LIVE REVIEW: Bowling For Soup @ O2 Victoria Warehouse, Manchester
Cast your mind back, if you will, to the year 2003. A fairly solid year by all accounts for pop-punk, this was a period that saw the world treated to BLINK-182’s self-titled record, YELLOWCARD’s Ocean Avenue and FALL OUT BOY’s seminal Take This To Your Grave amongst others. It was also a year that saw the UK hit with a touring combination that would go on to be revered by many fans this side of the pond for years to come, as on-the-rise Texas jokesters BOWLING FOR SOUP would bring a then-fairly new Canadian quintet called SIMPLE PLAN over for some shows. Now, some 17 years later, and with entire careers’ worth of success under their collective belts, BOWLING FOR SOUP and SIMPLE PLAN have come back together for their largest UK tour to date, and we were there at Manchester’s O2 Victoria Warehouse to see how they’d both fare.
As a towering trio of screen pillars flicker to live, a familiar but different cartoon intro begins to play. Tonight, teenage openers NOT UR GIRLFRENZ are invoking the Powerpuff Girls, as a voiceover jokingly explains the creation of the teenage trio in the same way as the superhero team, before Liv Haynes, Gigi Haynes and Maren Alford themselves appear and launch into the opening notes of power-pop banger Warped. Having already been over to the UK alongside BOWLING FOR SOUP back at the end of 2018, it takes very little time before the girls are settled back in with the already-densely-packed UK crowd, deftly cranking out jokes at almost the same pace as great cuts from their finely-crafted pop-punk arsenal, including at one point a tongue-in-cheek Wonderwall snippet that throws things entirely off course for a few gloriously-silly moments.
Song About You goes down an absolute treat with its’ instantaneously catchy chorus, as does newer track Game Over, but it’s the opening notes of MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE’s iconic I’m Not Okay (I Promise) that really force the entire room to pay attention, as Haynes’ considerable vocal talents propel the cover along in a slightly differently-paced, but nonetheless vibrant and exciting way. The momentum fully maintains from here on too, as seconds later, the trio change tact to a full-on lights-in-the-air power-balladry of Somehow, without missing a step, before rather appropriately powering onward into the punky stomp of Never Stop. It really speaks to the confidence and ability of the band too, that following No One Asked You Anyway, they bring things to a cheekily satisfying close by cranking out a solid rendition of SPICE GIRLS mega-hit Wannabe, to the apparent delight of about three-quarters of the room, and bemusement of the other quarter. Their set finally at an end, the trio leave the stage seemingly grinning just as much as the O2 Victoria Warehouse crowd. They might be young, but make no mistake, when it comes to classic pop-punk, NOT UR GIRLFRENZ are the real deal.
Rating: 8/10
From the immediate deafening reaction the moment that the lights go down, it’s instantly clear just how much the people of Manchester love SIMPLE PLAN. Indeed, that feeling also appears very much mutual, given the approximate couple of seconds it takes before frontman Pierre Bouvier is down from the stage and straight in the faces of the barrier-dwellers on ludicrously anthemic opener I’d Do Anything. The atmosphere barely lets up for a second throughout either, as the Quebec natives power through a vibrant 12 song set that encapsulates almost their entire career to date. Feet are appropriately moved on Jump, audience voices shattered on a shockingly early nostalgia-baiting one-two of Welcome to My Life and Shut Up that quite frankly rules, while Boom! proves that even the band’s more recent output more than stands up to the quality of their legacy.
There’s also the small matter of SIMPLE PLAN being responsible for the absolute rager of a theme song to seminal 00’s kids’ TV show What’s New Scooby-Doo, a fact which suddenly dawns on half of the Manchester audience as the band blast into it at speed with evident glee. It’s hardly the silliest thing to come over the course of the evening, but watching an entire venue lose their collective minds’ to an 18-year-old cartoon theme pretty much sums up how enduring early 00’s pop-punk has been to a specific group of people. Summer Paradise quickly follows (thankfully sans-SEAN PAUL vocal cameo) and sees the whole floor filled with giant inflatable balls for the next several minutes, very much to the approval of the audience (and presumed annoyance of security who have to repeatedly dodge taking them to the face), before Where I Belong and beloved debut single I’m Just A Kid restore a vague sense of normality to proceedings with monolithic sing-alongs, with Pierre even taking to drums in the second half of the latter, as Chuck Comeau vacates the stool to take a brief crack at crowdsurfing. With time rapidly running low, SIMPLE PLAN can’t resist cheekily pandering to the Manchester audience either, picking up where NOT UR GIRLFRENZ left off with a rapturously-well-received blast of Wonderwall leading into their closing number proper, Perfect.
Rating: 8/10
Despite the brilliance of what came before though, realistically, nothing was ever quite going to top BOWLING FOR SOUP playing in their self-proclaimed “favourite city in the world to play”. Again, an almighty roar of approval meets even just the house lights going down, before the PARRY GRIPP-penned band theme song Here Comes Bowling For Soup begins blasting through the PA, accompanied by suitably daft cartoon video, and the band members begin to take their places. Tonight it’s Suckerpunch that kicks things off, and immediately, sing-alongs are the order of the day, as several thousand Mancunians seem intent on matching talismanic frontman Jaret Reddick’s performance beat-for-beat. Incredibly, uber-hit High School Never Ends follows second, backed by screens showing a multitude of clips from the 2006 single’s brilliant music video, before BFFF and Ohio (Come Back To Texas) follow swiftly on (with NOT UR GIRLFRENZ even briefly returning for the latter’s finale) as Reddick, guitarist Chris Burney, drummer Gary Wiseman and bassist Rob Felicetti seem fully intent on inciting bigger and bigger crowd responses in as short an amount of time as humanly possible.
Brand new single Alexa Bliss, penned in tribute to the WWE Superstar of the same name and released just a week prior to this evening’s show, already has multitudes of fans singing every single lyric too, as the band are flanked by enormous images of Bliss herself during the song’s emphatic chorus. From here on out, the evening becomes pretty much a wall-to-wall greatest hits performance, with everything from anthemic heavyweights The Bitch Song and Smoothie King, to tear-jerker ballad When We Die and the “theme song to the greatest cartoon in the world”, Today Is Gonna Be A Great Day (of Phineas & Ferb fame), getting an airing across a set that seems to be packing limitless amounts of pop-punk bangers.
Of course, this being a BOWLING FOR SOUP show, there’s plenty of obligatory faffing-around from the four men onstage throughout the night – most notably tonight in the form of an extended joke-telling competition that, if we’re honest, perhaps goes on a touch too long for its’ payoff; diversions on several tangents including a snippet of insipid children’s sensation Baby Shark; and of course, the now-traditional attempts to understand various heckles in Northern regional dialects. Whilst some would argue these detract valuable time from the set that could be used to pack in a few more songs, the truth is that these moments of humour are what make BOWLING FOR SOUP shows so unique and enjoyable. Without the near-constant diversions into laughter, moments of utter randomness such as Marco Molina appearing for a seconds-long toy trumpet cameo on No Hablo Ingles, before returning to his post at the band’s VIP bar, could simply come across as ALESTORM-like random moments of wackiness-for-the-sake-of-it, but here they simply work as part of a larger attempt at eliciting joy.
Across the evening, a sign-wielding fan “dressed like a goddamn VANS shoe” according to Jaret is plucked from the crowd to take up Reddick’s guitar on an excellent confetti and pyrotechnic-aided rendition of Girl All The Bad Guys Want, several minutes of laughter are gained as Burney very nearly loses his shorts in a wardrobe malfunction, and punchy snippets of both AC/DC’s Shoot To Thrill and MOTLEY CRÜE’s Kickstart My Heart are thrown into the mix during one of the Texan outfit’s many interludes in order to keep the pace up. It’s all incredibly entertaining, and never feels forced or unnecessary, with perhaps the biggest laugh comes when Reddick leaves for a drink, instructing Felicetti to tell the story of recording one of their early albums in his stead – prompting his panicked noting at it having taken place well over a decade before his joining the band in 2019, to much hilarity.
With time very much ticking on following this multitude of distractions, it suddenly becomes worryingly apparent that curfew is drawing close and the band still have a fair few songs to get through. Fortunately, they make it through thanks to a granted extension from the venue, and the Manchester crowd are sent home ecstatic with a final run of Almost and a lightning-paced Punk Rock 101 (complete with obligatory beer-aided photo opportunity gag) leading into an encore of classic SR-71 cover 1985, and the utterly brilliant pop-music satire A Really Cool Dance Song giving Reddick and co. a chance to show off some comical dance moves and create some final before departing off into the night, leaving a sea of utterly delighted fans in their wake. They might be a regular feature on our shores at this point in their career, but as far as their actual show quality goes, tonight may well rank as not only BOWLING FOR SOUP’s absolute best performance in their absolute favourite city to play, but one of their best UK performances full-stop.
Rating: 10/10
Check out our photo gallery of the night’s action in Manchester from Jacob Kazara here:
