring 2025. Kez is a real, living, three-dimensional Rose, without the bolshy backchat of Nicole Taylor’s creation.
There is no artifice about Kezia Gill whatsoever; as per Luke Combs’ second album, what you see is what you get. With a little bit of help from Bob Harris and BBC Radio 2, as well as the big figures in the UK country scene like Gary Quinn and the Hancock family who run Buckle & Boots, Kez has found the audience she had spent years looking for and which countless record executives told her she needed. ‘Where have you been?’ people asked her back in 2019, to which the only possible reply was: ‘Where have you been?!’
Ultimately, this was a three-act play starring Kez, a girl with a dream who almost gave it up the chance to do the only thing she wanted to do. Perhaps she could only headline a solo show called The Story So Far after she left the book closed for a while, letting her dreams percolate as she remembered what she was supposed to do and where she was supposed to be.
Actually, I Was Supposed to Be Here would make a great album title.
A Country Way of Life 