One of the most successful UK bands of the last 16 years, Courteeners are an English guitar group – Liam Fray, Michael Campbell & Daniel Moores – formed in Manchester in 2006.
Lauded by Q Magazine as one of “the world’s biggest underground acts”, all of their albums have gone Top 10 – 2008’s St. Jude (No.1), 2010’s Falcon (No.6), 2013’s ANNA (No.6), 2014’s Concrete Love (No.3), 2016’s Mapping the Rendezvous (No.3), 2018’s St. Jude – Re:Wired (No.5) and 2020’s More. Again. Forever (No.2).
In 2023, their lauded album St. Jude reached Number 1 for the very first time with its 15th anniversary edition and became the album with the longest time between release and charting at Number 1 in UK chart history, according to the Official Charts Company. The band played their third sell out 50,000 capacity headline show at Heaton Park in June to celebrate the anniversary of the album.
Courteeners have cemented their place as one of the country’s biggest and best-loved bands. And the reason? Well, that’s when we need to turn our attention to the band’s singer and songwriter Liam James Fray. A riot of contradictions–romantic, sensitive, brash, self-doubting & opinionated – 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 young people across the country.
