Scouting for Girls book their biggest nights yet

Manchester on the Friday, Wembley on the Saturday in February: around 33,000 across two rooms, after These Are The Good Days and with cathedral dates still to play this autumn.

Scouting for Girls have confirmed the two largest headline shows of their career, set for consecutive nights in February 2027 as the band mark their twentieth anniversary. They play Manchester’s AO Arena on Friday 12 February and London’s OVO Arena Wembley on Saturday 13 February, with a combined audience expected to reach around 33,000.

The announcement follows the March 2026 release of These Are The Good Days, their eighth studio album, and a sold-out UK headline tour that concludes at London’s Roundhouse. Before the arenas, the band are also playing a series of cathedral shows in October 2026, including a date at Worcester Cathedral on 9 October that has already sold out.

Three friends, a million-selling debut

Formed in 2005 by childhood friends Roy Stride (piano, lead guitar and vocals), Greg Churchouse (bass) and James Rowlands (drums), the London three-piece took their name as a play on the 1908 handbook Scouting for Boys. They signed to Epic Records in 2007 and released their self-titled debut that September. The album reached number one on the UK Albums Chart in 2008 and has sold more than one million copies in the UK.

That first run fixed them in the British pop-rock mainstream. Early singles including She’s So Lovely, Heartbeat and Elvis Ain’t Dead carried the debut into heavy rotation, and the follow-up Everybody Wants to Be On TV arrived in 2010 with This Ain’t a Love Song among its lead tracks. The group have kept a steady release pattern since: The Place We Used to Meet in 2023, a fifteenth-anniversary edition of the 2010 album in 2025, and These Are The Good Days in March this year, with an acoustic Christmas version of the title track released ahead of it.

The line-up has remained the original three. That continuity matters on a bill built around two decades of shared writing and stage time rather than a revolving cast. The songs that filled the first record still sit at the centre of the live set; the later albums have added weight without replacing the early hits that first put them on national radio.

From theatres to arenas

For most of their working life, Scouting for Girls have headlined theatres, civic halls and mid-sized rooms. The AO Arena and OVO Arena Wembley are a clear step up in scale — venues built for a different weight of crowd, booked on consecutive nights on the two routes that define British arena touring. Framing the dates as a twentieth-anniversary pair turns the jump into a celebration as much as a commercial move: the band formed in 2005, broke through in 2007 and 2008, and are still releasing studio albums into 2026.

The current stretch of work already points in that direction. The sold-out UK headline tour ending at the Roundhouse, the October cathedral series with the Worcester date sold out, and the March album together set a run of activity that the February arenas now crown. Ticket details beyond the confirmation of the two nights were not set out in the announcement; what is fixed is the scale and the calendar.

What the dates leave open

Whether the February shows remain a one-off anniversary pair or the start of a larger arena habit is not yet known. For now the fact is plain: Scouting for Girls have secured the biggest headline stages of their career, on back-to-back nights in Manchester and London, with an expected combined draw of around 33,000.

Between here and those rooms sit the autumn cathedral dates and the close of the present UK run. These Are The Good Days is the latest chapter in a discography that has rarely paused. Twenty years on from formation, the three London friends who signed to Epic with a debut that still stands among the million-sellers of its era are taking that catalogue into the arenas — the dates are on the calendar for mid-February 2027.