St. Jude (15th Anniversary Edition)

In April 2007, Courteeners singer/guitarist Liam Fray was about to board a train out of Manchester Piccadilly to see Arctic Monkeys play in Liverpool when his manager’s number flashed up on his phone. He was calling with news of someone keen to produce the band’s debut album. “He says, ‘Stephen Street wants to work with you,’” Fray tells Apple Music. “I just thought, ‘Imagine being a producer and having the same name as Stephen Street, that’s embarrassing.’” Despite having signed a record deal, Fray was still getting his head around the idea that *anyone* was interested in his songs, let alone Street, a celebrated producer for The Smiths and Blur. Many of those songs had been written out of boredom while Fray punctuated his studies at the University of Salford with part-time work in Manchester’s Fred Perry clothing store. On Police Street, the shop window was a lens onto the divergent sights and sounds of a busy city. “Songwriting was just character-watching, having a bit of fun with yourself, almost childlike,” he says. “I thought, ‘Nobody will ever read these.’” Yet, during the last half of 2007, the Courteeners—by then one of Manchester’s most talked-about young bands—would decamp with Street to London’s Olympic Studios to forge those songs into *St. Jude*, a coming-of-age drama played out in exhilarating jangle pop and indie rock. It’s found a remarkably enduring connection, breaching the UK top five on its April 2008 release and then, in January 2023, finally topping the Official UK Albums Chart with the arrival of this 15th Anniversary Edition. As Fray noted by tweeting, “Beatles. Stones. Courteeners.”, only two bands had previously achieved that with a reissue. He’s at a loss to explain *St. Jude*’s success, but it doubtless involves his gift for using personal detail to explore universal anxieties and issues about love, friendship, ambition, and frustration. “There’s an angry young man in there,” he says. “But it’s good to be 18, 19, kicking against something, whatever it may be. It’s just typical things, being a young man and being jealous of people in bands.” Here, he recalls the making of *St. Jude*, track by track. **“Aftershow”** “I was big into Interpol and I was trying to do a bit of \[2004 track\] ‘Slow Hands,’ I think. And that really aggressive A-minor wallop. We opened with it at the Teenage Cancer Trust \[gig in March 2023\]. I was like, ‘Whoa! This is big!’ Maybe people don’t think of that with us. Maybe they think of this sniffly, jingly-jangly kind of thing, but this has got real power behind it. It’s about walking home when the sun’s coming up with a couple of friends and, ‘Actually, are we that close? We probably are, but I just wanted to turn his head.’” **“Cavorting”** “This was my first impersonation of Morrissey—‘overrated, dehydrated.’ If I can get a couple of rhymes in before the end of the line, let’s bounce on these syllables. I remember writing the first line and being like, ‘Yep, here we go.’ I still remember it getting the *NME* Single of the Week. We went out celebrating like we’d won the Cup Final. It was like, ‘This’ll do, lads, this is it, nothing else matters.’ If that had been the last thing that had happened, \[we’d have\] taken it.” **“Bide Your Time”** “A Fopp \[music, book, and movie store\] had just opened up near Fred Perry, and I remember buying \[1933 George Orwell novel\] *Down and Out in Paris and London*. This song was originally called ‘Down and Out’ and I had the start, I had the music, and it sounded very summery, jingly-jangly. We went on holiday two weeks later. Contrary to popular belief, we weren’t like *lads* lads. But a couple of us went, looking into this \[lads’ holiday\] world—sort of ‘No chance!’ It’s a snapshot of that world. People probably connect to that more than *Down and Out in Paris and London*, to be honest.” **“What Took You So Long?”** “I was at Fred Perry and somebody went, ‘Do you want to do the post?’ Well, that’s the best job, because once you’re out of there, you’re doing the rounds, you go to see a friend who works up the road. I came back and he said, ‘What took you so long?’ I went, ‘There was a queue at the post office.’ He just started laughing—and so I was like, ‘Right…’ It was so competitive in Manchester. I had a real envy of Liverpool because they seemed to look after each other. In Manchester, nobody really had each other’s back. Well, look, maybe they did, but they didn’t have ours. We were real outsiders. We were never the cool kids. You’d go to the generic indie nights and it was boring for us. But then we went to the art-school nights and it was like, ‘This is a bit much here, isn’t it?’ We couldn’t get our balance right. This is my misfit song, I think.” **“Please Don’t”** “The Ronettes, here we go. This is where Stephen took it up a notch and it sounds so easy and simple, it’s just gorgeous. To openly admit, ‘You know what, we’re probably not going to be friends here. We’ll say it, but come on, we’re not,’ I think that’s why people buzz off it, because they go, ‘That’s on the money, that.’ By saying it, do I come across as not a nice guy? I don’t know, but it’s more important for me to say it.” **“If It Wasn’t for Me”** “We weren’t going to put this on \[the album\], but after ‘Please Don’t,’ we needed something to get straight back in, really attack the listener. We’re challenging ourselves. Even the snare work from \[drummer Michael\] Campbell is really tight. We were wet behind the ears but we were focused and well-drilled. Stephen knew there was a bit of pressure on us. The *NME* were turning up to the studio every couple of days and he could tell things were kind of happening. He took good care of the songs, but he took real care of us as well.” **“No You Didn’t, No You Don’t”** “I can neither deny nor confirm who is hand-clapping. Madonna *was* in the building. I think me and Cam were at the bookies, watching the greyhound racing. She entered the building, she left the building. There were some claps. Actually, the truest story of this song is we needed a middle eight and The View came on the radio, I think it might have been ‘Superstar Tradesman.’ I was like, ‘That’s it—just a simple drop-down and handclap.’ The View were a great band, still are, a big influence on us. We heard it on the radio and I went, ‘Yeah, that’ll do. We’ll just do that.’ Or Madonna did. Who knows?” **“How Come”** “This is just a bit of a throwaway, a bit of light, ’cause it could get a bit heavy reading your own diary sometimes. ‘Try this fingerpicking bit, Conan \[Daniel “Conan” Moores, guitarist\].’ ‘Campbell, here’s some brushes.’ If you’re afforded the chance to work with somebody amazing \[Street\] and they’re suggesting bits and bobs like that, it’s almost insulting to not try it. Especially on a song where there’s no pressure. I’m not daft; nobody’s saying, ‘Can’t wait to hear “How Come.”’ But when they do, it’s like, ‘This is quite nice, a bit of a breather.’ And it’s giving confidence to everybody as musicians. Every track, you’re working out how good you are and what you can do. Are we any good? Are we one-trick ponies? This enabled us to kick out, in inverted commas.” **“Kings of the New Road”** “A real rollicking one, absolutely love playing this live. When we were in Olympic, we worked 10 in the morning ’til 10 at night, every day, six weeks. Those kind of hours send shivers down my spine now. I think it was after dinner one night, about half-seven, and we’re jamming. We didn’t know Stephen had walked in. ‘What’s that?’ Red button and headphones on. I said, ‘Just a B-side.’ He went, ‘No, it’s not.’ I thought, ‘If he believes in it and wants it on the record, great.’” **“Not Nineteen Forever”** “I was living with my parents still, sat on the end of my bed, little Telecaster, The Strokes chord book, trying to get ‘Someday.’ I got it wrong and my dad walked past and went, ‘That sounds good.’ I was like, ‘*We* don’t talk to each other, what’s going on? This is weird.’ So I carried on. The lyrics wrote themselves after being out one night, getting in a scrape and falling over. I remember the advert thing coming to us \[sofa superstore DFS wanted to use the song\] and the label were like, ‘This is money for nothing,’ but I just couldn’t handle it being a DFS song. No offense to DFS, but it didn’t sit right.” **“Fallowfield Hillbilly”** “I think this is me wanting to belong to a bit more of the artsy crowd. Not really knowing where we as a band fitted in. If you’re 17, 18, 19, everyone’s probably thinking that. What’s my thing going to be? Do I go to uni? Do I go straight into work? Who’s my mates going to be? Oh my god, what am I into? This was just sitting on the bus and scribbling. I think that was probably the last one with a pen and notebook. It was on to the phones after that.” **“Yesterday, Today & Probably Tomorrow”** “A proper love song, one of the only ones I’ve done. My partner at the time, she’d go and work in London, back and forth. So we were both back and forth, passing ships, passing trains, that kind of longing. I love \[Manchester musician\] Liam Frost, the way he plays the guitar, effortlessly fingerpicking. My guitar playing here is a bit of a joke. I’m all over the place. Stephen made it sound good. That was me sitting down on the microphone and after a couple of takes going, ‘You can’t fingerpick, what are you doing?’ But that’s pushing yourself, ‘Can we try this? Can we do it?’” **“Acrylic”** “This was us having a wind-up because we were the biggest Libertines fans there were, and then we were getting compared to them. I thought, ‘We gotta do this.’ The fans liked it, and those early shows, the people coming were buzzing off it. I can still see us in the rehearsal room. This is us as four 20-year-olds, I think. It had to go on \[as a hidden track on the original release\] because it is like, ‘Oh, it’s proper this now, isn’t it? We’re going to do it.’ It felt like a solidification of what we’re doing.” **“It’ll Take More Than a Weekend Away to Fix This Mess”** “You can almost hear us departing from the record \[on this track, which was unreleased until this 15th Anniversary Edition\]. It was the next thing I wrote after ‘Yesterday, Today…’ It’s nice to give something to the people they haven’t heard from that time. Sometimes, it takes somebody in the inner circle to say they like something, to jog your memory. Somebody very close loved it, and I was like, ‘If you love it, it’s going on.’ So I guess that this one’s for them.”