When I was involved in setting up the UK Country Music Association, which aims to amplify the voice of our domestic scene, I got to know Geoff Meads, who designed a stellar website for the UK-CMA.
Geoff and his wife Victoria are Tennessee Twin, a duo based in Cambridge who made their debut at Country2Country in 2024. I saw them for the first time in 2021 at the Blackpool British Country Music Festival where I was struck by their crowd control, easy stage presence and gorgeous harmonies. The pair met in a recording studio, and their song ‘Wings of Red, White and Blue’ won them a competition that saw them head to Nashville for CMA Fest. They have recently released an acoustic version of that song.
Their 2019 EP “Tips in a Jar” includes a groovy tune called ‘Move On’, while the more recent ‘Rear View Mirror’, about moving on from your regrets, has a great arrangement and a perky riff. In ‘Rewind’ and ‘Apple Tree’, the duo have carpe diem songs that remind the listener to remember the good moments. The latter, which was written during lockdown underneath such a tree, is Victoria’s favourite song of theirs.
Then there’s the lovers’ tiff ‘When We Move’, the recorder-assisted folk ballad ‘Alice’, ‘Every Story’, a melodic screed about the perils of gossip, and the excellent uptempo songs ‘Waiting Tables’ and ‘Two Heart Rendezvous’. ‘Hold My Hand’, meanwhile, is an emotional number which brings people to tears. Victoria says that the pair “have a friend who lost his daughter a few years ago, and he connects with that song. He asks us to play it. When he’s in the audience, you can’t look at him. He finds it cathartic; it brings her closer to him again”.
Geoff’s grandpa was a baker who wasn’t able to fight in World War Two because his occupation was deemed essential to the citizenry. Amazingly, Geoff told me a few weeks before their C2C performance, he would entertain the troops like Vera Lynn or Gracie Fields as part of a “Glenn Miller-style big band” on Friday and Saturday nights.
Young Geoff got his education from his grandpa on Sunday teatime. “He literally could pick up any instrument and five minutes later have a tune after it. Come Sundays we’d all have to pick something up and play something, mostly quite badly! My mum played church organ so we did have a pedal organ in our house”.
Geoff picked the tenor horn as his first instrument, “one of the least glamorous instruments. It’s neither big nor small. It very rarely gets any lead parts, even when you’re the top tenor horn player in the band. It turned out to be quite useful, because you play all harmony and all offbeats”.
Brass bands were next for Geoff, along with a tutor who was a front-desk player in the All-Star Band of Harry Mortimer, “the Bruce Springsteen of the British brass band world” and the man who brought brass to the Royal Albert Hall. Geoff was inspired to play guitar in rock’n’roll bands by Simple Minds, while his dad enjoyed music by the First Ladies of country, your Tammys, your Lorettas, your Dollys.
Victoria was enraptured by the TV show ‘Nashville’ and wanted to perform some of the songs from the show in tandem with Geoff. “It took hardly any time at all because the music is just so strong”, he says. “There was a lot of panicking in my head as to how I would play some of this stuff because you’ve got some of the absolute best players and writers in the world. When you start to dig into it, tracks like ‘Undermine’, written by Kacey Musgraves, is a song that someone in the early stages of their writing career would write. It’s very cleverly done.
“We’d sung together before and it was always a pleasant experience. We knew our voices worked together. I’d only seen bare bones of that show, so I had go off and do some research. Weirdly the first three or four episodes are perhaps the best ones. They were establishing characters but the first two series were very much about the music”.
It was natural for Geoff and Victoria to sing songs written by The Civil Wars and Striking Matches, who are both male/female duos. For their part, Tennessee Twin became a Gunnar/Scarlett pairing rather than a Rayna/Deacon one. When they started working on their own songs, which they describe as a cross between The Shires and The Civil Wars, Geoff wrote the lyrics and Victoria the melodies. They were determined to try and write their own version of the rapid-fire Gunnar/Scarlett duet ‘Plenty Far to Fall’, where each syllable is sung in harmony.
For Geoff, playing tenor horn helped him out when singing with Victoria. “As a second line player in an ensemble, you have to follow the melody that is being created by others, so you get used to synching in. You look at a score and there are an infinite number of ways of playing that score”.
“I was a first violin so everybody followed me!” says career leader Victoria.
As well as putting on their own songwriter nights, the pair also perform with fellow singer/songwriters Sarah Yeo and Donna Marie as part of the Songs & Stories Collective. The quartet have appeared at festivals including Country on the Coast, Buckle and Boots and the West Country festival too, covering ‘A Life That’s Good’, the anthem of the ‘Nashville’ TV show.
Geoff and Victoria have a guiding star in Ashley McBryde, whom Victoria admires for “her storytelling and her rawness, how brave she is. She is very much herself and it’s something to aspire to”. These days McBryde, who in September 2025 performed at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the Opry centenary celebrations, appears “a bit more feminine and an individual” who has grown into being a real frontwoman.
Geoff quotes Tim Minchin’s advice for success: be good at what you do and improve all the time; be true to yourself; and, above all, be nice. This makes Geoff a perfect choice to represent the outward face of the UK country/Americana scene, all the better because Tennessee Twin are fine ambassadors with their tender, harmony-laden songs.
