Bowling For Soup - Motorpoint Arena, Nottingham 13.02.2025

Bowling For Soup

Wheatus

Magnolia Park

On September 14th, 2004, Bowling for Soup released their hit album, ‘A Hangover You Don't Deserve.’ Nearly 20 years later, on February 13th, they celebrated the album's anniversary at Motorpoint Arena, Nottingham. Touring with Bowling for Soup are the rock veterans known for ‘Teenage Dirtbag’: Wheatus. Opening the show was a newer face to rock and metal, 6-year-old band, Magnolia Park.

With the stage set, lights went out and about an hour after doors opened, Magnolia Park made a dramatic entrance. I had not heard of the band before but was impressed by their energetic and angry performance. With powerful songs like ‘Misfits’ and encouragement to get crazy by band members, the audience began a moshpit and several members of the audience began to crowd surf. Magnolia Park wowed all six thousand members of the crowd with one of the most memorable opening performances I’ve ever seen.

Roughly twenty minutes after the end of the first performance, Wheatus graced the stage with their presence. Aside from their more popular songs, I hadn’t listened to much Wheatus before the concert. However, the self-aware humour of their singer, Brendan Brown, coupled with personal stories about how their songs were written and an excellent musical performance won me over. At one point during the performance of ‘Leroy’, Brendan noticed someone in the crowd was on the floor and paused the performance, urging the audience to be quiet and move out of the way to help the paramedics get to them. Once the person was assisted out of the crowd, Wheatus’ display of kindness evoked an ovation from everyone there. Wheatus finished off their performance with the fan favourite ‘Teenage Dirtbag’, which every last person in the arena sang along to.

After another thirty minutes of waiting, following Wheatus’ performance, Bowling for Soup began a dramatic entrance. A large graphic was shown on the big screen of the venue, a loading screen. Music played while the loading screen slowly crept up to 100%. The crowd buzzed with anticipation, eyes fixed on the stage. Once it was completed, a new song began alongside a video. The song was ‘Here Comes Bowling for Soup’ by ParryGrip and the video depicted band members with muscular bodies, winged, doing karate and other such hijinks. Toward the end of this one-minute song, the band walked out and immediately played ‘Almost’ and ‘Trucker Hat’ back to back.

The whole performance was immaculately put together. Bowling for Soup brought on various other musicians for some songs, including a keyboard player, saxophone player, and a guest drummer for a brief appearance. Jaret Reddick, the lead vocalist, enchanted the crowd with an amazing sense of humour and incredible charisma, and the backup vocalist, Rob Felicetti, joined in on some of the jokes. All in all, Bowling for Soup must’ve played around 24 songs, working through all 18 songs of ‘A Hangover You Don't Deserve’ and then some. Many of the songs were played at a slightly quicker tempo than the recorded versions, but you can’t blame them when they had so many songs to get through. During a lull in their two-hour performance, they welcomed an audience member onto the stage to spin a wheel to win a prize and choose the next song they should play. She chose for them to play the ‘Drunk Enough to Dance’ classic: ‘Life after Lisa’ and was invited to watch from the stage. After this, Bowling for Soup resumed their performance of ‘A Hangover You Don't Deserve.’

After dazzling the crowd with showmanship and their magnificent musical aura, rock legends, Bowling for Soup played some fan favourites before their time was up. Jaret first made a joke about how bands like to ‘fake-leave’ the stage before they play more songs, and how they won’t do that in case they fall and break a hip; Bowling for Soup played songs like Phineas and Ferb’s intro song ‘Today is Gonna be a Great Day’ along with hits like ‘Stacy’s Mom’, ‘Girl All The Bad Guys Want’ and ‘Highschool Never Ends.’

All in all, the terrific performance of the opening acts along with the once-in-a-lifetime experience of seeing my favourite Bowling for Soup album live, leaves me to rate this show five out of five stars. For sure, one of my favourite concerts I’ve ever been to. Bowling for Soup will be returning to the UK in December to play at the OVO Arena Wembley. If you are a fan of old-school pop-punk or you love Bowling for Soup and you didn’t catch this tour, you should definitely try to catch them in London!