Courteeners headed to Warrington on Thursday night for two intimate shows to support the launch of their Pink Cactus Cafe album. Mixing tracks from the record with some old favourites, they delighted the crowd for an hour.
"Play some Oasis" the scouse guy to our left shouts for some reason half way through the set. "Play the classics" he shouts after the next song. Inadvertently he sums up the issue facing Liam Fray and co right now. With a back catalogue, especially their debut St Jude that went to the top of the charts last year fifteen years on, full of songs that defined a particular period of Northern English working class existence, new material has a hard landing, especially as the nostalgic wave of the Gallaghers threatens to overwhelm its surroundings as we move into 2025.
As an arena tour approaches, these intimate shows linked to the album's release and part of the mechanism now that guitar bands have to play to compete with pop music's streaming numbers are a great place to showcase the new songs that will do battle on tour with the big-hitters that will be waited on with bated breath and expectation. The list of collaborators on Pink Cactus Cafe means the five of them may not have actually been in the studio playing these songs together, but live they come together with a much harder edge than the record shorn of special guests such as Brooke Combe on gig and album opener Sweet Surrender, a song that hints at the issues in the previous paragraph.
Also doing battle for Pink Cactus Cafe are First Name Terms and the album's three key singles Pink Cactus Cafe, the DMA's collaboration The Beginning Of The End and Solitude Of The Night Bus. The crowd response to them is very positive and Liam's confident enough to let the audience sing parts of them.
The rest of the set is a collection of key singles and fan favourites. Debut single Acrylic feels like it's always on the brink of implosion, no mean feat for an arena band to intentionally sound unpolished, but they achieve it. Modern Love, Small Bones and Are You In Love With A Notion have a real urgency running through them, despite Liam telling us he's knackered and sweating. The 17th, for us one of their finest moments, shows that they're not just a hit and run band despite the crazy scenes that always accompany their final song of this first set Not Nineteen Forever where the floor of Parr Hall becomes one seething mass of bodies. There's no time for traditional set-closer What Took You So Long because of the short turnaround time for the later show, but over the course of an hour Courteeners reminded us why so many love them, but also that they're still evolving and making new music.
Liam Fray is on Twitter. The Courteeners website can be found here and they are on Facebook and Twitter.
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