Richie Owens Takes Appalachian Roots to British pubs with HK Audio POLAR

Nashville-based singer-songwriter Richie Owens brought his blend of country, rock and punk to the UK this summer, playing historic pubs across England with HK Audio POLAR 10 MK2 column systems along for the ride.

Running from 11 to 18 August, the UK Pub Crawl saw Owens, joined by fellow musicians Bob Ocker and Joe Sharp, play eight shows across Yorkshire, Oxfordshire and Merseyside, from the Grosvenor Hotel in Robin Hood's Bay to The Mess at Fort Perch Rock in New Brighton. The idea was to take Appalachian music and storytelling back to the kind of small rooms where it feels most at home.

When KMC Music, HK Audio's US distributor, asked whether the brand could support Owens on the road, HK Audio brought in its UK distributor POLAR – which supplied two POLAR 10 MK2 systems to tour manager Paul Hought for venues without their own PA.

"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 Mike Lambo, Marketing Executive at POLAR. "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."

For an acoustic trio moving from pub to pub, that mattered. "When you're travelling from venue to venue, the last thing you want is to spend half your evening setting up equipment," says Owens. "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 on 18 September 2026. Owens plans to return to Europe four times in 2027, starting in January and hopes to bring POLAR with him again.

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