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COUNTRY sensations The Shires are in Nashville, hanging out at Ed Sheeran’s aftershow party – as you do.

The drinks are flowing when, through the corner of his eye, one half of the British duo, Ben Earle, spots a girl slightly worse for wear and, er, upside down.

Her legs are high in the air, being supported by none other than Ed himself.

She’s busy trying to guzzle beer through a tube...as you do.

“I turned round and looked a bit closer,” reports Ben. “I thought, ‘That looks like Crissie (the other half of The Shires). It can’t be!’”

Of course it WAS the irrepress-ible Crissie Rhodes, enjoying a party game known as “a keg stand” with the flame-haired troubadour.

She picks up the story: “I just walked up to Ed and said, ‘Oh, what’s going on here then?’

“He told me it was a keg stand. I thought it looked fun and asked if I could have a go. ‘Yeah, course,’ he replied.

“I was the first girl from the whole party to get involved,” says Crissie. “I began a trend,everyone was up for it after that.”

The wild night following Ed’s gig in the Tennessee capital’s vast Bridgestone Arena led to a fruitful collaboration between Sheeran and The Shires.

It’s a badge of honour to be handed a track by the man of the moment, a prolific hit-maker for himself and others. But it’s no real shock that smouldering ballad Stay The Night, a Sheeran co-write with John Newman, appears on Ben and Crissie’s new album, Accidentally On Purpose.

The endorsement is further evidence of the inexorable rise of two committed, compatible singers who started out as solo X Factor hopefuls.

In country music, the pair have found their home as writers and performers because, as they stress, “We’ve never tried to be cool.”

Ben, the band’s chief songwriter who looks pretty cool to me, describes his own encounter with Ed at that fateful party.

“I was just coming back from the toilet when he pointed at me. I went over and said, ‘Hi, I’m Ben from The Shires’ but he knew exactly who I was and told me, ‘Yeah, I pre-ordered your last album.’

“I couldn’t believe it. He mentioned liking Other People’s Things so I was just blown away.”

The next step came when The Shires asked to write with Ed only to discover, unsurprisingly, he was busy with his world tour.

“But his publisher sent over two songs and one was Stay The Night, which we just loved,” says Ben. “The demo was so Ed...just him on a sofa playing.”

It’s clear dreadlocked Ben and bubbly blonde Crissie drew inspiration from Sheeran’s natural, down-to-earth approach.

In an upbeat and wonderfully unguarded interview, they seem thrilled with their new album, the follow-up to 2015 debut Brave and 2016’s My Universe.

The album’s mood is set by shamelessly high-spirited tracks such as Guilty, the first single, and the infectious Echo.

Ben says: “An old school friend messaged me to say it’s so refreshing to just hear something so unashamedly positive.”

Recorded in Nashville, Accidentally On Purpose retains country flavours but pushes further into pop territory to reflect their widening appeal...a similar career path to the likes of Shania Twain and Taylor Swift.

The title track was inspired by Crissie’s fling with a bloke she met at, you’ve guessed it, Ed’s rave-up.

“I took a liking to him and hung out with him pretty much every night after that,” she says.

One day in the studio, she was chatting about her dilemma of whether to stay on in the city to keep the romance afloat...and Ben starting typing.

“Basically, everything she was saying was a lyric and I had this title Accidentally On Purpose,” he explains.

“I said to Crissie, ‘Are you saying you might accidentally on purpose miss your flight?’”

Crissie confesses: “I accidentally stayed a bit too long. I did miss my flight but the relationship fizzled out. I didn’t want another transatlantic relationship anyway.”

I’m meeting The Shires at The Sun’s HQ overlooking the Thames.

They’re still pinching themselves over their success story which began in earnest shortly after both were evicted from The X Factor — one in 2012, the other in 2013 — at the Bootcamp stage.

They’re often mistaken for an item but Ben has a long-term partner in Vicki, who has just given birth to their second child, a boy called Tennessee.

Crissie says: “Apparently I was pregnant at one point! When Ben announced that another baby was on the way, someone said, ‘Crissie, you look amazing’.

“We’re actually like brother and sister. There aren’t many male-female duos. They’re mainly in country music.”

Ben decides “we’re the Torvill and Dean of country” and reveals it was Vicki who kept him holding the dream during what he calls “the fight stage” of his career.

“I almost gave up,” he says. “Just before I met Crissie, I’d almost had enough of never getting anywhere. I was working five days a week in a shop and doing two days’ music. I even applied to university to do law but she (Vicki) said, ‘Ben, you have to give it at least one more try.’”

Cue his Facebook message — “There must be a country singer somewhere” — to which Crissie responded. The rest, as they say, is history.

With that in mind, I’m keen to discover the background of two singers who named themselves The Shires after counties they’ve lived in...Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire.

For Ben, music has been his life and he’s living proof that perseverance pays off in the end. “I had a record deal from the age of 17 to 20 as a solo artist and it was awful,” he says. “It didn’t work at all for me, for loads of reasons, but I’m not bitter about it.

“Then we both were on The X Factor and got rejected from that.”

His first taste of the limelight came by royal appointment years earlier when he was chosen to be a Windsor Castle chorister.

He picks up his iPhone and shows me a YouTube clip of The Queen’s Christmas Message from 1999 which begins with a close-up of a bespectacled Ben.

You hear his angelic tones on a performance of Once In Royal David’s City, at St. George’s Chapel in front of Her Maj.

“I was in the choir for a long time and I sang at royal weddings,” he adds — but admits that Harry and Meghan have yet to call.

“It was a really sweet story, actually. Being a chorister was the only way my mum could afford to send me to the school.

“We got a massive scholarship but part of the deal was you had to sing on Christmas Day.”

“Hard labour wasn’t it!” inter-jects Crissie with one of her mischievous peals of laughter.

Ben smiles at her and continues: “My mum was single and she took a liking to this guy in the choir. I passed her number back to him and later they married and he became my stepdad. At 12, I was living in the castle’s Horseshoe Cloister opposite the chapel.”

As for Crissie, her love of music began with Geordie actor Jimmy Nail’s country-influenced hit Crocodile Shoes. “My mum would put on Pink Floyd and The Who and I’d be like, ‘No, I want Jimmy Nail!’ I just loved the sound of it and the story.”

While still at school, she grew to love Alison Krauss, LeAnn Rimes, Shania Twain and Faith Hill. “I used to imitate what-ever they did. I remember hearing Martina McBride and was like, ‘Wow!’ I’d just sit day after day singing, singing, singing. It was all I ever did.”

At university, Crissie harboured ambitions to be a session singer, happy to do background vocals behind the scenes.

Then she began singing in pubs and at weddings and maintains: “I still believe that if this all crumbles, I’d go back to singing people down the aisle. The pubs might be more hard work! But I was more than happy to load all my gear night after night into pubs and squash myself in a corner. Ben joined me a few times on those gigs.”

It was around that time, late 2012, early 2013, that Crissie took the X Factor plunge as a solo artist. She says: “My family were saying, ‘You need to have a go. You’re not getting any younger and need to be seen.’”

Ben, who was on the year before, addresses Crissie directly: “It was different for me because, with you, we were already together so you being kicked off strengthened our resolve. When I came back from it, I also wanted to show them they were wrong.”

Crissie says she “really enjoyed the process. I just saw it as a TV show and, I mean, they presented me as a country singer, which was really exciting. There was another girl, Megan McKenna, who was my competitor and they said there was only one place for a country singer.

“I had been 8/1 to win at the bookies. I was the best odds out of everyone, then I just got kicked out. They chose a song I didn’t feel was right for me — Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls.”

She remembers Ben pacing up and down by the Thames, wondering what he would do if she made it to the next stage.

“We couldn’t have continued because, contractually, they tied you in,” says Ben. “The hilarious thing is that less than a year later, our single Nashville Grey Skies had gone to radio.”

Five years on, with Accidentally On Purpose entering the album charts at No3, skies are looking distinctly blue for The Shires.

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THE SHIRES Accidentally On Purpose

Accidentally On Purpose is out now on Decca Records. UK Tour runs May 12 to June 10, including London’s Royal Albert Hall on May 18.

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