The Wombats are one of the very few mid-2000s British indie bands who are still managing to get mainstream radio play every time they bring out a new album and last month’s release ‘Oh! The Ocean’ is their fifth successive appearance in the top five of the UK Official Albums Chart.
Therefore, it should be no real surprise that the Liverpool trio are headlining an arena tour, but I still raised my eyebrows when I first saw that – 18 years on from their debut album – they would be headlining Manchester’s AO Arena (which for a long time was the biggest arena in the whole of Europe) for the first time in their history.
Right from the first support act, fellow Scousers Red Rum Club, there’s a party atmosphere in the cavernous venue, probably helped in part by it also being a Saturday night.
Red Rum Club get the party started
I’ve seen Red Rum Club before so I know how fun their live set was, so I was disappointed to miss the first half of it after suffering through a 30-minute wait for food during a pre-gig trip to Popeyes on Bury New Road. However, the songs I did manage to see got everyone bouncing and although its nowhere near my favourite of theirs, I can’t deny that set closer – 2022 single ‘Vanilla’ sounds worthy of any festival or arena stage.
Manchester-formed band Everything Everything were the main support and while I can appreciate that they’re technically impressive, it’s just not really my thing and visually, they looked like a few blokes in the midst of a mid-life crisis. ‘Distant Past’ is a top tier FIFA tune though, so I was glad to see that make an appearance and a lot of the crowd did seem to be enjoying themselves throughout most of it, if not quite as much as Red Rum Club.
The playlist prior to The Wombats’ arrival got everyone’s voices suitably warmed up, with mass singalongs from everything from Oasis to Chappell Roan.
From my vantage point, I also had a great view of loads of massive multicoloured balloons being suspended from the ceiling, which would no doubt come into play at some point.
Some classics early on
After bounding onto the stage to ‘The Power of Love’ by Huey Lewis and the News, the band launched straight into catchy new single ‘Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come’. Starting with a new song rather than an established hit can always be a bit risky but here it seemed to pay off and they followed it up with undeniable classic ‘Moving to New York’, keeping the energy up with ‘Cheetah Tongue’ and the brilliant ‘Techno Fan’, before giving an outing to the second new album song of the night in ‘Kate Moss’.
Despite managing to fit seven of the record’s 12 tracks into the 23-song setlist, they never played any back-to-back, so there was never really that lull that you sometimes get when a band is touring an album that has only come out relatively recently.
You could tell from the band’s banter between songs that they don’t take themselves too seriously and that always make for more of a fun spectacle. After drummer Dan Haggis joked that seeing a wombat play the trombone should be on everyone’s bucket list, ‘Ready for the High’ from 2022 album ‘Fix Yourself, Not the World’ did indeed bring a very chaotic wombat mascot onto the stage, complete with a green trombone.
That quirky sense of humour was on display again later in the set when Dan challenged Manchester to recreate some of the ‘gnarly mosh pits’ that you wouldn’t really associate with The Wombats, encouraging people to be creative. Understanding the brief, a large portion of fans decided to sit on the floor and pretend to row for a large portion of ‘Method to the Madness’, which turned one of their lesser known singles into a bit of a moment.
Talking of deeper cuts, the band have been allowing fans on this tour to vote for one song that they wouldn’t usually play. On the night, ‘1996’ was a very popular winner, getting a brilliant response. It was followed up with another funny story from frontman Matthew Murphy about how he wrote ‘Pink Lemonade’ after flying to Barcelona and convincing himself that his girlfriend at the time was having “lots of furious sex” with a Spanish man (it was funnier when he told it) before clarifying that it had just all just been in his head.
A blistering end to the main set
After one of the standouts of the new album – ‘I Love America and She Hates Me’ – came one of the best moments of the entire night with debut album banger ‘Kill The Director’, which made the entire arena feel as if it was physically bouncing.
Then the pace came right back down a couple of songs later, as everyone was encouraged to shine their phone torches for a tender acoustic rendition of ‘Lethal Combination’, but from there the pace never really let up again until ‘Let’s Dance to Joy Division’ or their “fake last song” as Dan described it. The one wombat from earlier in the show was joined by a whole mob of them charging around the stage and letting off confetti cannons.
New album track ‘Can’t Say No’ opened the three-song encore, which went backwards through the different eras of The Wombats; followed by the underrated ‘Turn’ from 2017 and finally 2015’s ‘Greek Tragedy’, which was never one of the band’s biggest hits until it was remixed in 2021 and subsequently blew up on TikTok.
During the set-closer, the balloons were finally released from above and seeing them all being batted around the crowd made for a brilliantly joyous final few moments.
I’ve seen The Wombats a couple of times now at festivals but any reservations I initially had about them playing arenas were blown out of the water during the set. They were already on my list to see again at Neighbourhood Weekender but if they do open the Other Stage at Glastonbury, as has been rumoured, then I may just have to see them there as well.
At the time of writing, there’s still tickets left to see them on their remaining tour dates in Hull, Glasgow and Leeds, so if you’re near any of those cities, then you can’t really go wrong for 30-odd quid.
What are your favourite songs by The Wombats? Let me know in the comments.
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