Music News

Best of British Showcase #2 – Katy Hurt

January 18, 2019January 18, 2019 Nick Cantwell country music, katy hurt, natchez, revved up

Welcome to a new series on Belles and Gals where Nick Cantwell (twitter.com/nickbelles_gals) will be highlighting some of the very best acts on the UK country music scene, casting an eye over their music and chatting to the artists too. The series continues today with the wonderful Katy Hurt.

There’s little doubt that Katy Hurt is one of the leading lights on the UK country scene. I first saw Katy play live soon after starting Belles and Gals, a fantastic event which celebrated Katy hitting the top of the iTunes country chart with her single ‘Love You More’. Fast forward three years and Katy has enjoyed two appearances at the C2C festival (a festival she had never missed as a fan before appearing!), has built up a great following and has recorded an impressive portfolio of fantastic music.

I caught up with Katy after a live performance in London this week for a chat!

Hi Katy! So here we are at the start of 2019 but let’s start by looking back at 2018. You must look back on the year with great memories?

Last year was crazy, it was so much fun! It was definitely the best year of my career so far. Opportunities like getting to perform at Pilton Party, Country 2 Country and Black Deer, we did so many festivals that I was practically living in the car and living in tents and stuff, but no it was amazing and I’m so grateful to everyone that supported us. We had 3 single releases and an E.P. recording – so yeah, it was a lot of fun.

One of the highlight moments for me was when I saw your ‘Revved Up’ video for the first time last summer, one of the standout videos of the year. Tell us how the video came about!

Thank you! So ‘Revved Up’ was written for Clint Eastwood after we watched ‘The Good, The Bad and the Ugly’. When we recorded the song we realised how much it needed a badass video, so the only thing we could was to go where they filmed ‘The Good, The Bad and the Ugly’ and film our own! So we did, we took a roadtrip, two cars, we drove to the Spanish desert, rented some Airbnb’s along the wayand and put together a random western video. I made Gab (Gab Zsapka) the bad guy, he kept stealing stuff.

Katy Hurt’s Revved Up Video

You’ve hit the ground running in 2019, with more than 30 gigs before the end of February! You’ll surely be the fittest artist on the scene come spring time!

I’ll try! Yeah we had 41 shows booked for the ‘Unfinished Business’ tour and at the moment we’re still trying to confirm two more. I’m hoping we’ll maybe get to 45/50 shows in this tour if we can. Last year we did a lot of shows but we didn’t actually do a tour – we had toured the November before with Sonia Leigh and it was so much fun, but we kinda took a break, did a load of festivals and recording and stuff. So we definitely wanted to hit the ground running with this new E.P. and with all the stuff we’ve been working on and showing people what we’ve been up to. And we’re doing all sorts of shows, we’re doing duo shows, acoustic band shows, full band shows, kind of going to places I’ve never been to before.

What are you looking forward to most in the rest of the year?

I’m looking forward to the E.P. fully being out! At the moment it’s still not actually out yet, it’s only available at gigs and for pledgers, so I’m excited when that’s finally out and people can listen to the whole thing online and I don’t have to worry about it any more! Other than that I’m excited to go back to Canada and do some more writing and start work on the album, as it will be my debut album! It’s gonna be fun.

Katy’s brilliant latest single ‘Natchez’