Nathan Carter is on his way to the airport. Our call drops as he crosses the border, but minutes later, the country music singer is back, taking up the thread without missing a beat. Fermanagh-based Carter is used to working on the fly, fitting it in, making it work.
“I probably would describe myself as a workaholic, yeah,” he says (He is currently running four businesses). Graft is in the Carter DNA. Thirty-four-year old Nathan is a household name, with 26-year-old brother Jake quickly getting there too.
There’s no tension between the Liverpudlian siblings though –they’re best buds, and always have been. “Myself and Nathan were always quite close as brothers; we never really got on each other’s nerves,” Jake, who is already at the airport, tells me. The pop singer is all set to fly to Spain to gig at Carter on the Costa, a now annual hooley in the Spanish sun.
Nathan is the star attraction of a line-up of country-music luminaries that includes Johnny Brady and Lisa McHugh, who Nathan briefly dated a decade ago (they’ve stayed friends and she’s now happily married with two kids). The Carter brothers will be fitting in a recording of their podcast, The Carter Couch among their gig commitments on the Costa. It was, Nathan says, “Jake’s idea”, but Nathan is keen to embrace newness these days, and the podcast, with its refreshingly irreverent banter between himself, Jake and Dancing With the Stars pro Karen Byrne (Jake’s girlfriend of six years), is ju.