If it ain't country . . .

`If I don't get emotionally involved then it doesn't happened for me at all." Mike Ireland is explaining down a transatlantic phone line just what makes his style of country music so vibrant and alive. So alive, indeed, that last year's debut album, Learning How To Live, was considered by many the country album of the year.

But this ain't no brash young thing carrying his dreams in a guitar case with a Stetson for company. Born in Kansas city 38 years ago, Ireland is a relatively late developer. Formerly part of a little known, but well respected rock band, The Starkweathers, Ireland pulled Holler together to record the bittersweet songs that make up Learning How To Live.

Written in the wake of his divorce from his wife of five years, the songs are coloured by what was clearly a bitter and painful time. "Divorce is the great country music theme," he said in a recent interview, "so it made sense that the songs about my own divorce would become country songs. "Learning How To Live, for example, is about the aftermath of our break-up. My wife had been unfaithful and, at first, I blamed the whole thing on her. That song was about eventually realising I had contributed to the problems too and that I had to accept the blame for my part."

Ireland has been lumped in with the alternative country genre, or the alt.country movement as it is known in the Internet age. Although he is "just happy to be anywhere", the label doesn't exactly fill him with joy; "in some ways it doesn't fit us, as we're not rockist". He adds that although Nashville gets a bad press these days, it was also a music factory when Patsy Cline was recording and "she produced some classics".

Indeed, Ireland has chosen to reclaim some respect for the string-sweetened country pop genre now known as country-politan, the music that singers and producers such as Charlie Rich and Billy Sherrill recorded in the late 1960s. "Pop radio then played country crossover, which was the stuff I hated. It takes a while to get to you. Like I must have heard Charlie Rich two or three times an hour so it kind of got inside my head".

And then 30 years later it made sense, or at least his darker version of it. But he is adamant that he and Holler are not just a country-politan revival band. "If we were just a revival band then I wouldn't want to do it." Although his album makes numerous references to the genre, even to the extent that it is book-ended by tracks with strings, Ireland's passion is never contrived or self-conscious. And while attention has focused on the country-politan connection, Ireland is extremely selective in his other influences, such as the swagger and swing of Buck Owens and Earnest Tubb.

"There's a lot of death and danger and loss on this album," he told New Country last year. "That's clearer to me now than when I was making it. There's lots of ambivalence about all this irrational behaviour - people burning down buildings, people pulling out knives - because no one escapes blame, so no one can be self-righteous."

Ireland, who incidentally has connections with his namesake `two or three generations back", will be playing next Friday and Saturday. Others lined up for the weekend include:

Sunday: The Gourds, a highly praised Austin, Texas combo who, we are told, "move effortlessly between straight country, rock, zydeco, gospel, swing and jazz". They are also pretty hot on "cowboy aesthetics", which presumably means they can rope in the audiences.

Sunday: Kinky Friedman, who claims to be "the only non-land-owning, cigar-smoking, mystery-writing, cat-loving, Irish whisky-drinking, country musician and Jewish sex symbol from Palestine (Palestine, Texas, that is)." Friday: The great Rodney Crowell, who as well as being a fine songwriter, singer, guitarist and producer, is apparently one ace guy.

Friday/Saturday: Calexico, the rhythm section of desert rockers Giant Sand and OP8, their Black Light album of last year was a bizarre and beguiling journey into the netherworld of the Mexican border.

There are many others lined up including Mick Hanly, Dan Crary, the Tennessee Rhythm Riders (actually they are from Camden) and one Travis T. Merle, who will speak on the subject of "Sexual Deviancy and the History of Country Music"; he's a comic.

Brian Boyd's Sleeve Notes returns next week.