Not many bands would allow their warm up act to be more famous than them, but when the Courteeners played in Dublin’s Acaedmy on March 30th they let the likes of Wayne Rooney and Franck Ribery play to their fans via big screen. It would have been an excellent gimmick too, if Bayern Munich hadn’t snatched a last minute victory from their beloved Manchester United.
Shortly after the final whistle, the screen went up, the lights went down and Oasis’s Rock and Roll Star started pumping, and the crowd started pumping right along with it.
The band’s lead singer, Liam Fray reckons he knows the exact date that he became a rock and roll star. “August 31st, 2007. I think it’s when you put pen to paper, and you sign a record deal, and you get paid for playing guitar. I used to work in Fred Perry in Manchester and I was part of the management team there and I got my last pay cheque – cos even though the band was doing really well I was still working there a couple of days a week – and I got my last pay ceque on 31st of August of Fred Perry on the day that we signed. I’ve still got it, it’s brilliant. That was the hand over, it was like Yes! Fucking freedom from shop work!”
That’s when he knew he was a rockstar. He got a clue that he was becoming famous when he heard one of his songs used on Match of the Day 2. “That’s game on that, mate. It’s a good feeling. It’s nice. It’s like, you know you’ve made it then.” It was a nice surprise that he didn’t see coming “It’s strange ‘cos I think it was like the first week of the season, and you’re like ‘awh brilliant’. When you heard it the second week you were like ‘fuckin hell’. I think they changed half way through the season though.”
The Courteeners’ first album was the kind of album that doesn’t get made in the iTunes age. Most artists can only manage a few singles and a bit of filler. St Jude however was a complete album with no skippers. This resulted in the lads reaching number 4 in the UK album chart, but the singles barely making a dent in the singles chart.
Liam isn’t too concerned about the charts though. “I don’t worry about it. But at the same time you know, you’ve got to sell a certain amount of records to have a record deal. I think 15 years ago you could make four crap records before you made a good one. Now if every record doesn’t sell a certain amount, it’s like your getting dropped, and if you get dropped you’ve got no job. I think bands who say they don’t worry about that have either got fucking really rich parents or they don’t give a shit. And I’ve not got rich parents and I DO give a shit. If you do well on the back of being yourself, then you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
The songs that would become St Jude saw the band build up a name for themselves before the album got released. “It’s weird. I think a lot of bands get hype because they’ve got a great PR person. We were getting hyped because we were selling out thousand seater venues when we were unsigned. You can write a good magazine article, but you can’t sit a thousand people in a room in bar next door asking where’s Bide Your Time before it’s even out. The fans were exchanging accoustic demos and stuff like that, and it just takes one journalist in one magazine to go ‘the gig was mental, blah-di-blah’ and then other journalists don’t want to miss out.”
“In terms of living up to the hype, we’ve just got on with our jobs. The fact that we’re still going after a lot of people wanted to kick us down. That’s what happens, as soon as people get hyped, other people go ‘no, there shit them’. You don’t expect that when you’re starting out. You just expect people to be nice to you. It’s difficult to get across seriousness and toungue-in-cheekness in interviews. I said early on I want to be a big rockstar, and you do wanna be a big rockstar don’t ya? You want to sell out big venues and play to beig crowds. But at the same time, if that comes at the cost of the music then there’s no point. I’m quite happy where we are. We’re doing alright. Playing good venues and the album’s great. You make a good album and don’t worry about anything else. Whatever happens is going to happen, so just concentrate on the record”
The boys looked to build on the success of St Jude with the release of their second Album, Falcon in February. It went in at number 6 and Liam thinks that just being professional musicians for a few years has brought their sound to a new place. “I think that just comes with doing your job for a longer time. We’d only just got started when we got signed so I mean ask anybody in their first year of work how good they are something and they’ll go ‘mmm yeah, pretty good.’ And that’s any job; builder teacher brick layer. After 3 or 4 years, you get better at it don’t you. We know our way round a studio and stuff now. We never set out with a plan saying ‘look let’s do this record’. Everything happened pretty naturally and pretty organically.”
The lack of warm up band in the Academy led to some problems with sound levels during the early part of the show but the crowd didn’t seem overly put off and by the end they were belting every chorus right back at the band. Liam has been impressed by the reception the new tunes have been getting from audiences. “Unbelievable. We were taken aback by it ‘cos we weren’t sure. I think that when you have an album that’s, not necessarily like comercially successful – it did okay – but our fans are very intense, so we knew St Jude meant a lot. We were confident ‘cos we knew how good the songs were, it was just a case of are they gonna have it live? ‘Cos its one thing making a good record, but it’s got to be good live, cos if it’s not good live it’s game over. But it’s been unbelievable live, mate. They’ve been buzzin’ off it, and us in turn, buzzing off them.”
The band had faith in the songs, and even put their own money into getting it recorded. “We kind of used everything up and it was like we’re gonna go for broke. It’s weird because a lot of bands spend 2 years doing albums and stuff and it’s like, yeah, we wish. We had six weeks to do it in and if you don’t do it in them six weeks and get everything cut then it’s game over. But it was good that, it was like a pressure on us. You listen to some people who say they’ve been in a studio for 2 years – doin’ what? What have you been doing for 2 years? It takes 3 days to record a song. It could take a month to get a certain sound, but 2 years in a studio is ridiculous. You’d just start throwing things away and you’re not concise enough and you don’t work hard enough. A lot of bands spend a lot of time on the Playstation, I like to spend time on me guitar.”
The Courteeners have a passionate following and their audiences can sometimes get a bit rawkus. He cites a gig in Whelan’s in 2008 as one of the wildest. “Whelan’s was up there. Definitely. The first time we played Dundee, I didn’t think I was getting out alive. And it was a big room, it wasn’t like a tiny room, it was about a thousand capacity. Didn’t think I was getting out alive. T in the Park, King Tut’s Tent, that was mental. Scotland and Ireland are definitely the most insane crowds. Definitely go a bit mental – but in a good way.”
It’s not all moshing and crowd surfing though. Halfway through each gig, the rest of the band take a break, leaving Liam and his guitar to have a mini accoustic set with the audience. Part of the Courteeners’ appeal is their ability to mix hard edged rock and roll stompers and anthems with melodic, lyric driven love songs. “It’s funny cos I don’t take a lot of time over the lyrics, I remember reading an interview with the Roses saying that sometimes they’d wait for a couple of days until they had the perfect rhyming couplet or whatever. It tends to come, not necessarily easily – cos that doesn’t mean it’s better, if you can write it quicker – I just think it’s morea train of thought. I don’t think about what I’m gonna write. I can’t think unless I write. If I write it down that helps me. It’s pretty much stream of consciousness. I think that’s just the type of person I am; romantic but not soppy.”
When Liam had finished showing his softer side, the rest of the lads returned for a few more anthems. Despite the late start caused by the footie, the band were on stage for nearly and hour and a half, with no breaks. “We’ve been doing 18, 19, 20 song sets. We’re absolutly knackered when it comes to the end of it. It’s like an hour and 25 minutes. I think we’ve done too much really, but, fuck it, give people their money’s worth.”
A week prior to the Academy gig, the lads had been supporting Noel Gallagher for two nights at the Royal Albert Hall, and Liam really seemed to enjoy it. “Amazing. Amazing, man! It was like one of those things you dream of when you’re a kid. He was just such a fucking geezer. Just a nice guy. He came and watched the sound check, watched the gig from the side of the stage, came and said hello and stuff. He was he really top. It was amazing. I was fuckin’ shittin’ it doing the gig but it was a really great experience.”
Although the Academy may have been a bit of step doen from the Royal Albert Hall, the boys didn’t seem too bothered. They looked like they really enjoyed Dublin, and Dublin, in turn, enjoyed them.
