Hothouse Flowers Turn Manchester’s Ritz into a Celebration of Soul, Spirit and Song
O2 Ritz, Manchester · 10th November 2026
WORDS / IMAGES BILLY SEAGRAVE
Hothouse Flowers
Bring deliver a powerhouse performance, with an ease of a band that knows its audience.
There are easier ways to please a packed room than to make yourself vulnerable in front of it. Hothouse Flowers choose the latter. Opening with “Forgiven”, they establish a cathartic atmosphere at Manchester’s Ritz: music as release rather than routine, with the distance between stage and audience already beginning to dissolve. This is not a band dusting off its history. It is a band finding fresh reasons to believe in it.
The warmth in the room is palpable. A largely mature crowd arrives with the familiarity of listeners who have lived alongside these songs, but the anticipation feels anything but dutiful. Faces brighten, voices gather and the evening acquires the intimacy of a shared occasion. The Ritz may be packed, yet the mood is welcoming rather than anonymous: less a roomful of spectators than a gathering waiting to find its collective voice.
“Forgiven” provides the emotional key. Liam Ó Maonlaí’s vocals draw the audience into the song’s sense of release, giving the opening a weight that goes beyond the customary business of warming up a crowd. There is something generous about the exchange: the band offers the feeling, the room gives it back. Before the night has properly unfolded, the Flowers have established its terms.
A rousing cover of “I Can See Clearly Now” raises the bar. Its promise of renewal becomes a communal declaration, the crowd’s voices lending breadth and lift to the melody. What could have been an easy crowd-pleaser instead deepens the atmosphere established by the opener. The uplift feels earned. “Dirty Old Town” proves equally stirring, its well-worn familiarity becoming a strength rather than a limitation. These are songs people know, but tonight the pleasure lies in hearing what happens when they inhabit them together.
The Flowers’ musical restlessness reaches back to their days as the Risk on Dublin’s late-night dancefloors. Decades together have given them a shared language, not a fixed script. Rock, soul and Irish tradition rub against one another rather than settling into tidy compartments. Fiachna, Liam and Peter’s traditional grounding gives that freedom substance: the ancestral sorrow of “Currachaí na Trá Báine”, inherited by Fiachna and rooted in the devastation of drowning within a family and community, belongs to the deeper world their music carries. Humour keeps the seriousness from becoming solemnity, while expression matters more than immaculate execution. On record, their harmonies have a lush, layered quality; at the Ritz, the audience supplies another dimension. Voices gather around Liam Ó Maonlaí’s lead until the room becomes part of the arrangement: full, enveloping and beautifully communal. The connection between the band and that makeshift choir is the evening’s defining pleasure.
There is nostalgia in the room, inevitably, but it never gets to run the show. More than three decades into their career, Hothouse Flowers still approach music as unfinished business. What stays with you, though, is not a checklist of familiar songs. It is the warmth of a packed Manchester room discovering that familiarity can still lead somewhere unexpected. The Flowers are not merely keeping the past alive. They are making it breathe. Some bands spend their later years preserving the past. Hothouse Flowers would rather see how far they can push it. The appeal of their Manchester appearance lies not in the reassurance of a familiar repertoire, but in the promise that familiarity can be pulled apart and made new. For a band well into its fourth decade, that appetite for uncertainty remains its most compelling asset .
SET LIST
Forgiven
Giving It All Away
An Raibh Tú Ar An Gcarraig
I Can See Clearly Now
Forever More
Movies
Hallelujah Jordan
Sweet Marie
Lakes of Pontchartrain
Feet on the Ground
Don't Go
Dirty Old Town
If You Go
Si Do Mhamo I
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