Good morning,
Welcome to your weekly free edition of The New Cue, which is obviously really good, but what you really want to do is be a paying subscriber so you also get full access to Wednesday and Friday editions. Come on half a job Bob, live a little, press Subscribe Now below if you are not part of that crew. They’re the best crew.
Today, we’ve got a nice little natter with Courteeners’ Liam Fray as he looks back over the making of their debut ahead of a big reissue next year. Before that, a quick message from Ted:
Hello, Ted here. I want to offer a sincere, embarrassed apology to my friends at Rough Trade Records, particularly Geoff Travis and Jeannette Lee, as well as to Disco Inferno. In Friday’s Recommender I wrote that during the 1990s Disco Inferno had been in dispute with their label, Rough Trade, thinking to myself ‘Oh, I’m sure that’s right - they definitely had some label bother. I’ll check and change that later if wrong…’ I checked, I was wrong, they weren’t in dispute with RT, another label closed, but I did not change it in time. I was mortified when I realised. So here I am, setting the record straight. Now, back to Liam and Niall…
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Liam Fray
Last week, Courteeners announced a 15th anniversary reissue of their debut St. Jude in January and a huge gig at Manchester’s Heaton Park next summer to mark the occasion. Originally released in April 2008, St. Jude reached Number Four in the UK album charts and announced the arrival of a band who would become indie-rock titans. Playing Heaton Park is nothing new for Courteeners – this is their third time. A couple of weeks ago, frontman and chief songwriter Liam Fray hopped on Zoom with Niall to look back on the band’s early days and recount how working in the Fred Perry shop was integral to the band’s songs, why their biggest hit was a complete accident and more.
Hello Liam.
Yes mate, how are you?
I’m good, although I’ve just realized I don’t look good. Two years of doing Zooms and I still forget to look at myself in the mirror before logging on.
Do you know what’s funny is I was just brushing my teeth then and I put some aftershave on. This feels like a date.
Ah, if only I had Smell-O-Vision.
You’ve gotta get dressed up for your Zoom man, I’m still in that zone.
I respect that. How was your summer?
Yeah good, kind of stop/start. We did Neighbourhood festival and Y Not. The gigs were insane, the fans are still going nuts for it so I’m really buzzing. And then there’s all the St. Jude stuff, it’s like looking through your diary from 15 years ago. I think people think, ‘oh you just re-release them and that’ll be that’ but there’s so much, it’s uncomfortable at times.
What is it like trawling through all?
There’s an overwhelming sense of pride in the fact that we came from nothing. It’s so hard to describe it because it feels like so long ago, you’re not a different person but you grow and change. You’ve also got this kind of responsibility for the people that are still coming to it, like ‘oh no, that is still us’.
Do you recognise yourself when you look back?
Yeah, I can see myself. I worked in the Fred Perry store in Manchester. I had a double cassette thing and I bought a drum kit off my manager at Fred Perry for a hundred quid. I had one microphone for the drumkit and I would put down a beat and then I would record a vocal and guitar over the top. It sounded fucking dogshit but I can see myself doing the walk from the Fred Perry store to Pret or Greggs or Corbieres for a pint, having this cassette player on my headphones, going ‘This is fucking great!’. That almost that would have been good enough, I didn’t care. It wasn’t like, ‘oh, yeah, we’ll do G-Mex in two years, that’ll be alright’. There was no grand plan, no plans of ‘let’s do A, B and C’, just the creation of something. I didn’t realise the buzz I would get from creating something out of nothing. I still think that’s the most enjoyment I get, at the piano or the guitar, that first day when you walk out the studio and you go, ‘Fuck yeah, we got something today, we had nothing this morning’.
What was it that compelled you to write songs at that point?
I think I wanted to write words. I was into poetry, but not necessarily poets. I wouldn’t necessarily read volumes and volumes of different people, but I was always on the rhyme and I was always picking apart words, a fan of words and wordplay. I would jot stuff down all the time, little things, something about the guy selling bananas over there or that guy who works over there, something about an appearance or a demeanour. The music became a vehicle for those little rhymes.
If you’re into observational lyricism, I guess working in a shop is the perfect place to be.
And nobody ever came in that shop! It was amazing. Honestly, it’s pivotal. There was a Telecaster in there with two strings missing, so it was perfect for me cos I’m lazy as fuck. It was quite rudimentary, so things like Bide Your Time is played on three strings because two of the strings were missing, I had no choice and that’s what I wrote it on, sitting on the steps in the store. I did Cavorting on a Compliments From Fred Perry slip, I’ve still got it somewhere. Just being in that shop, the goldfish bowl looking out, you’ve got people in the rat race skipping past at five o’clock to get the train home, and you’ve got the students going about on a Tuesday with McDonalds bags because they’ve got fuck all else to do. It was a real snapshot of city life.
What was your headspace when you wrote Cavorting, which became a breakthrough early single?
The not-knowing, that really pivotal time. At that point, I was full on gig every night, The Roadhouse, Night And Day, fully immersing in that. I’ve probably said a few times, ‘Oh, yeah, Oasis were down the road so we thought we could do that’, but I don’t think that’s true. I think we thought Oasis were from another fucking planet. We didn’t think, ‘oh, we can be Oasis’. I didn’t think that. I probably said that because you almost fall into that trap of going, ‘Oh, local heroes down the road, we could do that.’ But really, never in a million years was I like, ‘oh, we’ll be in a band, we’ll do that’. Cavorting was that I’d got to know two or three people in bands who maybe didn’t want it, or were a bit like the posturers, the guys who would be in the dingy clubs and the girls were talking to them rather than us and we were like ‘oh right, they’re the popular ones are they?’. I had this love of all the people in the bands but then, not a jealousy, but probably insecurity as well, like ‘oh, we could never do that’.
Once you started getting a bit of a local following, did you feel that things were progressing quickly?
Yeah. But I loved that. I was ready, almost from in my head being like, ‘let’s see how this goes’ to ‘this is fucking happening, shit, whoa, this is exciting!’ Things were moving fast but only because we had our foot on the pedal, we were booking gigs and going out, gaining a bit of notoriety, going to house parties, the whole shebang. It was almost like I was writing those songs knowing that we were gonna go to house parties and play them.
Did that feed into the writing?
I think so. Because we were living that life, even though we were in a band anyway, we were going out to these indie clubs, thinking we were in The Libertines or whatever, going to house parties with guitars, but no real ideas of grandeur of like, ‘oh we’ll play Glastonbury in three years’.
At what point did you feel that you had the material for a debut album?
Honestly, pretty early. The first gigs were pretty much St. Jude. Not Nineteen Forever was a late addition. I’ve got a setlist from the early days and it’s Aftershow, What Took You So Long?, Kings Of The New Road, Fallowfield Hillbilly... the material was pretty much there. I say Not Nineteen Forever was a late addition but it came six months into the band. I remember playing it in Barnsley. We didn’t have any words, just had a tune, so we just played it instrumental for four minutes. We opened with it!
Not Nineteen Forever was a complete accident. I was sat on my bed in my mum and dad’s house trying to play Someday by The Strokes but got the chords in a weird order and my dad was walking past at the exact time and went ‘sounds alright, that’ and I was like, ‘yeah, yeah, that’s a new one!’. I just carried on with it and for that to become your biggest song, that shows you – fuck all your songwriting classes, just mess something up on the end of your bed. That encapsulates the whole thing for me, we weren’t trying. And I don’t mean we weren’t working hard, but we weren’t trying.
When you cast your mind back to St. Jude, what are the first things you think of?
The second Glastonbury we did in 2008, it’s stamped into my memory. In 2007, we played this unsigned tent but it was packed out. It was the week before Cavorting came out, 300 people, so I was like, ‘oh, OK’. Fast forward 12 months, it blew my mind. We were driving down on the Friday and the bus broke down in Walsall and we’d just started to get into the groove and then we got off the bus and it got lifted up, so all the beers and everything had been left on the bus. There’s a little room at the garage, someone ordered Chinese food, someone else is going to Morrison’s and getting some beers, there’s a little television and Glastonbury’s on the telly. We were doing the John Peel tent and to me that was just a bit of a bigger version of what we’d done the previous year cos I hadn’t been to or seen the John Peel tent. The Ting Tings were on and I went, ‘fucking hell, look at that, what’s that?’ and our manager said, “that’s the John Peel tent.” I was like, ‘Oh my god, holy shit!’. So we got back on the bus and we got proper stuck in and didn’t have much sleep. I remember being at the back of the John Peel stage and thinking, ‘this is like an enormodome, what are we doing?’ and someone saying, ‘it’s fucking packed.’ Our manager said he remembers me shadow-boxing - I’ve never been boxing in my life! What am I doing?!
I watched it recently and even the way that I said, “hiya Glastonbury, we’re the Courteeners from Manchester,” it’s so timid. But we were tight as fuck, we didn’t miss a beat. We nailed it. That was the moment. I think in context with the one the previous year, I love that bookend of two Glastonburys. It never felt like a jump, it was like 100 baby steps, it wasn’t one single has been A-listed and it’s gone massive but it was playing Tunbridge Wells and then going to Paris and playing in Paris and then coming back and playing at Reading and then going to Grimsby.
What are your main memories of the actual recording of it?
Doing 10am til 10pm for six weeks with Stephen Street. Now I’m bored after three hours in the studio, so fuck knows how we did it. Working with Stephen, you’re in the presence of a legend. I was watching him and listening and taking it in. We took it dead seriously. Friday and Saturday we had a good go, but in the week... we felt privileged, staying in the Marriott in Maida Vale, picked up in a car, those drives from the Marriott to Olympic. I’ll never forget.
How’s your relationship changed with the record the further away you’ve got from it?
Doing the acoustic version [2018’s St. Jude Re:Wired] really took out of me, revisiting it all because it was so open and honest, there was almost an element of ‘it’s only going to be your mates who listen to these songs’. No wonder we didn’t get on the radio, I’m effing and jeffing about bus stops and The La’s. It feels bigger now than it ever has been, playing festivals you look out and those people singing Cavorting are 15. That’s the biggest buzz for me. There’s definitely a time when we started out that we had quite an older crowd and for a band like us it’s an absolute lifeline to have this new generation of fans coming to it.
ND