The Courteeners – live at Glastonbury 2013 -Recorded June 25, 2017 – BBC 6 Music –
The Courteeners this weekend. In concert at the 2017 Glastonbury Festival and faithfully preserved by The BBC. In 2014, Courteeners stood on the brink of unveiling their fourth and – by some distance – greatest album. In the six years since they released their sharp and underrated debut St Jude – a pinpoint accurate portrayal of youth enjoying life – the band have been steadily rising. All their albums have gone Top 10 – St. Jude (no.4), Falcon (no.6), ANNA (no.6) – and the growth in their live shows has been exponential and astonishing.
From the International Talent Booking Site bio:
Just to take one example, on the 5th and 6th July last year, the band played two nights at the Castlefield Bowl, Manchester. They sold all 16,000 tickets in a day. In fact, they sold 100, 000 tickets in 2013 alone, also selling out Manchester Arena and Brixton Academy in the process. This time round – before the album’s even been heard by anyone outside the band’s inner circle– they find themselves headlining the Radio 1/NME Stage at this year’s Reading and Leeds Festival and handpicked to support The Killers at their 40, 000 capacity Glasgow Summer Sessions show on August 19th. The momentum is with them.
And the reason? Well, that’s when we need to turn our attention to the band’s singer and sole songwriter Liam James Fray. A riot of contradictions – romantic, sensitive, brash yet self-doubting – it’s his songwriting, an acute observation of how life is mostly lived, that has fuelled the band’s longevity, striking a resounding chord with an increasing large bandwidth of people across the country.
“Right from St Jude, everything was about how I was feeling,” explains Fray. “I did feel frustrated, stuck in a rut. But, I was full of ideas, watching the world go by outside, wondering if music could take me further than work, eat, club, sleep (a bit) die etc, I did seek escape from that life and I wrote about that. It wasn’t a formula. I wasn’t hell bent on capturing the abstract at 21. I wanted to focus on what was real. My world. Other people’s worlds. It’s what I knew. It’s what I grew up on. Pulp, Stephen Fretwell – they wrote about real life with frustration, heart and with humour.”
All you have to do is hit the Play button and we’ll do the rest.
