Mild at heart

Courteeners frontman Liam Fray is irate.
“It’s ridiculous. There are so many people who want to paint a vulgar picture before we’ve even have a chance to get out there,” he rants in his thick Mancunian accent. “But we just laugh at stuff like that. If they want to put my face on a magazine to sell copies, do it. I’m glad I’m helping the cause. You just hope that people don’t read too much into it.”
We’ve been talking about his band’s NME cover shot earlier this year, and the misrepresentation that he feels his band’s been unfairly landed with. Since The Courteeners released their debut album St. Jude, the amiable Fray has been portrayed as an arrogant, gobby young man by much of the press – and he’s not best pleased about it.
“Alright,” he grudgingly admits, “the first interview I did, I said some silly things [he’s slagged off The Enemy and Hard-Fi, amongst others] – but that was the first interview I’d ever done. I got taken out, plied with booze and whatever else, and then the microphone was turned on. But I’m sure if I took you out and gave you six bottles of whiskey, you’d turn around and say something bad about someone you work with. It happens everywhere, where a niggly comment is blown out of proportion.”
It’s easy to see why Fray is so protective of his band’s image, though; when he formed The Courteeners in 2006, he’d already spent years playing solo gigs around Manchester, inspired by the likes of his fellow citymen Oasis and The Smiths. Having laid the groundwork, he’s not about to let fame and fortune slip away so easily.
“We’ve been going out doing this since we were 16, mate,” he chuckles. “So we’ve taken to it like ducks to water. It’s just that now we get to have guitars and get a bit of free beer, instead of paying for it.”
2008 has already proved a bit of a whirlwind year for the indie-rockers, for sure; their Stephen Street-produced debut went in at #4 in the UK charts, and they’ve also won over a famous fan or two in the interim.
“We were outside this venue in Camden for our gig, and this black cab pulled up, and Morrissey got out. I just walked straight up to him and went ‘Alright Morrissey’, and he said, [adopts Morrissey voice] ‘Hello, how are you?’, and I was like ‘Fucking brilliant’,” he laughs. “He said ‘Are you any good?’ and I was like, ‘Mate, we’re fucking brilliant, come and have a listen.’”
Like so many other Mancunian bands, several members of The Courteeners have Irish roots – Fray with relatives in Cork and Waterford. I wager that his family must be striving to claim him as one of our own now that he’s ‘made it’.
“Yeah, they were all dead pleased,” he chuckles waggishly. “Me mammy was lovin’ it too – I just hope she didn’t read the lyric book!”

The Courteeners play The Academy, Dublin (September 30) and Mandela Hall, Belfast (October 1)