Hayley and Dave are an already much-loved North East duo, with a storytelling soul owed as much to Lindisfarne and Mark Knopfler as Dolly Parton and Nashville. Joanna Long spoke with them about their new single, ‘You Gave Up On Us’, and their upcoming hometown show at The Forum in Darlington on Friday 19th June.
How would you describe North Riding to someone who hasn’t discovered you yet?
It’s a blend of country, Americana and folk with North East storytelling heritage. We call it transatlantic country. We’re a vocal duo with a seven-piece band behind us; fiddles, banjos, mandolins, electric guitars, drums, piano, harmonica. Everyone’s a multi-instrumentalist. Dave produces all the music too, which means we can just get on with it, which, with a three-month-old in the house, is its own kind of achievement.
You both have fifteen-plus years of performing individually. What made this partnership feel like something special?
We went to the US for three months, started booking shows and playing together, and thought, this is more than the sum of its parts. We’ve been playing together for years, and we wrote a lot of our songs while we were in America, so the whole band was born on the road.
Bob Harris named you Horizon Artist and played ‘Frio River’ on his Radio 2 show. What did that mean to you?
We literally danced around the living room, and Dave doesn’t normally dance! It happened entirely organically, no radio plugger, no team, just Bob hearing something he liked. My mum texted to say we’d just been on Radio 2, and I was convinced it must be BBC Introducing. I listened back to the wrong week before we finally figured out it had actually happened. We’re still building around that.
Your new single, ‘You Gave Up On Us’, feels like a different sound…
Both songs were written in the same two-month period in the States. ‘You Gave Up On Us’ was written first, in an Airbnb in South Carolina, where we were totally immersed in the music scene there. We wanted to write a duet about something falling apart, told from both perspectives, as opposed to a love song, something darker. And ‘Frio River’ came from a stay at a brewery owner’s holiday home on the Frio River in Texas, sitting in the river, with the cypress trees and a proper night sky; the melody just came to us.
The North East feels central to what you do. Is that a conscious choice?
Absolutely. There’s a lot of country music in the UK at the moment, but we want to be British with it. We’re proud to be from the North East; we’re not going to start singing with American accents or writing about things that aren’t our story. I’m from the North York Moors, Hayley’s from Durham, so we cover a decent stretch of this region, and there’s so much here; folk tales, history, characters.
What do you want North East audiences to know about a North Riding gig?
It’s a show. There’s humour, there are stories, like Dave’s run-in with a bear in Tennessee…and there’s audience participation; a song with howling. That might put some people off, thinking about it. We hope it doesn’t.
North Riding play the Forum, Darlington on Friday 19th June. Tickets, priced at £12.50 in advance, are available at theforumonline.co.uk.
