The Wombats mark 20 years of their debut with a 2027 UK tour

A party for a 20-year-old record

The Wombats are going back to where it started. The Liverpool trio of Matthew "Murph" Murphy, Dan Haggis and Tord Øverland Knudsen will play their 2007 debut album, A Guide To Love, Loss & Desperation, from start to finish on a tour of Europe, the UK and North America in the spring of 2027, two decades after it made them one of the best-known guitar bands of their generation.

The tour was announced on 12 October 2026. Each night is split in two, the Official Charts Company reported: the first half is the album in full, and the second half is given over to the band's bigger hits and fan favourites from the five albums that followed.

In a statement, the band said that when they realised the album was turning 20 they decided it was only fair to throw a party. Haggis said the record had taken them from driving around the UK in his grandmother's car and sleeping on promoters' floors to touring the world, and that it was full of memories of playing the Royal Albert Hall, Japan, the US, Australia, where he said they got to meet an actual wombat, and Glastonbury.

Max Persad reported this first for Official Charts. Checked against Official Charts: The Wombats to celebrate 20 years of A Guide To Love, Loss & Desperation with UK & EU Tour 2027.

The dates

The tour opens in mainland Europe at Le Trianon in Paris on 1 April 2027, followed by the Palladium in Cologne on 3 April, Columbiahalle in Berlin on 4 April, the Zenith in Munich on 5 April, the Gashouder in Amsterdam on 7 April and Trix in Antwerp on 8 April.

The UK leg begins at O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester on 10 April, then moves to O2 Academy Glasgow on 13 April and O2 Academy Brixton in London on 16 April. It ends with what the band call a hometown underplay at the Arts Club in Liverpool on 18 April, a far smaller room than the arenas they have played in recent years. Snuts, Cherryholt, Abbie McCarthy and Filip Clements are named as support on selected dates.

A presale was set for 9am on Wednesday 14 October, and the general sale for 9am on Friday 16 October, Jenny Mensah reported for Radio X. On 20 October the band added a North American leg, opening in Toronto on 26 April, reaching New York on 29 April and Los Angeles on 14 May, and closing in Seattle on 19 May, Cait Stoddard reported for mxdwn.

StubHub also lists a second night in Manchester on 11 April and a second night at Brixton on 17 April. Neither was in the first announcement, and we have not yet seen an announcement for them, so we would treat them with care until the band confirm them.

Students, a goat and Paul McCartney

The Wombats formed in 2003 at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, the school co-founded by Paul McCartney. Murphy and Haggis met Knudsen there, and bonded over a shared love of lyrics about animals, they told Angela Balakrishnan for The Guardian in 2007. Their first gigs, Haggis said, were played to raise money to buy a painting of a goat dressed as Prince Charles that they had seen in a shop window, and Murphy said even their show at the Cavern was terrible.

Things moved quickly after that. By the end of 2007, Balakrishnan reported, the band had released the album, had two top 40 singles and played 260 gigs that year, and had become the first band to sell out the 1,200-capacity Liverpool Academy without a record deal. They had also played to 10,000 people at a festival in China before they were signed, on a trip paid for by the institute.

McCartney was a fan. Murphy once had a half-hour session with him as a student, and in 2008 McCartney named the Wombats as one of his favourite new bands on BBC 6 Music and said producing their next record "might be very tempting", Sean Michaels reported for The Guardian. Haggis called it ridiculously flattering.

Their early reputation was as much about the shows as the records. Balakrishnan described on-stage banter made of random facts, an occasional habit of performing in drag, and comparisons with the indie comics Half Man Half Biscuit, but found a taut and powerful guitar pop group underneath. Haggis recalled opening their set at V festival in 2007 with Kill the Director, just after it had been on the radio, and the whole tent screaming back at them. Murphy said they were a serious band that was not preoccupied with being serious all the time.

The album itself

A Guide To Love, Loss & Desperation came out in November 2007 on 14th Floor Records. It reached Number 11 on the Official Albums Chart and spent 43 weeks on the chart, according to the Official Charts Company, and Radio X reports that it has sold more than 400,000 copies in the UK, been streamed more than half a billion times and is certified platinum by the BPI.

Its singles defined the band. Let's Dance to Joy Division reached Number 15 in October 2007, Moving to New York reached Number 13 in January 2008, their highest singles chart placing, and Kill the Director and Backfire at the Disco both made the top 40. Reviewing the album for The Guardian, Leonie Cooper wrote that it may not break new ground but that the three-piece knew their way around a catchy melody, from the barbershop opener Tales of Girls, Boys and Marsupials to a song about hating Bridget Jones.

Let's Dance to Joy Division came out at almost the same time as Control, the film about the Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, and some fans of the band accused the Wombats of name-dropping. Haggis told The Guardian it was a coincidence, and Murphy said the song could just as easily have been about dancing to Radiohead or the Smiths. In early 2008 the band were part of a wave of cheerful guitar pop in the charts alongside Scouting for Girls and the Hoosiers, which Rosie Swash, writing The Guardian's chart round-up, summed up as "Scouting for Plain White Wombats".

The records that followed

The band's second album, This Modern Glitch, went higher still in 2011, reaching Number 3. Its first single, Anti-D, was about Murphy's experience of depression and of the antidepressant he was prescribed, as he told Sarah Phillips for The Guardian that year. He said he wanted to speak openly about something that was still a taboo for many young men, and the mental health charity Mind thanked him for it.

Glitterbug reached Number 5 in 2015, and Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life reached Number 3 in 2018. Then, in January 2022, Fix Yourself, Not the World gave the Wombats their first Number 1 album, more than 14 years after their debut. Their most recent album, Oh! The Ocean, reached Number 4 in February 2025.

Their later success surprised some critics. Reviewing Fix Yourself, Not the World for The Guardian, Alexis Petridis noted that the band had been dropped by their major label and might have been lumped in with other bands from the era once dismissed as landfill indie, yet were now playing far bigger venues than 15 years earlier, helped by a TikTok revival of their 2015 song Greek Tragedy. He put it down mainly to the fact that they write noticeably better songs than many of the bands now called indie.

Malcolm Jack, reviewing a show at O2 Academy Glasgow for The Guardian in 2019, was less convinced by some of the newer material, but described a crowd full of young fans who could not have been listening when the debut came out, and a finale of Let's Dance to Joy Division with giant balloons and four people dressed as wombats invading the stage.

Prices we are tracking

We have tracked the UK dates on StubHub since they were listed in mid October. At 8.25am on Friday 30 October the cheapest ticket for the first Manchester night, on 10 April, was £109, and for the 11 April listing it was £99. In London, the first Brixton night was £150, after a low of £100 earlier in the month, and the 17 April listing was £113.99.

The smallest rooms were among the most expensive. The cheapest ticket for the Arts Club in Liverpool was £112.74, and Glasgow was the dearest of the UK run at £221.59, down from a high of £275. All of these are listing prices, plus StubHub booking fees at checkout.

Resale prices this far ahead tend to be set by a small number of listings, and they can move a long way as more tickets come on to the market. The live price for each date prints below this story and is checked hourly.

More music on the way

The band say the tour is not only a look back. In the announcement they said the first album gave them the platform to make lots more music, "with more on the way", and that the second half of each show would take in songs from all their other albums. They described the night as a little trip in a "Sonic Delorean" for anyone the album meant something to.

No new album has been announced yet. If more UK dates are confirmed, we will add them to this story. You can set an alert on any of the dates below and we will email you when the cheapest price for your date falls.

Tickets today

What StubHub lists now, checked hourly. Prices are listing prices; StubHub adds its booking fees at checkout.