Our Backstage Spotlight: Raintown

From Glasgow, Scotland to ‘Music City, Nashville, USA,’ Raintown is already creating quite a buzz!

Fusing their eclectic musical influences with the roots based instrumentation and conversational writing style of country music, Paul Bain and Claire McArthur of Raintown are a contemporary twist on a country duo.

A couple in real life as well as onstage, the duo just returned home from a much talked about performance at the CMA Global Party in Nashville, the show that heralds the start of the biggest Country Music Festival in the world, CMA Fest.

Raintown created a bit of history in that one event by becoming the first Scottish act ever to be invited to perform!

Recently, the group was nominated and made the top 5 for the UKCountryMusic.com Listeners Award for their song Just One Kiss. They’ve reached #2 in the UK & Ireland Hot Disc Chart, and they have just completed a new music video of their single Picture of Us:

Stuart Cameron of Up Country Magazine says, “This duo from Scotland has already created a big buzz in the industry with their debut single, Just One Kiss. They are being hailed (for the best of reasons) as Britain’s answer to Lady Antebellum. They show that British acts are able to come up with a sound which matches anything coming out of Nashville right now.”

The duo says their name Raintown, “represents an ideal of community, (in particular from heavy manufacturing industries like Ship Building and Coal Mining that were prevalent in post-war Glasgow), of hard working, hard living, but kindhearted, people, who used music (in our families’ case Country Music) to come together and share important moments.”

“We are very much a work in progress,” says Paul. “To be honest for us that will never change, we always believe we can do something better and try and improve across the board always. So with that said, although we had been performing, and I use that term loosely, for a number of years we were perhaps the prime example of getting into bad habits.”

So when Raintown found out about Tom Jackson and his Live Music Methods, they were really excited! At first, they absorbed everything they could from Tom’s YouTube videos and Onstage Success blogs.

Having worked on their live performance, applying Tom’s concepts to their show, they realized it made all the difference in how their audience saw them at Nashville’s CMA Global Party when comments like this came in:

“Based on their album, I expected the live Raintown experience to be enjoyable. But I was hardly prepared for the show-stealing triumph they put on at The Stage on Lower Broadway in Nashville. Their performance was high-powered, charismatic, and a joy to behold. I could sense the ripples spreading through the room as everyone realized, ‘These people could be REALLY big…'” Pat Geary (Voice of Country: Nashville)

Since their trip to Nashville, Raintown has joined us Backstage and they plan on getting all of Tom’s DVDs so they can really dig into Tom’s teaching.

Raintown is currently working on their first theater show in the UK and plan to move onto a UK tour after that.
Their next album will be written and recorded in Nashville, and over the next months and years their goal is to make an impact in the States, Canada, and across Europe and Australia.

But as Claire says, “Most of all, we want to keep improving, getting better at all aspects of our career in Country Music!”

Tom Jackson

Tom is uniquely talented and skilled at transforming an artist's live show into a magical experience for the audience; helping artists at every level create a live show that is engaging and memorable, teaching them to exceed their audiences' expectations and to create fans for life. Tom has taught indie and major artists of every genre. He has worked with Taylor Swift, Le Crae, Home Free, The Tenors, Shawn Mendes, The Band Perry, Francesca Battistelli, Jars of Clay, & many more. Tom also teaches at colleges, conferences and events worldwide.

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