Sunday 14th September 2025
Manchester Academy, Manchester, England
“I wasn’t sure you were gonna show up,” Oliver Anthony says from the stage to the thousands of people who have packed into the Manchester Academy concert hall tonight. Overpriced beers in hand, they’ve just sung along to ‘I’ve Got to Get Sober’, the third song of the main set.
It’s a reasonable concern. Not only has tonight’s gig, and this whole European tour, been rescheduled from its initial date in February, but there remains that question mark over the rise of Oliver Anthony – real name Chris Lunsford. As everyone knows, Chris was not a professional musician when he put the video for his ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ song online in August 2023, but it immediately went viral, speaking as it did to a vast community of forgotten men and representing a political zeitgeist that many of the chattering classes either didn’t know existed or had tried to suppress.
That viral sensation for such a political song, and Chris’ remarkable decision to resist the lure of obscene money or compromising for the music industry, resulted in some bitter mainstream and partisan attack pieces – labels like ‘flash in the pan’, ‘one-hit wonder’ and, for the ‘Richmond’ song itself, sneering dismissals of its technical quality or the content of its lyrics. And, such has been the unprecedented strangeness of Oliver Anthony’s rise, the questions and the criticisms weren’t always illegitimate, even if they were sometimes dishonestly made. What to make of an ordinary, if talented and principled, man who, literally overnight, became a man and message discussed by presidents and presidents-elect, and considered the voice of many?
I posed the same question to myself when I went to see Oliver Anthony on his first visit to Manchesterin February 2024, a mere six months after that viral ‘Richmond’ hit. It was answered within moments of him taking the stage, as the crowd spontaneously belted out the entirety of ‘Richmond’ word for word – a special night of musical catharsis, generosity and goodwill. In my review of the night, I labelled Oliver Anthony – with a nod to the title of his viral hit – ‘The Richest Man in the World‘. Chris had been tested and had come forth as gold. Speaking the truth, he had been lauded for it and loved. He was making bank and, when the tour was over, he could retreat back to the sanctity of his woods in Virginia with his wife and kids and his good ole dogs.
What, then, would be the change in the nineteen months since then? One, sadly, is that his sanctuary has been somewhat compromised; the afore-mentioned wife is now that most dreaded of things, an ex-wife, having allegedly demanded (admittedly, according to podcast rumours) 60% of his future earnings. The beloved partner of ‘Always Love You Like a Good Old Dog’ has become a ‘Scornful Woman’, the title of his latest single.
But if Chris has been bruised and battered by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, he doesn’t show it tonight. Both the above songs are played in his set; ‘Scornful Woman’ is not excessively bitter and ‘Good Old Dog’ remains as tender as ever – my favourite Oliver Anthony song. “I’ve still got these three kids with her,” Chris says before ’90 Some Chevy’, his song about taking the not-yet-scornful woman out in his old car when they first met.
Other changes are more routine, but still noteworthy in a review of a night of live music. Having visited Manchester last year as part of an acoustic trio, with Joey Davis on guitar and Caleb Dillard on stand-up bass, Oliver Anthony now leads an amplified five-piece band. Joey remains on guitar, though he occasionally switches to electric throughout tonight’s set. (Oliver Anthony also leaves the stage at one point to allow Joey to take the lead on singing two well-received covers, ‘Valerie’ and the Elvis Presley cut ‘T-R-O-U-B-L-E’.) The rhythm section is now performed by Peter Wellman on bass and keys and Noel Burton on drums, with the music further complemented by Billy Contreras’ fiddle. Opening act Sam Shackleton even returns to the stage on a few numbers to lend his harmonica.
Backed so strongly, and with nineteen months since he last toured England, the night should be set up for an incredible expression of Oliver Anthony’s creative and political message. But, surprisingly, this is where the Oliver Anthony live experience falters somewhat. The one-two punch of ‘Scornful Woman’ and ‘Cowboys and Sunsets’ in the second half of the set are the only two newer songs Oliver Anthony plays. Indeed, they (along with ‘Momma’s Been Hurting’, which doesn’t get an airing tonight) are the only new songs Chris has released since his viral frenzy, not counting the re-recorded Samsongs that made up his Hymnal album.
There is one unreleased original tonight: ‘Hank’, a fine slice of Oliver Anthony’s patented portentous country-folk which goes down well with the Manchester crowd. But if I’m honest I had expected more from an artist who, onstage, promises us there’s much more to come: “I’m gonna take a couple of months off when I get back and we’re just gonna try and get as much stuff recorded as we can.”
This may be down to an excess of caution from a truly independent artist, who would no doubt want his songs fairly protected. At the start of the night, Chris alludes to an ongoing dispute with the streaming companies about getting his money (“they make it so difficult to just do this like a regular person. There’s always some asshole that you gotta go through”) and later introduces ‘Ain’t Gotta Dollar’ by saying this whole viral thing started because he’d written that song and “was wanting to just go play it at a bonfire or a bar and I didn’t want anybody to steal it. I didn’t have a lot of money at the time, so the cheapest way to do it was just to put it on the internet. I knew nobody would be able to rip it off.”
But even allowing for this caution, the fact remains there are nine covers in tonight’s set (not counting Joey Davis’ two-song interlude). That would be unusual for any singer-songwriter, but particularly for one who is so consciously opinionated, who has such a rare opportunity to reach large numbers of people while remaining unfiltered and untethered to any industry compromise.
Tonight’s covers are themselves a mixed bag. The set opens strongly with the evergreen ‘Amazing Grace’, before Chris nods to the local crowd – “there’s a city not very far from here called Salford, I believe” – with a cover of ‘Dirty Old Town’ by the local folk legend Ewan MacColl. The song gets a fantastic singalong from the crowd, and I’m sure I’m not the only Salfordian here tonight who finds it a special moment.
Some of the covers suit Oliver Anthony’s sound well: Elton John’s ‘Rocket Man’, revived for the first time in the set since Chris last came to Manchester, and the Lynyrd Skynyrd classic ‘Free Bird’, countrified with a bending dobro sound here while still allowing Joey Davis opportunities to shred on guitar. Others are unnecessary or ill-chosen: the dissonant Primus song ‘Jerry Was a Race Car Driver’ passes me by, while the fluent staccato singing required for ‘Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked’ and ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia’ doesn’t sit well with Oliver Anthony’s more plaintive, resonant voice.
I’m no party-pooper, mind, and I enjoy as much as anyone tonight the lusty crowd-pleasing singalongs enabled by the likes of ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ (“they don’t sing it that good in West Virginia, I swear,” Chris remarks). It’s only that I go to a night of live music wishing for an artist to express themselves just as much as they enjoy themselves, and tonight’s covers see that expression diluted. If a particular cover has a particular resonance for an artist, then all the better, but in my opinion such a significant number of easy crowd-pleasers take away from the artist’s own voice and message. And remember, this is an artist who became so rapidly popular precisely because he had something to say.
(That said, Chris does have some limits on how far he’ll go to cover a song tonight. “You guys’ll wanna hear one of those new Beyoncé country songs, or something like that?” he jokes, to pantomime boos from the crowd. “Nah, I’m just kidding. We don’t need two people butchering ‘Jolene’, that’s for sure.”)
Clinging to a raft of covers is particularly strange when Oliver Anthony has plenty of his own to keep him afloat. His original songs are very well-received tonight, generating singalongs to rival any, and when he breaks into the earnestness of ‘I’ve Got to Get Sober’, ‘Rich Man’s Gold’ or ‘I Want to Go Home’, he allows for a communality of experience among his fans. For all the covers on show, Oliver Anthony resonates best when he’s speaking from the heart.
Certainly, there’s no harm in the audience having a working-class hero to call their own, for all the sneers that come from outside. His music gives people a license to release their pent-up frustrations in a healthy way, and it means crowds get behind him like few others. Regardless of whether you agree with his politics, none can, in good faith, deny his authenticity, or his sincerity from behind the mike.
Two years after ‘Richmond’, Oliver Anthony is still clearly trying to figure out a way to cash that golden ticket in the most meaningful and culturally useful way. One thing he is doing which is of merit is creating opportunities for other artists to follow, as with Sam Shackleton, tonight’s opening act. It’s unlikely that Sam’s authentic, lively folk music, complete with banjo, harmonica and lyrics delivered in a thick Scottish dialect, would have made it on its own to as large a crowd as the one that has assembled in the Manchester Academy, were it not for the support of iconoclastic gatebreakers like Oliver Anthony. It’s an opportunity Sam takes fully and with a charming insouciance, singing his opening song a cappella with a can of beer in hand. He provides a mix of old folk standards and western songs alongside his own canny originals, and the crowd is fully invested in the sound, uncommercial as it is. Our cultural gatekeepers have never known what we truly want, but apparently it’s Scots banjo music, and I for one am here for it.
As for Oliver Anthony, he still has plenty of time to figure out how else he wants to grasp his opportunity. It seems his fanbase isn’t going anywhere: Chris remarks how he hid in the woods for six months or so and “I didn’t look at none of my socials or Spotify or none of that crap, and I just figured everybody had moved on. And one day I got on there and looked and it was like the same amount of monthly listeners. And I just realised I gotta keep doing this a good while longer.” Far from being a flash in the pan, his status and sincerity grants him a staying power. He only has to find a way of making the best of it.
Perhaps all he needs is encouragement; to be reminded of something he surely already knows but might understandably forget or allow to lapse in moments of doubt. Namely that a great many ordinary people, voiceless in the grand scheme of things, are willing him on. And Manchester is keen to provide that encouragement.
“Uuu uu ouu uhhh!” comes the shout from the crowd.
“What’s that?” Oliver Anthony replies from the stage.
“Uuu uu ouu uhhh!”
“I wish I could hear what you were saying,” he says. “It sounds like it’s really cool.”
“Uuu uu ouu uhhh!”
“I can’t hear shit up here. All I hear is “something the bay” or something like that.”
“Uuu uu ouu uhhh!”
“I just gotta hear what he’s saying. ‘Go on the boy?”‘
The crowd cheers.
“Alright, now what?” he says. “I don’t know what that even means.”
The crowd laughs.
“GO ON THE BOY!” Chris roars, and the crowd roars back. The shout will be heard spontaneously throughout the rest of the night.
“I don’t know what it means,” Chris says later on in the night, after roaring the phrase again. “I’ll find out tomorrow, I’m sure.”
What it means, aside from being a throwaway piece of slang, is that Oliver Anthony has a crowd of thousands behind him. Everywhere he goes, in England, in Europe, and back home in the United States, there are crowds of thousands. And they are there because he’s doing something against the grain. He came from nowhere, bypassing the gates and the gatekeepers, and expressed a sentiment shared by many that had been too often dismissed. He’s singing honest songs and endeavouring to stay honest himself while he does so. This is why people stay invested in him and his music. He might not be the right-wing prophet some wanted him to be in the immediate aftermath of ‘Richmond’s virality, but he’s an artist with integrity trying to do it the right way. Go on the boy, people say, having recognised what he is. Keep going.
The Oliver Anthony experience, then, is to recognise in him both change and constancy. I can criticise something as banal as the lack of change in the setlist, the small number of new songs and the plethora of covers, but also recognise and admire that in much deeper ways it’s good that this artist has not changed, or at least has not been changed, not been corrupted by what he’s encountered in the last couple of years.
It’s this that people respond to, and it’s this that I’m hoping flourishes in the next couple of years, with Oliver Anthony continuing to hone his craft and focus in on his greater purpose. A figure like this, a beacon of sanity and normality in an increasingly divided world, becomes something even more cherishable considering this Manchester gig takes place just a few days after the senseless murder of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk in America, and the attempts of a worryingly large number of people (including some musicians I admire) to rationalise and excuse it. Even celebrate it.
“I only spoke to Charlie once,” Chris says, “I didn’t really know him. And the reality is that it could’ve been…” He pauses for a moment, not continuing the thought. The reality is it could have been anyone. It could have been you for your opinions, it could have been me for mine. It could have been Chris. What if someone took a shot at him? It seems absurd that the writer of “fudge rounds” would be met by rounds from a thirty-aught-six, but then again it would have also sounded absurd to me a few days earlier if someone had posed the same scenario for Charlie Kirk. “The Turning Point guy?” I asked, baffled, when I was first told the news. “Why would anyone want to get him?”I find it hard to accept Kirk as the saintly Martin Luther King figure some have tried to present him as since his death. But he was someone who appeared to be, at least by the standards of the clusterfuck that is modern political engagement, moderate and respectful and sincere.
“The point is, we should be out in public talking like this all the time,” Oliver Anthony says. “It shouldn’t take a Charlie Kirk for people to want to stand outside and talk this out. This is a psychological war we’re in and it’s gonna go on for a long time.”
Chris has just played his penultimate song, ‘I Want to Go Home’. “We’re on the brink of the next world war,” he sang, and in my review of Oliver Anthony’s first gig in Manchester nineteen months ago I noted that the song was full of foreboding. I then quoted, a tad indulgently I admit, from my own novel, writing that it feels like something is coming. We don’t know what it might be or what form it will take. But if we don’t know what it is or what we would need to fight it, we can at least decide what we would want to preserve when it comes. What we would want to keep of ourselves.
Whatever was coming might well have arrived in the wake of Kirk. World war, or civil war, or even just a culture war getting out of hand, we’re at a dangerous moment. What was lost to a bullet in Utah was not just a young father who sought to speak across political divides, but what the many who celebrated and excused the murder allowed to be lost in themselves.
Even if Kirk was the evil man some claim – and he wasn’t – he wouldn’t deserve that death. The only divide that matters here is the one between those who think it is acceptable for a man with a microphone to be gunned down in public and those who know it is not. The whole point of civilisation is to allow us all to co-operate and co-exist without resorting to violence, so that our base animal instincts to hurt and bully and tear one another apart do not take control. When we justify violence in our society, even slightly, we pull recklessly at one of the fundamental threads of our existence.
Because Death is the enemy. Death and violence. That is the enemy of civilisation, and it doesn’t tilt left or right but stands unwaveringly as the fundamental enemy of organised humanity itself. When I saw the video of Kirk I was sickened, of course, but it was clear in what it was: Death, the Enemy, making an appearance. What was more disturbing, more disheartening, was the attempt of many to excuse and diminish it, because that is an enemy that’s harder to pin down, one that seeps in like rot rather than stands tall as Death does. For all that I’m familiar with aspects of the culture war, I at least thought we were in a healthier place than this. It’s a damn shame what the world’s gotten to.
“Think about people you’ve dated in the past,” Oliver Anthony says, shortly after invoking Kirk. “Stupid arguments you’ve had. You can’t even fix those on the phone, so how are we gonna fix our country on a phone, y’know? It’s a rigged game.”
Chris puts a lot of it down to manipulation from above, from the powerful people and the rich men north of Richmond, and certainly it’s true that there’s a push, particularly with social media, to incentivise negativity and division. He calls from the stage that “we’re all a lot more similar than we are dissimilar” and how it’s important to resist this attempt at control.
This is true, but it’s also important for people to take ownership of their own thoughts. Nobody should be so far gone to the manipulation of algorithms and elites that they cheer and mock the murder of Charlie Kirk. Nobody should douse their morality in arterial spray. It doesn’t matter what Kirk was. It only matters what you are. You can never fully know another person, and so you can never judge them proportionately for their errors and opinions. You can only seek to know yourself – and even that is hard to do.
But in knowing yourself you can, in spite of the attempts to control you, choose to be who you are, or at least choose who you will not be. You can choose to be someone who doesn’t rationalise political violence because they agree with the ‘side’ it comes from, and you can choose not to follow sly, vindictive or insidious takes dressed up as morality and virtue in order to excuse or diminish the brutal and undignified public murder of a man in front of his young family. The important video shared online in the wake of Utah was not the one of the deed itself, but the one of Kirk on a studio news set some months earlier, beaming a smile as his infant daughter runs towards him and he lifts her up in a hug. That was what was lost, something more important than any political hot-take that’s here today and gone tomorrow. And that, sadly, is what many fail to realise.
What does this have to do with Oliver Anthony live in Manchester? We’re certainly a long way from critiquing the number of covers on tonight’s setlist. But it’s worth discussing not only because Chris mentions it himself on stage, but because Oliver Anthony as an artist appears to be in a holding pattern. Whether out of caution or doubt, he has not kicked on from his initial viral success. He’s talked of releasing new material on one hand and of quitting music entirely on the other. It would be natural and completely understandable for him to not know what to do with his success and his opportunity; an opportunity which is unlike any that came before it, and which has come during such increasingly contentious times.
But he plays ‘Richmond’ to end the show. And it reaches the people in the crowd just as it has always done, prompting not only a singalong of people who in the grand scheme of things consider themselves voiceless, but a flood of cathartic purpose, a sense that if the world is fucked there’s at least these three minutes of a song under which people can shelter and regroup and perhaps even push back. It doesn’t matter what you think about fudge rounds specifically, or minors on an island somewhere. It only matters that when you hear it you know you’re not crazy, that there are others who see things are fucked too and for a short while they’re singing all around you.
“If you don’t get anything else out of this show tonight,” Oliver Anthony says, “I just want you to remember this…. They already do this, but it’s gonna get worse and worse with all this crap. They’re gonna make you feel like you’re this big. Like there’s nobody else on this planet that thinks the same way you do. They isolate you in this little box… Like you’re just dead. Like nobody cares about you.
“And I swear to you – I’ve been all over the United States and Europe and Australia and I’ve talked to so many people. Thousands of people. Just believe me: there will always be more of us than there ever will be of them.
“I love you all. Just give me a minute and I’ll jump down there. I’d love to meet you all – if you want. Thank you.”
This, then, is what matters. Someone looking to lead by example. It doesn’t mean that person needs to be pure and error-free. It doesn’t mean they always have to be right. It doesn’t even mean they have to be doing everything they could be doing. It just means that it’s valuable that, every once in a while, you can look to someone and see them trying to operate with integrity in a world that makes it increasingly harder to do so.
Some of the crowd filters out into the night, and Chris walks along the front row talking to people and taking selfies and signing autographs, greeting anyone who chooses to stay. I’m already in the front row, where I’ve been all evening. I consider staying to meet him, but instead I stick to my long-standing rule of not bothering artists after a gig, unless it happens naturally.
After all, I can say it here instead.
Setlist:
(all songs written by Chris Lunsford – a.k.a. Oliver Anthony – unless noted)
- Amazing Grace (John Newton) (unreleased)
- Dirty Old Town (Ewan MacColl) (unreleased)
- I’ve Got to Get Sober (from Hymnal of a Troubled Man’s Mind)
- Lonely Boy (Dan Auerbach/Patrick Carney/Brian Joseph Burton) (unreleased)
- Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked (Matt Shultz/Brad Shultz/Jared Champion/Daniel Tichenor/Lincoln Parish) (unreleased)
- Cobwebs and Cocaine (from Hymnal)
- Take Me Home, Country Roads (John Denver/Bill Danoff/Taffy Nivert) (single)
- 90 Some Chevy (single)
- Rich Man’s Gold (from Hymnal)
- Always Love You Like a Good Old Dog (from Hymnal)
- Jerry Was a Race Car Driver (Les Claypool/Larry LaLonde/Tim Alexander) (unreleased)
- Hank (unreleased)
- Free Bird (Allen Collins/Ronnie Van Zant) (unreleased)
- The Devil Went Down to Georgia (Charlie Daniels/Tom Crain/Joel DiGregorio/Fred Edwards/Charles Hayward/James Marshall) (unreleased)
- Scornful Woman (Chris Lunsford/Joey Davis/Billy Contreras/Draven Riffe) (single)
- Cowboys and Sunsets (single)
- Valerie (Dave McCabe/Boyan Chowdhury/Russ Pritchard/Sean Payne/Abi Harding) (unreleased) [Joey Davis singing]
- T-R-O-U-B-L-E (Jerry Chesnut) (unreleased) [Joey Davis singing]
- Ain’t Gotta Dollar (single)
- Rocket Man (Elton John/Bernie Taupin) (unreleased)
- I Want to Go Home (from Hymnal)
- Rich Men North of Richmond (single)
My other concert reviews can be found here.
My fiction writing can be found here.
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