When Liam Gallagher first heard the songs John Squire had written for their new collaborative album, he had two thoughts: that they were “banging”, and that he instinctively knew how to sing them. After all, he’s been singing Squire’s songs since his early teens.
“You’ve got to remember, I’m a massive Stone Roses fan,” Gallagher announces from across the table at a studio in Kentish Town, north London. “They were the ones who got me into [being in] a band, so I know the rhythms. It’s not like I’m singing Trent Reznor out of the fucking Nine Inch Nails, d’you know what I mean? Not that I’m saying it was easy. I just make it look easy.”
Launched with the recent psychedelia-tinged single Just Another Rainbow, this is a marriage of two of the most celebrated members of Manchester’s music scene: John Squire, the still-startlingly talented guitarist of the Stone Roses, and Liam Gallagher, the Oasis frontman whose swagger defined the optimism and hedonism of the 1990s. Even if you’re not a generously coiffured bloke in Adidas Sambas, the union feels like a bit of a moment: Just Another Rainbow rose to No 1 in the midweek chart and could stay at the top today.
The self-titled collaboration gained traction after the guitarist’s guest appearance at Gallagher’s mammoth pair of Knebworth shows in 2022. Excited to learn that Squire was writing again, the singer wanted in (“When rock’n’roll calls, you’ve got to pick up the phone”), but with two conditions: the material had to be guitar-heavy, and Squire would have to write the lyrics. No other parameters were set; there were no strategy discussions around a record company table. “It’s the way it should be,” Gallagher says. “Calling people up to have meetings is a bit fucking estate agent, innit?” He and Squire had actually collaborated once before on Love Me and Leave Me, a song written for Squire’s post-Roses band, the Seahorses, but both parties’ memories are hazy on how that came about.
Text messages flew back and forth; Squire sent demos of his works in progress, while Gallagher peppered him with YouTube videos of other artists, including Sex Pistols, Jimi Hendrix, Faces – and the Bee Gees. “He sent that not long after I sent him [my first demo] Love You Forever, which I’d sung in a very high register, out of my range,” says the softly spoken Squire (who I speak to in an adjoining room, as the publicist thinks that Gallagher might dominate the conversation if they are interviewed together). When a Bee Gees track flashed up in reply, Squire thought Gallagher was “taking the piss; the sentiment being: ‘I’m not into this, we need a rethink.’” It turned out he’d never received Squire’s demo and those Gibb falsettos were sincerely sent, like the other videos, as a guide for how he hoped the album would sound.
After working remotely for a few months, in May 2023 Gallagher travelled to Squire’s home studio in Macclesfield to record some initial vocals. Four months later, they went to Los Angeles and recorded 10 tracks over three weeks. Greg Kurstin produced and played bass and piano; he and Squire bonded over Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Déjà Vu, Paul McCartney and the Jimi Hendrix Experience drummer, Mitch Mitchell. Joey Waronker (who has worked with Beck, REM and Roger Waters) played the drums. They wanted to avoid making an album where the musicianship sounded “mechanical”. “Perfection is subjective, isn’t it?” suggests Squire. He adds that he often likes “something that’s slightly out of time, a little bit sloppy. There’s plenty of percussion on Stones and Beatles records that’s off the mark and yet it’s perfect.”
The result is a remarkably buoyant and breezy psychedelic blues record, where Squire’s guitar lines cascade merrily and Gallagher’s vocals often soar above his usual snarl or sneer. In the Stone Roses, Squire’s playing was long-form, exploring the big spaces opened up by the band’s grooves; here he’s more economical and purposeful, letting the songs dictate any noodling. His playing sounds rejuvenated, while Gallagher has found his comfiest post-Oasis fit. The album’s closer, Mother Nature’s Song – a wide-eyed ode to the beauty of our natural world set to campfire acoustic guitars and, appropriately given the title, George Harrison-style slide – is one of the most affecting songs either artist has recorded. Gallagher’s vocal brought tears to Squire’s eyes when he first heard it, something Squire says has never happened for anything he’s written before.
When I ask if Gallagher had the power of veto over the lyrics, Squire says the topic never came up, while Gallagher bristles at the same question: “If there were any kinky saucepot shenanigans going on, I’d obviously have pulled him up on it! But I remember getting the lyrics, thinking: it feels like me.”
Decked out in regulation green parka and swearing liberally, Gallagher remains every inch himself. As we talk, I sometimes get the impression that the bravado of youth may be giving way to the wisdom of age, only for him to revert to another classic swaggering Liam-ism. He says that he’d like to give rival bands a verbal pasting, except there are “none about,” or at least none he regards as worthy. “It’s a shame, because they’d be fucking getting it as well,” he says, reassuringly. “No one wants to be in a band and share success these days. It’s all ‘me me me’ solo stars.”
Although Gallagher has recorded three solo albums – all UK No 1s – he clearly thrives as part of a team. His first post-Oasis project was the band Beady Eye; Oasis co-founder Bonehead has toured as a member of his live band; and Gallagher will revisit Oasis’s 1994 debut, Definitely Maybe, for an arena tour and Reading and Leeds festival headline slots this year. The intention is to keep the band’s catalogue alive. “There’s no way I’m letting Oasis turn into one of these [bands] where you just wrap an album in cellophane every 10 years,” he says.
But in the strictest sense Oasis have been dormant since 2009, after a backstage altercation at the Rock en Seine festival in Paris, after which Noel Gallagher walked out and never returned. Would Liam do anything different if he could go back to that night almost 15 years ago? “Yes, I’d fill ’em both in,” he glowers, meaning both Noel and the band’s manager Marcus Russell. Suddenly, he rises from his seat and paces the room, gesticulating. “They threw me under the fucking bus. All my life caved in.”
Noel always intended to go it alone, he claims, citing as evidence Noel’s solo acoustic gigs between Oasis tours. “If you want to do your little thing because you’re not getting enough attention, feel free, mate. I’ll go to Barbados and sit on a beach for six months, but don’t be pulling the plug on the band. That’s the way I saw it.” Noel, for his part, said in a 2009 statement that he quit the band because “the level of verbal and violent intimidation towards me, my family, friends and comrades has become intolerable”, and in 2021 described the Paris altercation as “just the straw that broke the camel’s back”.
Liam claims the finger was pointed at him when the group collapsed, and the blame placed on his drinking. He sits down and draws a straight line on the table to indicate consistency. “That was my behaviour since day one, and his. That’s what made Oasis what it was,” he says. “I wasn’t any different, but all of a sudden, he’s turned into Ronan Keating or some soft cunt, going: ‘We can’t have that behaviour.’” Gallagher is now in full flow. “Meanwhile, [these days] he’s out on tour with fucking [ex-Kasabian frontman] Tom Meighan, who’s allegedly, apparently …” He stops short of stating Meighan’s conviction for assault in 2020. “And yet you won’t get back in a band with me because I’m a ‘fucking cunt’?! Eh, chill out, mate.”
He calls the five years following Oasis’s demise an “absolute nightmare … I was sitting at home with no management, no office, and no one to really speak to, while Noel” – as the chief songwriter and creative force in Oasis – “was still walking into his big management office having everyone running around after him, getting smart and dissing people. Looking back with hindsight, you can go: ‘You’re a big boy’ and all that, but when you’ve had all that stuff for 20 years … I could barely tie my shoelace let alone run my business or my life. All that support was taken away, but little Noely G had it all still there.”
He continues: “There were 40 or 50 people working for Oasis. All of a sudden, everyone was out of a job. Meanwhile, he’s off with his guitar and his wife, having a lovely time.” Has he ever talked directly to Noel about it? “No. There’s been no chat. I haven’t seen him, and we won’t see each other. They are up their own arses, all of them.” The difference, he says, is “I know I’ve been humbled. And thank fuck for it because it’s made me a better person. But he’s not. He’s still going round thinking he’s the man, but we’ll see.”
Left to pick up the pieces, Gallagher says he formed Beady Eye as a “Band-Aid”, for himself and the remaining members of the group. “Gem [Archer] and Andy [Bell] had put their heart and soul into Oasis and they’d been slung on the skip.” They never had big goals in Beady Eye, he adds. “We were just trying to keep sane.” The band released two albums before calling it a day in 2014. Gallagher’s solo career launched in 2017, with those three hit albums culminating in two sold-out nights at Knebworth, home to Oasis’s greatest live triumph in 1996. Humbled no more, then, but he’s still rattled.
When I join Squire in the next room, the vibe shift is palpable; I get the impression he calculates each syllable’s impact before he lets it into the atmosphere.
When he walked on stage at Knebworth alongside Gallagher in June 2022, it was the first time he had performed live since the Roses ran aground in 2017. The group’s unlikely reunion had lasted five years: stadiums filled, festivals headlined, and doubters who questioned whether their combustible intra-band relationships could last somewhat silenced. Recording an album, however, was a step too far.
“It became apparent it wasn’t going to happen,” Squire says soberly, eyes peeking out from behind his fringe. Two new songs, All for One and Beautiful Thing, emerged in 2016, but by that point “the general feeling was that nobody was that into even being in a band together, never mind making an album”.
And so the Roses parted ways. Vocalist Ian Brown resumed his solo career and used social media to broadcast his diatribes against the Covid vaccine, while Squire returned to visual art (he co-created the pop art cover for Just Another Rainbow). “I consider making anything as a valid part of my personality and happiness,” he says, “so it doesn’t matter how big or small it is, or whether it’s visual or sonic. What makes me tick is creating.”
Music had not been on his agenda, however. And it may have stayed that way had disaster not struck in 2020. While playing basketball with his nine-year-old son, Squire tripped and broke the wrist of his dominant hand, affecting his thumb. “It did panic me,” he says. “There was a question mark over whether I would get full use of it back.” In the end, physiotherapy combined with a rigorous guitar-playing regime restored him to the level he was at previously.
The injury didn’t just force him to play again; it reignited his desire to do so. “I’m still a sucker for a key change, a chord change, a choice lyric,” he says. “If I can make that happen it’s really exciting.” When asked if he regrets not releasing more music over the years, he is circumspect: “There’d be a trade-off. I might not be married. I might not have as many children” – he has six – “and I might not have seen as much of them. I don’t feel like I’ve massively fucked up.”
When it came to him and Gallagher working together, Squire says he had “high hopes” but their chemistry surpassed his expectations: “I think we were both surprised at how complementary my guitar tone is with his voice and how the songs I’ve written worked for him.” Squire refuses, though, to be drawn on the meaning of his lyrics, saying “I think it’s the prerogative of the listener”, making intriguing lines such as “I know you’re happy in your suburban trance / You should have fucked me when you had the chance” (One Day at a Time); “This voyage of self-discovery has my sails in flames” (Mars to Liverpool); and “Thank you for your thoughts and prayers / And fuck you too” (Make It Up As You Go Along) destined to remain a mystery.
Gallagher and Squire hope this is the start of an ongoing musical relationship. They want to tour later in the year and Squire hints that he has begun work on a second album. “The guitar fights back,” he says.
“If John comes up with another load of songs that are banging, they’ll get it as well,” Gallagher says. “Squire’s got a lot more in him. People look at John as this guitar hero, but he definitely knows how to write a fucking song.” As I get up to leave, I compliment Gallagher on the record and suggest that while he has always rocked, Squire has given him some roll.
A week later, I’m told to ring Gallagher back. “I wanted to pull you up on something,” he says. “You said that John had given me a bit of ‘roll’?” I sheepishly affirm I did. “Yeah, I got the hump with that as I left. I thought: ‘Fuck that’.
“I’ve always been rock, and I’ve always been roll.” He pauses for a moment. “But saying that, John inspired me to be in a band. So, maybe he gave me the rock and the roll.”
-
Just Another Rainbow is out now. The album Liam Gallagher John Squire will be released in spring.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion