Radio Free, Silverado

WZR2 FM1.01 on the dial

Transmission One - The Big Bear Dave Vader show

Somewhere between the rolling hills of England and the fading glow of the American dream… a signal has started broadcasting.

At first it arrived quietly.
A flicker through the static.
A late-night voice drifting out of the darkness.

Somewhere beyond the dashboard lights and motel signs.

A neon oasis after miles and miles of nothingness.

Now the signal has a name.

Radio Free Silverado.

Part pirate radio station. Part travelling broadcast. Part cinematic dream about a new album from Our Man in the Field.

This is not simply a record release.

It is the beginning of a whole new way take your musical medicine.

Over the last year, the band have spent most of their lives somewhere out on the road — more than 150 shows across the UK and Europe — from Glastonbury’s Acoustic Stage to Hyde Park with Neil Young, alongside long stretches opening for Chuck Prophet, The Delines and Jackson Dean. Night drives. Empty service stations. Cheap coffee. Broken sleep. Long conversations somewhere after midnight.

Silverado was born out there.

Recorded at Mark Knopfler’s British Grove Studios and produced by Guy Fletcher, the album captures a band operating at a completely new level — sonically expansive but deeply human at its core. There are traces of widescreen soul, late-night AM radio, worn-out highway romance and voices echoing through static somewhere deep in the night.

But Silverado is not an American record.

It is America viewed through the eyes of outsiders — a British perspective looking across the Atlantic at the mythology, beauty, contradictions and fractures of the modern American dream. A love letter to good America and good Americans and they need it, am I right?

The musicians who drift through the record only deepen that feeling. Ethan Johns. Sonny Landreth. PP Arnold. Robbie McIntosh. Nick Pini. Will Fry. Guy Fletcher himself. Even Glynn Johns quietly appearing in the room during sessions, like some ghost from another era of recording history.

Everything about the project feels more than just another album.

And so Radio Free Silverado emerged.

A fictional station (for now anyway) broadcasting from somewhere between reality and imagination — carrying songs, stories, movies, transmissions, live sessions and fragments from the Silverado universe. The idea has started spilling naturally into films, artwork, merchandise, live shows and the growing community gathering around the project.

The truth is, the foundations are already there.

You know how it is, stuff’s been going on, am I right? BBC Radio 2 and 6 Music have championed the music. Bill Bentley called the last record “once in a decade”. Bob Harris has repeatedly backed the band. But the most important thing has happened more quietly: people have started finding each other around the songs.

That is what Radio Free Silverado really is.

Not nostalgia.
Not cosplay.
Not revivalism.

Something stranger than that.

A band building a new groove in real time.

And this is only the beginning.

Stay tuned.