Review: Fun Lovin' Criminals @ Hard Rock Cafe – March 28

By Melanie Hughes

The Fun Lovin’ Criminals dissed Coldplay as they brought love to Manchester’s Hard Rock Café, all for a good cause.

The notorious trio were in a jovial mood, which was made even better by the superb weather in the week and played a crowd-pleasing set for the Bombay Teen Challenge charity which 100% of the ticket sales was donated to.

“We’ve been coming to Manchester and getting into trouble for a long time,” Huey joked to rapturous applause before the band kicked off the evening with a crowd favourite ‘The Fun Lovin’ Criminal’.

He continued to thank the crowd throughout for donating money to charity by buying tickets for the gig and for taking place in the auction held before the band took to the stage.

Signed t-shirts and guitars were up for grabs with many items going for over £100 and a signed guitar for over £600.

Despite the seriousness of the cause there was always going to be time for laughs and jokes and the front-man took it upon himself to have a sly dig at Coldplay front man Chris Martin.

“God bless you for coming out for such a worthy cause, a lot of bands don’t do shit like this,” he said.

“We’re not like Coldplay doing all this fair trade. I guarantee everyone’s got something from China on them. Nice try dude. This is going to get kids off the streets,” he added.

It was a show for the true Fun Lovin’ Criminals as they played a host of classic tracks as well as covers found on their albums too.

A particular crowd favourite was King of New York and, of course, Scooby Snacks during which the band encouraged a full on crowd sing-a-long.

The New York threesome were impressed with the unusually warm temperature in the North West last week and said they’ve enjoyed their time in Manchester, Huey said: “I’ve seen blonde girls with a tan that don’t live in Essex.”

In fact, Huey spoke a lot between songs and, slightly merry on the beer anyway, the band downed tequilas in honour of, keyboard player, Brian’s (Also known as Fast) 40^th birthday.

The band signed off with ‘We Have All the Time in the World’ after agreeing to play another few tracks as a special birthday present!