Watch Blossoms and Rick Astley team up to cover The Smiths

Blossoms surprised fans in London tonight (September 13) by inviting Rick Astley on stage to run through a selection of Smiths covers.

The Stockport band are currently on a UK headline tour, performing the first of three nights at London’s O2 Kentish Town Forum after stepping in to replace Machine Gun Kelly for a recent main stage performance at Reading & Leeds 2021.

As well as airing new single ‘Care For‘ in their career-spanning set that leaned heavily on 2020’s acclaimed ‘Foolish Loving Spaces‘, the band gave gig-goers the biggest surprise of the night when veteran pop icon Richard Astley arrived on stage.

“Since it’s London, we thought why not do something special?,” said frontman Tom Ogden. “So we’re going to do some songs by one of our favourite bands with a friend of ours from the North West. Welcome our friend Rick Astley.

“Do you want to tell them what band it is, Richard?” asked Ogden, adding, “It’s The Smiths everybody,” before tearing into ‘Panic’ and ‘This Charming Man’. Swipe through the below Instagram videos to see footage of both.

Later, Blossoms frontman Tom Ogden played an acoustic segment of Astley’s classic ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ after it was also played as warm-up music before the show.

Astley is no stranger to such surprise rock n’ roll antics, having turned up to join Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl on stage at Club NME at London’s Moth Club in August 2019 to run through some Foos classics and a rendition of ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ – before doing the same at Reading Festival.

Blossoms’ tour continues with another show at The Forum tomorrow (September 14) and Wednesday(September 25) before performing at Newcastle’s This Is Tomorrow Festival and at Manchester’s AO Arena, as well as supporting Courteeners with Johnny Marr and Old Trafford. More headline shows in Europe and the UK will follow in 2022. Visit here for tickets and more information.

News is expected soon of the band’s new album after they teased details of it in a recent interview with NME.

“I’m not sure what I can actually say,” frontman Ogden told NME, before Donovan, laughing, jumped in and said: “Fuck it, it’s an album. No band just releases a random single. It’s usually followed by something.”

“OK, we have done an album,” Ogden went on to admit, “we’re just working out the fine details.” Asked whether he had any idea when it might arrive, Ogden said it would “probably be next year”.

“I fucking hope so,” Donovan added. “I feel like we’ve been sitting on it for ages now. I purposely haven’t listened to [‘Care For’] in ages. I just try not to listen to your new stuff because by the time you come to actually playing it live you’re kinda bored of it and you’re onto the next.”

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