A few years back, if you’d asked Blossoms to choose somewhere they love to go and eat, you might have ended up at Gregg’s.
These days, they’ve got slightly more upmarket tastes. Over lunch at one of the city’s best steakhouses, Hawksmoor, singer and guitarist Tom Ogden and drummer Joe Donovan discussed their upcoming headline gig at Wythenshawe Park and the time that Gary Lineker made them gnocchi.
That’s a pretty winding tale, as it goes. “Our new album’s called Gary,” says Tom. “Which was named after a fibreglass gorilla that was stolen from a garden centre in Scotland.
“I wrote a song about it, the song went on the album, [we] didn’t have a name for the album, and you’re looking at options to call it things and I was like ‘lads, I think we should call it Gary’.”
The suggestion received a ‘mixed’ response, perhaps unsurprisingly. “You follow your gut,” Tom goes on. “And my gut was Gary.”
Fast forward to the name being embraced by the band, they decided to approach famous Garys, by way of promotion. They bagged some top Garys – Numan, Neville and Lineker.
“Next thing, it was ‘Lineker’s invited you to his house, [and] he’s going to cook for you, cause he loves cooking’. We got the train down to London, went to his house, and he was cooking as we went in, and he had the basil in his hand and the mozzarella, and he cooked gnocchi for us. The food was mega.
“It was worth calling the album [Gary] just for that.”
From meeting at school in Stockport, the band formed in 2013, after all strangely gravitating to work at the Alma Lodge Hotel on the A6. Their first gig at the Night and Day Cafe followed, and the rest is history, four albums in and two number ones under their belt.
The band have one of their biggest ever shows fast approaching – a headline show at Wythenshawe Park, on 25 August.
Tom is very much of the opinion that you should ‘give the people what they want’, so while there’s a new album and a host of new songs due for September, the classics will be front and centre.
“I would never not play the biggest songs, cause that’s why you’re in these bigger venues. And you know Charlemagne is going to be at the end, because you’re an idiot if you don’t play it at the end,” says Tom.
“We’ve been sat backstage and thought ‘fuck it, shall we just open with Charlemagne?’, and then we’re like ‘no, no don’t be daft’.”
You never know though. There’s a first time for everything.
Blossoms play Wythenshawe Park alongside Inhaler, Shed Seven, The Ks, Seb Lowe, TTRRUUCES and The Guest List on 25 August.
