The Manchester band will bring The Singles Tour to Australia and New Zealand in April and May, revisiting a catalogue that helped define the Madchester era.
by Paul Cashmere
Inspiral Carpets will return to Australia and New Zealand in 2027 with The Singles Tour, bringing together the songs that established the Manchester band as one of the defining acts of the Madchester era, including This Is How It Feels, She Comes In The Fall, Dragging Me Down, Joe and Saturn 5.
The tour will be the band’s first Australian shows since their 2023 return, when they played to audiences across Perth, Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne before continuing to New Zealand. The 2027 run will again focus on the singles that formed the backbone of Inspiral Carpets’ early catalogue.
At the centre of that sound is Clint Boon’s organ, one of the most recognisable elements of the band’s music. Combined with Graham Lambert’s guitar, the rhythm section and the vocal harmonies, it gave Inspiral Carpets a distinctive place within the late 1980s and early 1990s Manchester scene.
The band emerged from Oldham in 1983, initially developing a garage rock and punk influenced sound before moving towards the psychedelic, organ-driven style that would become their signature. By the end of the decade they were part of the wider Manchester movement that also produced the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays.
Their breakthrough came with This Is How It Feels in 1990. The single reached No. 14 in the UK and helped drive the band’s debut album, Life, to No. 2. The following year’s The Beast Inside reached the UK Top 5, while Revenge Of The Goldfish and Devil Hopping continued their run of singles and albums through the early 1990s.
Devil Hopping produced one of the band’s most enduring songs in Saturn 5, which became a Top 20 UK single in 1994. The album also included I Want You, a collaboration with The Fall’s Mark E. Smith.
Inspiral Carpets split after their original run with Mute Records ended in the mid-1990s, but the catalogue continued to find new audiences. The band reunited in 2003 and later returned with original vocalist Stephen Holt, following Tom Hingley’s departure in 2011.
The band’s history also carries a significant loss. Drummer Craig Gill, who had joined Inspiral Carpets as a teenager in 1986, died in 2016 at the age of 44. The band remained inactive for several years before announcing their return in 2022, with a new touring chapter beginning in 2023.
That comeback brought the band back to Australia for the first time in three decades and introduced them to a new generation of New Zealand audiences. The current tour follows that return with a set built around the singles rather than a particular album.
Boon has described the band’s current live form as the strongest it has been, saying, “We’re on fire at the moment. We’re playing better than ever, and I think we’re appreciating it more, too… It’s brilliant that we’re still here doing it.”
The 2027 shows will draw heavily from the band’s best-known material. Alongside This Is How It Feels and Saturn 5, the set is expected to include She Comes In The Fall, Joe and Dragging Me Down, songs that remain closely associated with the era that made Inspiral Carpets a fixture of Manchester’s alternative music culture.
The timing also gives Australian audiences another opportunity to hear the band’s catalogue in a live setting following the 2023 shows. For a band whose identity was built around singles, the format of The Singles Tour places the focus squarely on the songs that carried Inspiral Carpets from Oldham clubs into the UK charts.
Dates:
29 April, Perth, Rosemount Hotel
30 April, Fremantle, Freo.Social
1 May, Adelaide, The Gov
6 May, Brisbane, The Triffid
7 May, Sydney, Metro Theatre
8 May, Melbourne, Northcote Theatre
12 May, Wellington, San Fran
Tickets:
Presale: Tuesday 29 September, 12:00pm Local
General Public On Sale: Thursday 1 October, 12:00pm Local
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