‘Liam Gallagher John Squire’ is an album set on rekindling mojo and bouncing off each other’s very different talents in the process.
You wouldn’t give a three-year-old a football and expect them to start crossing it like Kevin De Bruyne, would you?
Likewise, you wouldn’t expect a van driver to set up a record label and then open a world-renowned nightclub before everything goes bankrupt, either.
Unreasonable expectations have dogged Liam Gallagher ever since Oasis’ ultra messy implosion fifteen years ago; for all of that decade-and-a-half since he’s been defined as much by who he wasn’t working with as who he was.
Consciously skipping over Beady Eye, his trio of solo albums to this point – 2017’s As You Were, Why Me? Why Not? three years later and the latest, C’Mon You Know – have possessed a few killers, some lukewarm filler and universally gave the impression of missing a jigsaw piece.
By the never undersold one’s own recent admission the hole was guitars – loads of guitars. That, unsurprisingly, is where John Squire comes in.
The pair go back, of course. First to a Stone Roses gig at Manchester’s anything-but-International in 1988. Their respective fortunes diverged, but when Oasis were coronated at their Knebworth gigs eight years later, Squire joined them on stage, repeating the act in 2022 when Gallagher played there again brotherless.
The two rekindled their friendship, the former reaching out tentatively with some demos, and before long the idea of a joint record had gained unstoppable momentum. Liam Gallagher John Squire is the result.
We’ll get to what it’s not in a bit, but for now let’s talk about the noise made and the stories told. First, they’re obviously having a ball; opener Raise Your Hands confirms this, an unapologetic distillation of numerous Britpop anthems (see esp. Supergrass, Dodgy, Ocean Colour Scene) which the likely audience will have danced to across many sticky nineties’ carpets.
This sense of older and wiser euphoria continues with Mars To Liverpool, Squire fully employing his pedal collection, whilst the chorus is sneakily tuned to annex Radio 2 for the next several years.
One of the reasons The Stone Roses were able to stand apart from the scene they co-created was in their melding of blues, funk and sixties’ psychedelia, expressed by Squire’s fluent and schooled technique.
Here, his love of both Jimmy Page (I’m A Wheel) and Jimi Hendrix (Love You Forever, which owes much to Purple Haze) is front and centre, both freewheeling tracks which groove way more than anything his singer has ever been a party to before.
Even such a ‘why didn’t they think of it twenty years ago?’ proposition has its flaws, however. Putting Squire’s often trite lyrics to one side (you never needed Shakespeare in I Wanna Be Adored), despite the compact ten-song roster both Make It Up As You Go Along and, particularly, I’m So Bored’s grating solipsism would’ve been better off left in the man cave.
OK, but come on does any of this sound like their old bands though? Well, of course. Here, Just Another Rainbow has the feel of Mersey Paradise draped over This Is The One, whilst One Day At A Time could’ve sat anywhere on Definitely Maybe, although neither are precisely this or that, timeless by instinct as opposed you reckon to design.
There are a lot of things you wouldn’t do with Liam Gallagher John Squire, comparing it to The Beatles’ Revolver being one of them, but as misplaced as Our Kid’s hubris can be as far as that goes, it would be just as unfair to try to bend it into the shapes of some of Britain’s most iconic 20th century music.
Instead, taken for what it actually represents, this is an album from two veterans set on rekindling their mojo and bouncing off each other’s very different talents in the process.
What would you do with it? You’d say it is what it is, of course.
