The New Cue #423 October 7: Liam Fray of Courteeners.
"To have seen dinosaurs would be insane, I would have buzzed off that."
Good morning,
Welcome to your weekly free edition of The New Cue, where each Monday an artist is faced with our Life & Times questionnaire. All the big queries are in there, and a lot of the little ones too. This week’s interviewee is Courteeners frontman Liam Fray. A chatty, amicable Mancunian who was brought up five miles from the city centre in Middleton, Liam made a bit of a blunder with his New Cue interview as he postponed it from a Friday afternoon before Spurs vs Man Utd to a Tuesday afternoon after Spurs vs Man Utd. Niall, I, wasted no time in bringing it up.
“Argh, fucking hell mate, what is going on there?” began Liam’s post-match analysis. “It’s funny. I heard someone say that United are the most Spursy team out there. Bad stuff.”
But every bad result needs a big distraction so you can pretend you don’t care ‘cos you’ve got this other thing going on, and Liam certainly has that. Courteeners return with their seventh album Pink Cactus Café at the end of October, a record that blends their knack for singalong anthems with modern production flourishes and guitar-pop. Here's the breezy title track, Pink Cactus Café:
It was, he says, one of their most collaborative efforts yet, featuring guest spots from Brooke Coombe, DMA’s and Pixey. “That was new for me,” Liam states. “I don’t know if within certain circles I’ve got this demeanour of a grumpy solo writer in his bedroom not letting anybody in. It’s just been the way that it’s worked, that I’ve done it on my own and then taken it to the band. With this one, after all those lockdown restrictions, I thought, ‘Well, when we can do this, I’m going to reach out to all those people I respect and I’m lucky enough to call mates. Getting in the room with other people felt like a bit of a victory. It felt invigorating and new.”
The band head out on tour in November, a trek that takes in shows at mammoth venues across the UK but which all seem quite small compared to some of the megagigs the band have staged in their hometown over the past decade. Like this one, at Heaton Park:
Just before rehearsals began, Liam took the time to speak with us. Today’s edition is free but if you’d like to get full access to our Wednesday and Friday editions too and make sure we get some dosh for this constant delivery of music editorial gold, then click here. It costs £5 to subscribe. £5 a month! Come on, you love a bargain:
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The Life & Times Of… Liam Fray
What was the first record you loved?
Controversially, I’m going to say Be Here Now. It’s an age thing. Obviously everybody knows the first two are the iconic ones but this felt like it was mine. On my first day of the first year in high school, I sat next to Conan (Courteeners guitarist Daniel “Conan” Moores) in French and we hit it off straight away. I thought, ‘He’s definitely a bit of a character’. We weren’t necessarily talking about Joy Division and seven-inches, but we knew that we were both into music. I think he mentioned The Who and I said The Beatles, our parents’ record collections. Fast forward to the first day of Year 8 after the summer holidays when Be Here Now had come out. I think he brought it in and on the sticker it said, ‘Woolworths, £16.99’ or whatever it was back in the day. I said, ‘Oh, I got mine from Woolworths’. Now, I was on holiday with my family in Torquay and he said, “I was visiting my family down in Torquay” and I said, “tell me that you got it from Woolworths in Torquay” and we got talking. We’d got it on the same day in the same place. That’s fucking mad. And now we fucking play in a band together. I love that. When I listen to it, I think of me and him being little shits at 13 and getting into scrapes and stuff. It’s really evocative. I love it.
What’s the last record you loved?
My Method Actor by Nilüfer Yanya. I heard Like I Say (I runaway) a while ago and I think she’s got a really unique voice. There’s some quite interesting tunings on it. I’ve recently started learning other bits on the guitar again. Every now and again, something just piques your interest a bit more than, ‘That sounds good’, where I want to get a bit more into those songs. To have something that you listen to and go, ‘I want to learn that’, that’s always a good indicator for me that I’m going to have quite a long-lasting relationship with something.
What’s your earliest memory?
My earliest memory is going to pick up my sister from school and being in the push chair and having the plastic sheeting over the front of it. It was absolutely sheeting down. I remember thinking, ‘Fucking suckers, I’m not going to school and I’m in here, all safe and toasty and warm’. I thought, ‘This is the life’… didn’t know I’d have to go the year after. I still have that where when it rains, I love it, you know when you stay somewhere and it’s got skylights and stuff. I’m a big fan of that. I think it must be connected to that memory.
What’s your daily routine?
I go through peaks and troughs of discipline. When I’m really disciplined, I’m strict and I’m up and out and it’ll be a long, early walk. Then I’ll head into the gym, steam, sauna. And there’s a great place near our rehearsal rooms called Kabana, which do amazing vegetarian Indian food, so we’ll have some of that for lunch. Then we’ll be in rehearsals until from 2pm till 7pm. Then, if I’m being super disciplined, it’ll be a magnesium Epsom salt bath, which I’m a big fan of. If anyone’s struggling with sleep - someone put me onto it about a year ago and the fucking difference it made my sleep is unreal. So not a very rock’n’roll answer. The other daily routine might be very, very different from that. I think it’s really important, routine. It’s something that I struggle with, but I love it when I’ve got it.
Who or what is the love of your life?
My family, we’re really close. I’ve got a lot of family in London. Also, my red Epiphone that I’ve had since I was 16. And my signed Cantona shirt. They’re the things that are getting rescued in the fire.
How important is your football team to you?
The couple of hours before a game, I really feel it. I don’t think I’m that nice when I watch football, I’m really involved in it. Not immediately, but very quickly afterwards, I’m done. I forget it. It doesn’t ruin my weekend at all. I’ll build my weekend around the game, be that watching it at home or going but I know some people where it’s with them till Tuesday. I mean, we have really chosen a bad time for this because I’m still feeling it after Sunday.
What’s your worst habit?
I’m late a lot. My timekeeping is bad. Even as a kid, if somebody knocked on for me, I’d be like, ‘I’m just gonna put pizza in, give us half an hour’. Out of respect for my bandmates, I’m ten times better than I used to be. I think about our poor tour manager in the early days, having to get four or five of us checked out of a Travelodge in Southampton and get to Sheffield for soundcheck. How the fuck did he do that? God love him. That is a tough job that, TMing a young band. So worst habit, probably lateness. And I hate myself for it, but I am trying. I am getting better.
When were you most creatively satisfied?
Maybe when we parted ways with Universal after the second album. I was in New York for a while and I wrote Anna, or most of Anna. I think that time could have been downing tools at that point, it could have been it, there were definitely conversations about it behind the scenes. I think getting that done and recorded and it sounded good, that felt pretty good.
Has anyone you’ve met made you feel starstruck?
Keith Richards. I was on holiday and I was staying with a family who were quite wealthy. They had a house and he lived a couple of doors down. You’d just see him on the beach, and it’d be like, ‘What the fuck!’. I got chatting to him. I was with someone and she was small so he called us little and large, he called me large. He’d be like, ‘Alright large’, I thought that’s pretty fucking cool, Keith Richards just called me ‘large’. That was pretty surreal.
What would people be surprised to learn about you?
That maybe I’m terrible in social situations where I don’t know people, you know where it’s like, ‘What do you do?’, fucking hell, no thanks. I feel like I am painfully shy but, look, give me four drinks and happy days. But in certain walks of life where you have to go into a room and shake strangers’ hands, like weddings and stuff like that, oh God. I can’t hack it at all.
Who or what is the greatest influence on your work?
I think it’s time. I’ve never rushed anything, much to the annoyance of people who work with us, but I take a bit to sign off on it, and once we’ve demoed it and stuff, I’ll spend ages with it. I listened to Ezra from Vampire Weekend on something the other day, and he said ‘I listen to it hundreds of times’. I was like, ‘100%’, I’m exactly the same. So I think maybe time is the biggest influence, because I need time. Sometimes you’ll do something and someone will be ‘Have you signed off on that such and such version yet?’, and it’s like, ‘I got it yesterday’. I need two weeks with something.
What are you scared of?
None of your traditional snakes or spiders. That’s fine. I don’t love heights, when you’re standing at the bottom of a really tall building, like Blackpool Tower or whatever, and you’re looking up at something massive, thinking, ‘It could fall over, this’. And I know it’s not going to but looking up at heights. Bit mad. I don’t know if there’s a name for it.
If you could go back in time, where would you go?
I watched Jurassic Park the other day with my nephew and he was loving it. I think to have seen dinosaurs would be fucking insane. I would have buzzed off that. Obviously I wouldn’t get out the jeep. But also anything from the last 150 years, 1980s Manchester or something like that, when the Haçienda was kicking off. Any kind of musical explosion. We had The Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The White Stripes and stuff and I class that as a thing, but anything like that. Imagine when The Beatles first came out in the 60s. It must have been fucking wild. So many things, really, but we’ll go with dinosaurs.
What do you wish the 18-year-old you knew?
Don’t fret about things. I was always a worrier in school. Playing football on Sunday, I’d always be like, ‘We’re gonna get trounced today’. You end up winning 3-0, ‘well, that was a walk in the park’. And that feeling would last for about two hours and then it would be ‘I’ve got a cup game on Wednesday…’.
What one book would you recommend we read?
I read Down And Out In Paris And London by George Orwell when I was 18 and working in Fred Perry. It’s when Fopp was around and you’d go and get the classics for £3. I just used to rinse Fopp, I loved it. I’m gonna reread that. I think I’ve read it twice, when I was 18 and when I was 30, so I’m going to revisit it because it’s about just getting by on what you’ve got and fucking living life to the full.
What’s your favourite film and why?
I Am Sam with Sean Penn. It’s great. His daughter gets taken away from him. It’s really sad but it’s soundtracked by The Beatles, they’ve got a shared love of The Beatles. It’s really sad, but it’s good. I love it.
What was the house you grew up in like?
It was happy. It was a normal semi-detached. We lived on a main road so couldn’t really play out but we had a garden out the back. I’ve got the best memories of kicking a football from quarter-to-four after school until the sun went down every night in that garden. I had a really chilled out childhood, no family dramas or anything, proper lucky in that regard. Mum and dad were both teachers, so they were off all summer and we’d go to Wales or Torquay for a week. We’d go to London a lot. My mum’s from London, so we’d go to London for Christmas and summers. I was surrounded by loads of Arsenal fans giving me stick.
What talent would you most like to have?
I’d love to be able to paint or draw properly. I think I’d like to take classes to see if I’d be any good. I took it GCSE art - A*! - but it was different stuff, different projects. But I’d love to draw, I mean to be able to fucking draw brilliantly. I’d really like a space where I could put some canvases up and just get going. I did the front cover for St Jude, but it was very rudimentary, quite literally painting by numbers. I find it so therapeutic as well. It’s a real zone out.
Which living person do you most despise?
Despise is a big word so I won’t say anybody. I hate bad manners, though, even small things. I will definitely be giving a ‘You’re welcome!’ when someone doesn’t say thank you. People say that’s really bad for you if you act like that but fuck it, it needs to be said.
What would be the most hurtful thing someone could say to you?
That I didn’t care about music or didn’t care about the band, or they think you’re dialling it in. I’ve seen that a few times where someone’s said, ‘Oh, they’re just cashing in doing a big gig every two years’. No, working your arse off all the time, non-stop and then if we’re fucking lucky enough to put something on and people want to come, why wouldn’t you do it? Would you not do a big gig if you could, like, it’s fucking great, 50,000 people in a park that you grew up in down the road from your family home? Yes, please.
What’s your greatest achievement?
I don’t think we’ve done it, or I’ve done it. But I think the fact that we’ve got a band with two of my best friends, one, Michael, from childhood from when we were five, and Conan, from school, aged 10,11, and we’re still here, still getting on. Those Heaton Park gigs as well. Sometimes it takes a question like this. I Googled it before and I was like, ‘Fucking hell, look at that!’ That is a great achievement for basically no-hopers. We didn’t know anyone in the industry, we weren’t musicians, we didn’t have any doors opened for us. Everything has been a fucking battle. And you think, ‘Yeah, fuck it, I’m proud of us’.
ND