Live at The Cluny 2 in Newcastle upon Tyne: Bec O'Malley

O’Malley’s name may have been undiscovered when that video was posted, but by that point, he’d already been playing music and writing his own songs for years. Growing up in Stockport, he first picked up a guitar aged 12, learning the basics from his cousin and fleshing out the rest from YouTube tutorials. A few years later, his interest turned from simply playing others’ creations to working on his own, first in bands with school friends, and then on his own. Along the way, his sound evolved, pulling in new influences and building the foundations for the music he makes today. “I was doing the indie stuff for so long, and I was just getting bored of it,” he explains. “I started listening to more of the modern side of country – Zach Bryan, Morgan Wallen, those guys – and it just revamped it in my head.”

Rather than jumping on the bandwagon of the surging popularity of country music in the UK, the genre is something that’s always been around O’Malley. He comes from an Irish family where music was always playing around the house and at family gatherings, and “they’d always play all the country music – a bit of American country, Irish country”.

The 23-year-old’s material, though, is a balance – one that draws from a world of Nashville skylines and pick-up trucks, but also from his lived experience in the UK. Instead of parodying the language and topics of his American counterparts, he puts his reality front and centre, writing about things he and the people around him have seen or been through. “You don’t see many trucks around here,” he laughs. “It just wouldn’t feel right to [copy US country] – it’d feel like role play.” It’s an approach he sees as having a unique allure to it: “No one in the States is going to sing it from a perspective that I’d sing it from.”

Sonically, too, he merges two disparate parts – country and indie – and, rather than be seen as someone predominantly in one lane, he wants to be known for his distinctive blend of them both. A love for The La’s, Sam Fender and Oasis have fuelled the indie side of his writing, with the latter band in particular having a huge impact on him – not just musically, but in attitude and ambition, too. The Gallaghers’ hometown of Burnage is just down the road from Stockport, and their influence seeped into O’Malley’s surroundings early on. “You see Oasis and how big they got when they’re from just down the road, and it’s like, ‘If they can do it, why can’t I?’” he reasons.