Liam Fray has shared his memory of meeting Lou Reed and revealed that the late rock icon was a fan of the Courteeners’ song ‘Bide Your Time’.
The singer was appearing on BBC Radio 2’s Tracks Of My Years with Vernon Kay when he shared the anecdote about The Velvet Underground frontman, which you can see in the clip below.
“I was lucky enough to meet Lou, the man himself,” Fray said. “Yeah, it’s mad. I was on holiday. His wife Laurie came over and said, ‘Oh Lou says you play’. And I was like, yeah I do play, I do play!”
“She said, ‘Oh do you want to play his arts club in New York?’,” he continued. “I was like, yeah!”
Fray added that the eventual moment came three weeks later, after he had reached out to former Courteeners live keyboardist Adam Payne. “I said [to him], ‘Listen, you’ve got to save my bacon here, because I can’t play acoustic guitar on my own to Lou Reed’.”
“So, we get down there, no crew, no sound engineer, I had a little amp, I borrowed a guitar from my friend Keith from We Are Scientists. So I had this guitar I’d never played before, singing through a Bluetooth speaker or something, and in the corner, you could tell it was a piano was under a cover, and I was like, ‘Oh, it’d be wrong for us to not play it, if we get in trouble, we get in trouble’.”
“So what better way to demo your third album that no-one’s heard before? He was on the front row, Lou. He was a big fan of [2008 Courteeners song] ‘Bide Your Time’, apparently. He told me afterwards.”
On October 25, Liam Fray and co. will release their seventh album ‘Pink Cactus Café’. You can pre-order/pre-save it here. They are also hitting the road in November for a number of UK headline dates – visit here for remaining tickets.
Last month, Liam Fray spoke to NME about the upcoming album, and recalled how it felt different to all of the band’s past releases.
“It did take me somewhere else where I’ve never been with the band, in terms of my approach”, he said, also describing the “psychedelic dream” vibe that underpins ‘Pink Cactus Café.’ “I do feel a lot of pressure, I was scared of failing so much that I forgot to enjoy it. Maybe this album is the embracing of what we do. Relaxed, but still meticulous in the approach.”
In other Courteeners news, the band topped the albums charts last year when they reissued their breakthrough 2008 album ‘St. Jude’ LP in celebration of its 15th anniversary. The frontman would later share that the re-release of the record gave the band a boost after the industry had “washed its hands of us”.
Earlier this week, The Courteeners were announced as the headline musical act for the 2024 Legends Of Football charity event. They will play the JW Marriott Grosvenor House on October 7, where Wayne Rooney and Fara Williams will be celebrated for their achievements in the game.