THE Shires are back on our patch tomorrow night for the first time since Britain's pioneering new country duo squeezed in two shows in one day on July 16.

They began by opening the Old Station main-stage bill at the Platform Festival in their "spiritual home" of Pocklington, previewing a handful of songs from their second album, before dashing off to the Lakes Festival in bracing Skegness.

"That was a great day," says Ben Earle, recalling a typically busy diary for The Shires, whose rapid rise was crowned by My Universe entering the charts at number three in October.

Only last year, Ben and Crissie Rhodes had became the first British country act to have a top ten album in their home country, matching Jess Glynne, James Bay and Years & Years in achieving a gold record with their debut in 2015.

The Shires have played regularly in Pocklington, both at Pocklington Arts Centre and twice at the Platform Festival, and tomorrow will be their York Barbican debut. Only the balcony seating will be in place, leaving plenty of room for dancing at the only Yorkshire gig of their biggest tour yet.

York Press:

The Shires' Crissie Rhodes performing at Pocklington's Platform Festival in July. Picture: Tim Nicholson

"The tour's pretty much sold out at every venue, and they're such special places we're playing like Bridgewater Hall in Manchester and Sage in Gateshead," says Ben. "They're such beautiful places where everyone listens so intently and we're still taken aback with surprise that so many people are coming to see us."

The bright new dawn of British country music has brought both The Shires and Ward Thomas – who shared a bill at Pocklington Arts Centre not that long ago – to the fore with both acts challenging the industry norm of releasing an album every two years by cracking on with their second record.

"It was a relatively short time between last year's album [Brave] and My Universe, but we'd had the songs ready for Brave and chose the right time to release it, around the time of the Country2Country show in London," says Crissie. "That was the first place we really got to showcase who we were.

"Only a year earlier, we were performing on the pop stage there; now we were releasing the album and going top ten and ever since then we've been writing for this album."

Ben and Crissie had recorded Brave in the country capital of Nashville and returned to Tennessee to make My Universe at the Sound Stage Studios, following in the country footsteps of Carrie Underwood, Tim McGraw and Lady Antebellum.

"We wrote songs there but we were also writing all the time before them" says Ben. "The big mistake bands make is getting caught up in promo work and not focusing on songwriting."

York Press:

The Shires at Pocklington Old Station in July. Picture: Tim Nicholson

The Shires took the chance to link up other songwriters, such as Kip Moore, while in Nashville for three weeks."There's a great songwriting community there and now we're signed to a big deal with Big Machine Records in America, it's great for us as we can work with songwriters and people are so open to doing stuff with us, especially as we've sold so many records over here."

Already The Shires have played the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville and Ben and Crissie will look to make great strides in the USA next year. "The plan will be to go out there in January and play as many shows as we can," says Crissie.

"The thing is that over here radio is so centralised, whereas in America there are thousands of stations, so it has to be a case of going into as many as possible to play our music, so you could be looking at six to eight months just to prompte one record.

"But we also want to tour here, play festivals, and we're going to Australia for a month next March, so we'll have to go back and forth to America. That's a lot of air miles."

Signing to Big Machine gives The Shires a "massive foot in the door" in America, says Ben. "It's run by Scott Borchetta in Nashville and distributed through Universal," he adds. "He signed Taylor Swift and look where she is now; he did this year's country album by Aerosmith's Steven Tyler, and he's such a passionate guy, saying 'Nashville is built on songs'.

"With us, he's really focused on retaining what we are, which is a British spin on country, but it would be good to have a couple of songs remixed with a more American sound, maybe adding steel guitar."

The album title My Universe reflects The Shires' universe growing ever wider. "Yeah, definitely, both personally and creatively," says Ben. "I also became a dad this year: I have a son called River now. He was born on the day The Shires were headlining the Acoustic Stage at Glastonbury. River was born at 1am and I was on stage that night at 9pm!

"We've really opened up on this album: I've written about being a dad on Everything You Never Gave and Crissie's written about her dad on Daddy's Little Girl, so they're two very personal songs that are going down really well everywhere."

The Shires play York Barbican tomorrow night; doors open at 7pm. Tickets update: barely a handful available at the time of going to press. Box office: 0844 854 2757 or at yorkbarbican.co.uk