The Wombats live in Manchester review by Rob Johnson
It’s a testament to the fact that there is still an appetite for a three-minute guitar-led pop song that The Wombats are currently headlining arenas across the UK despite being six albums and 20 years into their lifespan as a band. It’s genuinely heartwarming to see such an unassuming, unpretentious band achieve such great success. It’s also interesting to note the vast age range of people in the audience. Courteeners can pull in huge crowds but their demographic very much skews older. As someone the same age as the members of The Wombats, it’s surprising that most of the crowd at the Manchester AO Arena are younger than me. Surprising and depressing…
The Liverpool band are currently celebrating the release of their sixth album Oh! The Ocean and they kick things off with a well-received rendition of lead single ‘Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come’. The newer songs go down a storm all night with the almost sell-out crowd and that is a reflection of the fact that it is their best album in quite some time – a true return to form.
You can’t beat the classics, however, and ‘Moving to New York’ makes the walls shake and the floor bounce. With the right eyes, and if you can see through your floppy fringe, it’s almost like being back in the halcyon days of 2007 again. The unmistakable synth intro to ‘Techno Fan’ is a siren call for a bunch of people who can’t dance to pretend that they can (both on and off stage) before ‘Ready for the High’ sees an actual wombat take to the stage to play an actual trombone (well, a man in a wombat costume and a plastic trombone but it’s close enough).
The Wombats have always been a band that has encouraged interaction with their fans and on this tour, they have asked punters to vote online for a specific song to hear at each date. Manchester voted for ‘1996’ and by the time the song reaches its unforgettable bridge (one of the best the band has ever written), anyone who didn’t vote for it is surely delighted with the outcome anyway.
Lead singer Matthew ‘Murph’ Murphy regales the crowd with a tale of misplaced jealousy to introduce ‘Pink Lemonade’ (“the first lemon song of the night”), before ‘Kill the Director’ takes the roof off. I’ve seen many bands over many years, and I can’t recall another occasion where the first line of a song was bellowed back at the stage with such wild-eyed intensity. There are rumours you could hear the legendary refrain “I’VE MET SOMEONE THAT MAKES ME FEEL SEASICK” all the way back in Liverpool. It’s a banger, isn’t it. No more. No less.
Drummer Dan Haggis and bassist Tord Øverland Knudsen leave the stage for Murphy to deliver a beautifully strummed acoustic version of ‘Lethal Combination’ before returning for set highlight ‘Tokyo (Vampires and Wolves)’. The song is The Wombats in microcosm. In excelsis. Gallows humour. Unstoppable synth riff. Punishing chorus. It’s everything that makes the band so special and it’s greeted accordingly by the adoring Manchester crowd. The first part of the set closes out with the soaring crescendo of ‘Method to the Madness’ (a song that is much more powerful live than on record), the pop perfection of ‘Lemon to a Knife Fight’, the dark pathos of ‘If You Ever Leave, I’m Coming With You’ and, finally, the ‘fake’ last song, ‘Let’s Dance to Joy Division’. Cue even more guys in wombat suits and confetti canons and the band wandering off to massive applause and cheers from the crowd.
If I were to offer one criticism (and I am going to), it would be that the encore perhaps doesn’t quite live up to the main body of the set. ‘Can’t Say No’ is one of the many highlights from their new record and ‘Turn’ is undoubtedly one of the finest songs the band have ever written (and it’s greeted as such here) but ‘Greek Tragedy’ as a set closer feels like a slight anti-climax when you’ve got ‘Anti-D’ just sat there unplayed on the bench. That slight grumble aside, however, The Wombats prove once again here that they are playing arenas because they deserve it. Unlike many of their peers, they belong in venues this size now, and they have the songs to back it up – one of the UK’s finest bands.
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