A London country music fan reads about Harry and Meghan listening to a teenager sing about peer pressure, and remembers what country songwriting is really for
Monday, 26 October 2026. Kentish Town, back from teaching a free guitar workshop at a youth club in Somers Town, fingers sore, heart full, 8.30pm.
The Most Country Moment In The British News This Year
There is a famous definition of country music, usually credited to the Nashville songwriter Harlan Howard, which says it is three chords and the truth. I have it written on a Post-it on my fridge. I look at it every morning while I make toast, and I think about whether anything I wrote the day before passed the test.
This week, the purest example of three chords and the truth I have come across did not come from Nashville. It came from Nottingham. In the report on Harry and Meghan’s return to Britain and their charity visit, a fourteen-year-old girl in a community recording studio in St Ann’s sings a song about peer pressure. The couple applaud, hug her in the recording booth and tell her to keep singing.
The piece is full of sharp jokes about gold sticks, velvet cushions and the royal habit of arriving to unveil things under curtains. But the line that stopped me is the one about the young people getting something rare in British institutional life: the undivided attention of adults who seemed interested in what they were doing. That is the whole of country music. Somebody sings their truth. Somebody listens.
My Youth Club Workshop
Every other Monday I run a free guitar workshop at a youth club in Somers Town. We have six donated guitars, three of which stay in tune and two of which are, by any reasonable standard, firewood. The kids are between twelve and sixteen. Most of them came in wanting to learn drill. A few wanted to learn Taylor Swift. Over the months, I have smuggled in a bit of Dolly, a bit of Johnny Cash and a lot of three-chord songwriting.
Tonight a fifteen-year-old named Jaden played me a song he has been writing for six weeks. It is called Bus Pass. It is about his mum working two jobs and him looking after his little sister after school. It has three chords. Two of them are slightly wrong. It made me cry in a youth club in front of a vending machine. I told him to keep singing. I did not hug him in a booth because we do not have a booth. We have a storage cupboard with a mop in it. But I listened to the whole thing, all the way to the end, and that, I am more and more convinced, is the job.
The Gold Stick Problem In Country Music
The report’s funniest bit is about the Gold Stick, the royal post whose holder carries a stick that is gold, with a silver one for backup. Country music has its own gold sticks: the awards, the stadium tours, the rhinestone suits, the private jets. I read an article recently on New Country about the richest country music stars, and the numbers are enormous. Some of those people deserve every penny. They wrote the songs.
But the money is not the music. The music happened first, in a kitchen or a truck or a church basement or a youth club in Somers Town, when somebody with three chords told the truth and somebody else listened. Everything after that is a gold stick. Lovely to carry. Not the point.
Why Nottingham Matters
The report argues that the charities in Nottingham were perfectly able to function before, during and after the royal visit, and that helping people does not need a palace. As a volunteer in a youth club with firewood guitars, I can confirm. Nobody needs a palace. They need guitars that stay in tune, a room that is warm, and one adult who turns up every other Monday and does not leave until the last kid has played their song.
If a famous couple visiting Nottingham helps that studio get new equipment, good. If it makes one more teenager feel that someone important listened, good. But the people who will still be in that studio next Monday, and the Monday after that, are the youth workers and volunteers whose names were not in the report. Country music has a word for those people. It calls them the backing band. Nobody remembers their names. Every song needs them.
Fridge, Toast, Truth
I am home now, eating toast in front of the fridge and looking at the Post-it. Three chords and the truth. Tonight, a fifteen-year-old in Somers Town passed the test with two chords and a slightly wrong third. A fourteen-year-old in Nottingham passed it last week in front of a duchess. Neither of them needed Nashville. Both of them needed somebody to listen.
Next Week
Next week I am bringing a capo to the youth club, so that Jaden can play Bus Pass in a key that suits his voice, and a packet of Jaffa Cakes, because nobody writes a good song on an empty stomach. I am also going to tell the kids about Harlan Howard. They will not care. They will want to know if he was rich. I will tell them he wrote songs people still sing sixty years later, which is the only kind of rich that matters in country music. Then I will hand out the Jaffa Cakes, and we will tune the firewood.