The death of Wes McGhee seems to have passed virtually unnoticed, even among the music community. Which is a big shame.

In the late ’70s and all through the ’80s Wes was a regular performer at the Weavers Arms in Newington Green – virtually a lone bastion of country music in those pre-Americana days.

Wes was a stalwart of a small scene that was just beginning to spread among former punks like me and my late friend Steve England, who was inspired to start his own club, Son of Redneck, to spread the rootsier end of country music to the rest of us.

Wes came not from Nashville but Leicestershire, and had started his own band there at the age of 13, before moving to Hamburg as a teenage guitarist for hire for German bands.

After a frustrating eight-year period tied to a contract with a record label that didn’t share his taste in country music, he finally broke free and released not one but two albums in 1978.

By then he was ubiquitous on London’s fledgling country circuit, based largely, if not solely, at the Weavers and the Mean Fiddler, whose owner Vince Power was a great enthusiast.

Wes often played alongside visiting Texas musicians like Rosie Flores and Kimmie Rhodes – both big favourites of mine – as well as his fellow home-grown country boy Hank Wangford.

He had a particular affinity, as do I, for Tejano music from the US-Mexican border, characterised by the twang of acoustic guitars, often blending in with fiddles and the mournful wail of a pedal steel guitar.

It was not until the mid-’80s that roots music began to make an impact in the UK, and it would be a couple more decades before Americana began to reach a wider audience.

Wes was there before both of those, and worked with some great artists, like Butch Hancock, one of his great inspirations, Chuck Prophet and Billy Swan.

He was still writing and playing his guitar until recently, when he was laid low by the respiratory condition COPD, which took his life at the age of 77.

I was hoping to find footage of him at the Weavers in the ’80s but instead here he is at the Mean Fiddler, playing one of his rockier honkytonk numbers, the self-penned Whisky Is My Driver.

For superior recordings of this, and many of his other great tunes – among them Monterrey, Tejano Moon and Neon And Dust – I highly recommend the collection Bead Mountain, Bad Roads And Borders.

RIP Wes McGhee (1948-2026)