Manchester indie band Corella are used to fans travelling to see them.
For years, devotees from seaside towns and post‑industrial cities alike have booked hotels in Manchester or Leeds to pile into sweaty venues and bounce along to the quartet’s adrenalized guitar anthems.
This month, though, it’s Corella doing the travelling, as they swap big‑city stages for intimate rooms in Blackpool and Preston on a deliberately northern headline tour.
Frontman Joel Smith jokes that, back home in Grimsby, "there’s not a music scene… there’s a fish scene", so Manchester was always going to be the place where their story began.
He moved there in 2016 for university, along with guitarist Jack Taylor from Oldham and York‑born drummer James Fawcett, and all three were randomly assigned to the same halls block.
"We sort of believed in fate after that," Joel says.
"If it wasn’t for that person to put us in the same university halls, we wouldn’t be in the band Corella."
When James later drafted in his friend Ben Henderson on bass, the line‑up was complete and the band set about learning how to be a band in one of Britain’s most storied music cities.
Those early shows were hardly glamorous. Corella cut their teeth supporting whoever would have them on bills across Manchester, from rooms like the Deaf Institute to smaller grassroots spaces such as Joshua Brooks. "I remember being absolutely clueless," Joel admits of that period.
"It’s really tough to start off in a band, trying to get off the ground, get up and running.
"You need to have that solid fanbase, and luckily, we had a really solid group of people that came to watch us at every gig."
Word of mouth did the rest, as friends dragged more friends along each time, the audiences grew, and the band’s reputation as a live proposition began to outrun the recorded tracks they had online.
"We always knew that we sounded better live than we did on Spotify," Joel says, only half‑apologetically.
Like most modern bands, Corella rely on streaming to find new listeners: some of their tracks now sit on 12 or 16 million plays apiece, inflamed by inclusion on coveted editorial playlists and the addictive feedback loop of the Spotify for Artists app that lets them watch their numbers climb in real time.
He describes streaming as "a blessing and also a curse" – brilliant for pushing a young band into new territories, less brilliant when those millions of plays translate into modest income and a constant feeling of chasing the next spike.
"Sometimes you’ve got to sit back and think, you know what, we’ve done pretty well there," he concedes, though you sense that pausing to take stock does not come naturally.
If the economics of contemporary guitar music are complicated, Corella’s solution is simple: double down on the thing that made people care in the first place. "We really thrive through the live stuff," Joel says.
"We love the smaller venues.
"We love the vibe of getting in a sweaty room and just plugging in and playing instead of all the rubbish that comes with it with the bigger venues."
That "rubbish" might include extra crew, smart lighting and decent catering, all of which he insists are appreciated, but they can also create a kind of distance between band and crowd. In the tight confines of a club or back‑room bar, there’s nowhere to hide.
It’s why their May run consciously hugs the spine of the north, with stops at Blackpool’s Bootleg Social and Preston’s The Ferret alongside dates in Huddersfield, York, Stockton and Grimsby.
These aren’t obvious tour routing choices from a spreadsheet perspective, but they make perfect sense emotionally to a band who see themselves as part of a wider northern guitar tradition.
"We noticed that when we were playing gigs, so many bands just know how to rough it," Joel says of the north’s circuit.
"There’s obviously a guitar‑driven audience there as well because we were there in Manchester, we’ve got to do this for the north, and we keep that close to our chest.
"We always remember where we’re from, and that never changes, really."
For the people buying tickets in Blackpool and Preston, that sense of shared identity matters.
These are towns where fans will routinely jump on trains to catch rising bands in bigger cities, and Joel says he has huge respect for those who build weekends around gigs, from booking hotels to eating in local restaurants before a show. On this tour, he wants to bring the show to them instead.
"These places… people love music so much and they will travel to Manchester or they’ll travel to Leeds to watch their favourite band," he says.
"I absolutely love that people do that and I think it’s just nice that we can get back to those places even though they’re smaller venues.”
Blackpool in particular carries a personal resonance. Corella have never played there before, but Joel knows the resort from childhood coach trips with his Yorkshire family to the Pleasure Beach.
His memories involve rollercoasters like the Big Dipper and the Valhalla water ride, finishing the day soaked to the skin on the bus back to Barnsley.
These days he lives by the sea in Grimsby and cheekily doubts Blackpool’s fish and chips will beat what he’s grown up with, but says he’s looking forward to rediscovering the town from the perspective of a touring musician rather than a kid with a wristband.
All this is happening at a pivotal moment for Corella.
Their debut album Once Upon A Weekend introduced a jangly, tropical‑tinged indie sound that marked them out as festival‑friendly up‑and‑comers, but Joel is adamant the follow‑up, A Beautiful World To Lose, needed to push harder.
"We didn’t want to release the same album twice," he explains.
"The music that we’ve got coming out is a lot more meaningful, especially with the lyrics.
"We’ve got a lot more storytelling, real stories that people can connect with."
The heavier edge he pushed for comes from watching how crowds react live – the jumping, the singalongs, the cathartic moments that only really hit when the guitars bite down a little harder.
Produced by Grammy‑winner Jason Perry and due out on 18 September via FLG, A Beautiful World To Lose weaves those instincts into thunderous tracks like 'Rewire', which rages against political manipulation, and 'Thunder Strike', co‑written with Circa Waves' Kieran Shudall, which grapples with the anxiety and adrenaline of chasing a career in a band.
Elsewhere, songs such as 'What’s The Use', 'Wolf' and 'Lost A Friend' lean into vulnerability, touching on themes of hopelessness, bravado and grief after drummer James lost two friends to suicide and Joel went through the end of a long‑term relationship.
"These lyrics have more grit to them, more heart, and we knew we had to be willing to make ourselves more vulnerable," Joel has said of the record.
The May shows, including those Lancashire dates, will be the first time many of those songs are aired live in front of fans.
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For Joel, who spoke on a day off in Berlin about wandering through a Turkish neighbourhood and catching a rhythm that he instantly wanted to pinch, that constant flow of new inspiration is the point.
"You can’t really switch off from it," he says.
"You’re always looking for things to influence you, and I’ve noticed that more and more growing up."
If Corella are magpies, snatching shiny ideas from Manchester clubs, German street corners and family coach trips to Blackpool, then the Bootleg Social and The Ferret dates promise to be where all those fragments collide at close quarters.
In an era when rock bands are meant to play the algorithm as much as the amp, there is something stubbornly old‑fashioned about four northern lads loading their gear into tiny rooms and trusting in word of mouth.
Joel would probably say that’s exactly how it should be.
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