It is not even teatime when The Castellows arrive onstage, and the evening sun is shining across Wembley Stadium. It feels entirely fitting for the glistening, gleaming, summery country music the trio provide.
“Place To Leave” and “Cowboy Kind Of Love” possess a certain old-school charm, and the sisters are clearly enjoying their first taste of a stage on this scale. Their traditional take on country music is perhaps the only one of its kind we will hear all evening, but it never feels out of place in surroundings as vast as these.
They take their name from their great-grandmother’s maiden name, and their music follows in a similarly grand tradition. Yet they finish with a song everybody knows, and their highly convincing version of Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing In The Dark” is perfectly in keeping with the pop sensibilities that sit alongside their rootsier sound.
Expect to see plenty more of the Balkcom sisters.
Back in the spring, when I reviewed Heavy On The Soul, I said that, let’s be honest, Ty Myers is astonishing. And he is.
For someone so young to command a stage of this size is quite sensational. The superb “Run, Run, Run” showcases his rich, deep voice and soulful grooves, while the trumpet adds another dimension throughout.
Just as impressive is the way he takes Tyler Childers’ “Feathered Indians” and makes it sound like one of his own. The only other song from Heavy On The Soul is “Two Trains”, which is every bit as tremendous here as it is on the record.
Then, much like The Castellows before him, Myers finishes with one he knows everybody will recognise. Except he takes The Zutons’ “Valerie”, drains away some of its usual cheer and bends it towards his own sound. It should not work quite as well as it does.
Give him another ten years and he might be where Luke Combs is when he appears later. On this evidence, you would not bet against it.
With all due respect to the artists who appeared before him, Thomas Rhett represents a step up in class. An arena act in his own right, he has no trouble commanding what is now becoming an enormous Wembley crowd.
Given 45 minutes, “Make Me Wanna”, “T-Shirt” and the rest provide an almost perfect foil for the main event. Rhett clearly loves being onstage, too, pacing up and down and taking ownership of every inch of it.
And the hits? He plays them all—or at least it feels that way. The man has accumulated an incredible number of number-one records, and “Die A Happy Man” seems particularly appropriate this evening after he tells Wembley how much he loves playing shows of this size.
He eventually brings his 45 minutes to a close with “Crash And Burn”, by which point only one conclusion seems possible: in another year or two, it could easily be Thomas Rhett’s name sitting at the top of bills like this.
“Some day, these lights are gonna fade… some other good ol’ boy be on the stage.”
Eventually, the song predicts, somebody else will occupy this stage. That is the thought behind “Tell ’Em About Tonight”, from Luke Combs’ 2026 album The Way I Am. Yet rarely have two lines better told the story of a bloke who has taken over the world in nine years—or seemed less likely to come true any time soon.
Just look at the facts. Across three consecutive nights at Wembley Stadium, around a quarter of a million people will watch him. Country music is mainstream. That is no longer an opinion. It is simply a fact.
The set begins with “My Kinda Saturday Night”, and Combs is greeted with the sort of adulation afforded to the biggest rock stars, never mind country singers. What follows is a masterclass in how to deliver stadium rock. “Lovin’ On You”, “Hurricane” and “She Got The Best Of Me” all arrive early, powered by that gritty voice and a delivery built for places of this size.
He speaks movingly about how much he loves doing what he does and how much he loves being onstage. Everything about him makes you believe it, too. Yet Combs handles the quiet ones as well as anybody. “One Number Away” retains its intimacy despite the vast surroundings, while “Sleepless In A Hotel Room” appears to take him through some very real pain. The soulful “Rethink Some Things” offers another side again.
Then there is what he calls the trilogy of songs written for his wife, Nicole: “Beautiful Crazy”, “Better Together” and “Forever After All”. Their connection with the crowd is obvious. Combs’ greatest gift might be making almost 90,000 people feel as though he is singing directly to each one of them.
Around halfway through, “Back In The Saddle” arrives as an enormous rock song. It also underlines something else. The old cliché says that Nirvana came along and wiped hard rock from the face of the earth. What they actually did, in my estimation, was send hard rock fans towards country music.
The biggest modern country songs possess all the same stylings as the Bon Jovis, Mötley Crües and Aerosmiths of this world: huge choruses, enormous guitars and a sense of communal celebration. Combs understands all of it instinctively.
That connection becomes even clearer after the last of those three songs. While Combs tunes his acoustic guitar, the band plays a medley featuring “Crazy Train”, “She Will Be Loved”, “Billie Jean”, “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” and “Something Like That”. It crosses metal, pop, rock and country without any of it sounding remotely out of place.
An Ed Sheeran cover, “Dive”, follows, before the bitter and altogether more vitriolic “Cold As You”. Fair enough, really, because you have always got to put a breakup somewhere.
Combs knows what everyone is here for, though, and does what any self-respecting arena rocker would: he picks up the pace. “When It Rains It Pours” is quite sensational, while the honky-tonk-ready “1, 2 Many” sees former England captain John Terry come onstage to down a celebratory beer with him.
“Beer Never Broke My Heart” (which contends that ‘football teams’ have – just like mine on this pitch in 2011 – I might not get the romantic ones, but that one, yeah) then brings the main set to an end. That would be a showstopper for most artists, but Combs still has three more.
He returns alone with his acoustic guitar and speaks lovingly about what he calls the greatest song ever written. He remembers listening to Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” with his dad in the car, and whatever debate has surrounded his version, he does the song immense justice.
The chart-topping, sensational “Where The Wild Things Are” follows, before “Ain’t No Love In Oklahoma” finishes the evening as a gloriously big, stomping thing.
Quite frankly, Luke Combs is in a league of his own when it comes to this stuff. He is 36, roughly the same age Bruce Springsteen was when he began filling these same stadiums during the 1980s.
Contrary to the lyric that began this review, there is nothing to suggest that Combs’ lights are going to fade any time soon. He is riding the crest of a wave.
If you can play Wembley Stadium three nights on the trot, then whether or not you possess the universal cultural reach that stadium stars enjoyed in the old days hardly matters. Plenty of people connect deeply with your music.
Damn right, as he puts it himself, I’ll tell them about tonight.
