FROM BOOTLE TO NASHVILLE: THE REMARKABLE JOURNEY OF SIOBHAN MAHER KENNEDY

One of the first times I ever saw Siobhan Maher was at a venue called The Firehouse in Bootle. We don’t do irony in Bootle so it won’t surprise you to know that this ugly concrete building had in former years been a fire station.

It was cold and always felt empty so it was never my favourite venue but for a Bootle boy like me it was undeniably convenient. It also meant I didn’t have to go into town and mix with the posh people with fancy jackets and floppy haircuts from Aigburth and Allerton!

This all came back to almost 40 years later when I met up with Siobhan Maher Kennedy (to give her full married name) in Nashville where she had spent most of the intervening years.  I quickly learned that Siobhan was Nashville and country music royalty. Everyone in the music community in Nashville knew Siobhan and everybody loves her. It felt like an awfully long way from Bootle, Toto. 

Siobhan has done too much to cover everything in a short piece like this but over a short chat recently we attempted to cover some highlights of what is an extraordinary career.

Born in Waterloo and brought up in Crosby, Siobhan was raised in a musical household with her Mum and Dad (Billy Maher) taking their music around the social clubs and working men’s clubs of the North. Indeed the very first interview I did with Siobhan in the early 90s also involved her parents. This interview was for a book I co-wrote which was about musical families and was cleverly called Harmonious Relations. It seemed inevitable I guess that given her family background a musical career was inevitable. 

She first came to my attention when she provided harmonies first in a band called Passion Polka and then The Persuaders. It was after a Persuaders gig that she first met Tim and Paul Speed (now owners of Camp and Furnace) and bass player Dave Snell who persuaded her to join their band as lead singer. 

The band was called River City People and after a few years of learning their craft they were signed in 1988 by EMI after a bunch of very scared record company execs risked journeying to Bootle’s premier venue, The Firehouse, to sign them before anyone else swooped.

I was writing for NME around this time and this was a real buzz around the city with other bands like The La’s,  The Real People, Rain, Top, The Tambourines and The Farm all garnering attention but The River City People were one of the first actually signed.

As Siobhan remembers it, those first couple of years were a slog with the band trying to break through with their first album ‘Say Something Good’ by playing everywhere that would have them. Along with every other group they were  desperately trying to get played on Radio One which was pretty much the only way to have a hit record then. 

The hit finally came after they compromised and agreed to the record company’s request for them to do a cover version. The band’s version of California Dreaming meant they were all over the radio and played Top of The Pops (the biggest pop music show of the time) a few times. 

Siobhan recalls their TOTP appearances. ‘It was a dream for me to get on that show after growing up watching it. The record company wanted me to buy an expensive dress for the show but I went on wearing what I always wore. It’s what the band’s fans expected. Obviously now we’d had a hit the record company loved us and I was on the pop pages of the Daily Mirror every week with stories which were completely made up! But the real excitement was that suddenly we were opening up for Fleetwood Mac at Wembley.’ 

The group then made a fairly common mistake of spending too much time trying to break the US rather than trying to grow their UK and European audience. The second album arrived just as house music began to dominate the charts and it was effectively over, although the group struggled on until 1993. 

Though the band split EMI kept hold of Siobhan and partnered her with Debbi Peterson from The Bangles in a new group called Kindred Spirit. The group were sent to Nashville to record and that is when Siobhan met Ray Kennedy,  a country music artist and renowned producer (with five Grammys to his name). The two married and Siobhan has spent most of the subsequent period living in Nashville with Ray and their children. 

She has never stopped working and has worked with loads of major artists including the likes of Steve Earle and recently achieved another career highlight with an appearance at the legendary Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. 

Siobhan has never lost her love of her home city (nor her accent) and comes home as often as she can. In 2015 she was here long enough to work on a memorable LIMF commission entitled HerStory. She performed  alongside  other incredible Liverpool music talents in Liverpool Jennifer John, Natalie McCool, and the legend that is Jayne Casey. It was a powerful and joyful set and remains one of my all time favourite Sefton Park musical moments.

Since then Siobhan has continued to be active in Liverpool music. In 2019 she came up with the concept of The Liver Girls, based on the Nashville model of venues like The Listening Room, The Bluebird Cafe ( and the brilliant Narrative monthly nights in Liverpool now use the same format too). The Liver Girls is obviously focused on female singer/songwriters and has taken place at various venues around the city on an occasional basis over the last six years.

Siobhan has spent the whole of her life living in what are arguably the world’s two greatest music cities and I’m intrigued to get her take on any key differences. ‘ For me the music of Liverpool is authentic and organic. It’s just ‘in people’ and if you are musical you absolutely need to make music all the time. It doesn’t matter if you are making money from it or not because you absolutely have to do it.’

‘Nashville is very different. People move to the city to be a songwriter or musician because the industry is there. Everybody – waiters, cashiers etc – have all gone there to try to make it in the music industry but need a day job to survive. It’s the same as LA is for actors’.

I think Siobhan is spot on in her theory and I’d say is living proof of it. She is very much a product of her home city. Steeped in music since her childhood  so that singing and making music is as natural to her as breathing. She will never stop making great music and is giving back to the city that nurtured her through projects like The Liver Girls. 

Written by Kevin McManus