Bringing his blend of country, rock and punk to historic pubs across England, Nashville-based singer-songwriter Richie Owens looked to HK Audio’s US distributor KMC Music for support on the road. In response, UK distributor Polar Audio supplied two Polar 10 Mk2 systems to tour manager Paul Hought for venues without their own PA.
The UK Pub Crawl saw Owens joined by fellow musicians Bob Ocker and Joe Sharp, in eight shows across Yorkshire, Oxfordshire and Merseyside, from the Grosvenor Hotel in Robin Hood’s Bay to The Mess at Fort Perch Rock, a coastal defence battery built to protect the Port of Liverpool. The idea was to take Appalachian music and storytelling back to the kind of small rooms where it feels most at home.
‘The Polar 10 Mk2 was an ideal choice for the Richie Owens tour because it is compact and powerful enough to fill a room,’ says Polar Marketing Executive, Mike Lambo. ‘With the tour spanning multiple venues, portability and simplicity were essential, but without compromising on sound quality. The Polar 10 delivered on all fronts, providing big, clear sound from a system that can be deployed in minutes.’
‘When you’re travelling from venue to venue, the last thing you want is to spend half your evening setting up equipment,’ Owens offers. ‘These systems made our lives so much easier and allowed us to concentrate on what we came to do: play music and tell stories. They’ve proven that great sound doesn’t have to come with a truckload of equipment.’
Highlights of the tour included a night at the Grosvenor with Steve Phillips of the Notting Hillbillies and outdoor shows around Fairport’s Cropredy Convention in Oxfordshire, where the trio reconnected with Fairport Convention’s Dave Pegg and folk singer Ralph McTell.
Owens, who has been performing in the UK for more than 35 years, sees a direct line between British folk traditions and the music he grew up with in the Smoky Mountains: ‘A good many of those songs crossed the Atlantic long before we did,’ says Owens. ‘I’ve always believed music works best when there’s not much standing between the people playing it and the people hearing it. If you can do that in a 300-year-old pub with a little history soaked into the walls, well, that’s about as close to heaven as a travelling musician ought to expect.’
The tour forms part of Owens’ ongoing Appalachia series, the latest instalment of which, Appalachia: Ballads, Bloodlines & the Long Journey Home – Volume Two, was released in September 2026. Owens plans to return to Europe four times in 2027 beginningin January, and hopes to bring Polar with him again.
More: https://polar.uk.com