Glastonbury 2023: Watch Rick Astley and Blossoms cover The Smiths song ‘This Charming Man’
As part of their performance at the 2023 Glastonbury Festival, Rick Astley and Blossoms performed a full set of covers in tribute to the iconic Manchester band The Smiths. Here, we have footage of the somewhat unlikely combination running through a rendition of the 1983 hit, ‘This Charming Man’.
The collaborative act performed on the Woodsies stage at 6:30pm tonight and delivered a rendition of a number of classics by the pioneering indie band. Of course, this was not the first time they have covered ‘This Charming Man’, given that they went viral in September 2021 with their cover of it at London’s O2 Kentish Town Forum.
For that show, frontman Tom Ogden told the crowd: “Since it’s London, we thought, why not do something special? So we’re going to do some songs by one of our favourite bands with a friend of ours. Welcome our friend Rick Astley.”
The frontman continued: “Do you want to tell them what band it is, Richard?” The ‘The Never Gonna Give You Up’ vocalist replied: “The Smiths”. As the footage shows, they were greeted by universal applause.
Following this, both Astley and Blossoms announced two Smiths cover shows in Manchester and London, which the band’s former guitarist Johnny Marr, took issue with. “This is both funny and horrible at the same time. Well, I met The Blossoms a few weeks ago and they elected to not mention it. Nice,” he wrote on Twitter. Both parties have now made up.
Elsewhere, in a recent interview, Astley explained his “love” for The Smiths and how he had “always” wanted to form a cover band of them. “Even when I was in bands as a kid, we never played The Smiths’ songs because they were a bit too intricate for us,” he told the NME. “I never saw The Smiths but I’ve seen covers bands of them, and I just fall in love with them every time.”
Watch Rick Astley and Blossoms cover ‘This Charming Man’ at Glastonbury 2023 below.
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