“I’M not the biggest fan of Vegas,” says Spencer Cullum, hunched over his laptop high in a hotel over Nevada’s Sin City. “I’ve already seen two vehicles on fire from my window. One of them was a party bus in flames at 4am, right near a gas station! Downtown here is just crazy.” Cullum, born and bred in Romford, Essex, is about to release his second album, Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection 2, a sublime set of eccentric folk and psychedelic exploration. Such music, however, doesn’t get your name in lights in Las Vegas alongside Adele and Penn & Teller: so right now Cullum is here as the pedal steel player for country blockbuster Miranda Lambert.
“She writes great songs,” he explains, “and she lets me play what I want, but it’s still bizarre, these massive crowds. It’s nice playing for a female country artist, though, because the crowd doesn’t go into that ‘bro country’ territory that seems to be taking over America.”
“It is a bit of an anomaly, isn’t it, Spencer in Las Vegas!” laughs BJ Cole, pedal steel maestro and something of a mentor to Cullum. “An ongoing gig with somebody like Miranda means you don’t have to look around for work too much – you can relax and do your own thing.”
Most of the time, then, Nashville-based Cullum is playing country music, but over the last few years he’s branched out with his more eccentric Coin Collection project. On their self-titled album
