Allison Moorer: (I can't believe it's) not country

Tonight, for one night only, Telford's Warehouse, Chester is the home of country music. Or at least it is in theory. It might equally be the home of something else: soul music, for instance, or the Terry Wogan Fan Club. It's hard to tell.

The walls are close, the ceiling low, the seating arranged in tight rows. There must be 150 in tonight. The place is packed. In the front two rows a handful of shaven heads in funky duds gawp at the gimlet-featured beauty on stage, lip-syncing the lyrics of each song as it is sung. Behind them, and dotted throughout the company, are a neutral crew of middle-youth to middle-aged men with hair on their heads and pints in their hands. Some of them have moustaches. All are wearing catalogue casuals. But by far the biggest constituency is a silent, grizzled majority in billowing print polyester and Rohan slacks. They are as graciously receptive to events as a tour party absorbing contingency plans on a Saga holiday. They utter not a word to each other but take discreet photographs between songs and clap politely. They certainly do not punch the air or yell "Whooo!"

"Mah oh mah, y'all are so polite," says the woman on stage in a slightly theatricalised Alabama drawl, shifting her weight on to one hip so that the blades of blond-red hair around her face re-settle like a rack of knives. The round eyes of the giraffe on the faux-Rousseau jungle mural behind her seem to widen slightly. "Are you always this way?"

A voice erupts into the silence from the back of the room. It's a big Yorkshire voice. "It's because George is not in tonight," it says.

"Wey-ull, ah'm sure glad you left his ass at home," says the woman, thickening her drawl. The silence deepens. "Uh, this wern's called 'Dying Breed'." The guitarist fires off a funerary twang. "No one grows old in this household/ We are a dyin' breed ..." It's a song about the compulsions of narcosis ­ whisky, barbiturates, heroin ­ and the way they can run in a family. Everyone seems to quite enjoy listening to it.

Allison Moorer is not the first Nashville artist in the world to find that early breaches in the ramparts of English taste reveal a strange social admixture of cool young dudes, family men and listeners to Terry Wogan. (The last-named are on board tonight chiefly because of Moorer's "A Soft Place to Fall", which is a regular feature of the Radio Two daytime playlist, having been the ballad that dignified the 1999 Robert Redford weepie, The Horse Whisperer. It is the only song that rates an anticipatory clap on introduction at Telford's.) And how welcoming Telford's and Tel Wogan must seem in comparison to the hustle on Music Row. In Nashville, the house-proud home of country music, ferociously narrow radio programming has reduced country music to, in the words of Moorer's British publicist, a "homogenised sound carefully marketed to an audience largely composed of women over 30 ­ commercial country is now in the hands of the giant radio conglomerates." The Big Hat music of country mythology has been pushed up and away by the sudden growth of Big Hair. No bad thing, some might say.

Actually, it's just a pointless, patronising thing, says Moorer, who is a Nashville resident herself but is no more interested in big hair than she is in big hats. She has made three albums, superbly co-written with her husband Doyle "Butch" Primm, each of which has put additional country mileage between herself and the governing Nashville aesthetic ­ a sort of de-twanged, hi-tech ballad candyfloss, owing rather more to The Eagles than to Hank Williams.

The new one, Miss Fortune, bears no trace of that aesthetic, being a bleak meditation on "the inevitability of life ­ y'know: relationships break down, bad shit happens, people live on the streets, drink themselves to death, life goes on." Its moral position is oblique, its music a diffuse tumble of southern musicological debris slicked on top with possibly the most soulful white female voice you've ever heard. If Nashville stands for tradition ossified by social conservatism and market engineering, then Miss Fortune stands for tradition leaning on the bar and putting the moves on you with a deep, deep sigh and an old-fashioned look. This is deviant country.

Whispering Bob Harris, whose Bob Harris Country dignifies early Thursday evenings on Radio Two, reckons Moorer might be queering her own pitch by making her musical identity so slippery.

"It's the way she is and isn't Nashville," he says, cagily. "I'm a great fan. I think she has a voice to die for. And I love the way there's no division between her private life and her musical life. That shows her passion and commitment. But she does fall between the cracks. She's half way between what I call the organic, natural way of recording ­ the alt.country, bluegrass, Americana scene ­ and the Nashville gloss and songwriting factory."

He worries that because she is neither one thing nor the other, she stands little chance of getting on the heavily formatted American radio network ­ still the only sure way to sell records in any quantity in the US. "Also, by not having a specific target to aim at, and taking on the world in general, she's putting herself up against people she needn't put herself up against. Once you get into a wider market, you're starting again." He tells a story about watching Moorer play on Music Row among the great and good of country music, in front of an audience rank with major label execs. "She was brilliant. You had the feeling: this is the real thing. And everyone from the majors was saying, 'Wow, this is the real thing!'" He pauses dramatically. "But I wouldn't sign her."

Can it be so simple? Can you be too good? And not sufficiently alt.country, New Country, Neo-Traditionalist Country, Country-Rock, Western Swing, Americana, Bluegrass, Jazzgrass, Nugrass or Schmugrass to be worth the candle-glimmer of our attention?

Of course not. The reviews in this country for Miss Fortune have been universally excitable. The shaven dudes, family men and Saga holidaymakers who make up her British audience have bought 6,000 copies in its first fortnight. Terry Wogan is now playing the more amiable tracks from the album on heavy rotation.

But Moorer does present other difficulties, to consumers as much as to retailers and programmers. She is slightly disturbing. Her country deviancy is not actually a formal thing at all. Her differentness is not comfily self-sealing in the way of, say, lo-fi post-modernist alt.country, the wistful grit of Americana or the sheer craziness of neo-bluegrass twisters The Asylum Street Spankers.

The real trouble with Moorer lies in her content, which is subtly but resolutely bleak. She sings about addiction neither from the moral perspective nor from the gothic one, but from the point of compulsion. She sings about the failure of love not as a drama but as an inevitability. And if there was ever an uptempo song about happiness designed to make you suspicious of that emotion, then "Up this High" is it. There's a sense that life, rendered in Allison Moorer songs, would be a sentence of restless inertia punctuated by moments of dreadful insight. Not very Nashville really (indeed, the US edition of the album excludes the song "Bully Jones", which takes a pragmatically amused view of the difficulties encountered in living with a monkey on your back. Fortunately we get it and it rocks).

If you ask Moorer whether she thinks life is perfectible according to the American cultural model, she laughs.

"No I do not," she says, her voice rather less Alabamian than when she's doing her onstage knife-tossing routine. "I think a lot of people live in a fantasy world ­ people want life to be a movie. And it is not a movie. That's why we have movies."

When they finally get round to doing the Allison Moorer biopic, of course, they will go to town. They will enjoy doing the farmer's daughter's Alabama childhood. They will enjoy exploring the relationship between Allison and her musical sister Shelby Lynne. And they will certainly expend a lot of resources showing how Allison's dad, in a drunken fit, took a gun and shot first her mother and then himself in front of his teenage daughters.

What will be harder to show in a movie will be the way Moorer's country deviancy is every bit as moving in its way as that of some of the other great deviants. Gram Parsons being one. After all, it's the subtle deviations from the country norm that have kept country alive and out of the box marked DOA, right from the very start. Lest we forget, Hank Williams was turned out of the Grand Old Opry for the hubris of using drums.

She's currently reading Gore Vidal's The Decline and Fall of the American Empire. She's listening to "Debris" by The Faces.

'Miss Fortune' is out now on Universal South. Allison Moorer will be touring the UK in October and November