Since mid-December reports have been coming out of a collaboration between Jon Squire and Liam Gallagher. And today the first fruits of the partnership have seen the light of day.
As expected, it does almost sound like a meeting of Stone Rose and Oasis.
The lyrics may not be the most insigthful (at one point Liam resorts to reciting the colours of the rainbow), but John Squire’s extended guitar histrionics make up for that.
And there is believed to be a full album on the way (not sure when though – I think it might be March), and also a tour together (whether in support of the album or as a co-headliner/special guest thing when Liam tours Definitely Maybe later this year – further fuelling the “Oasis are getting back together – maybe Glastonbury” rumours
(very much doubt that will happen – Noel and Liam need to speak to each other first. Unless they are using John Squire as a mediator perhaps?)
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I have absolutely no interest in this musically, but in terms of trolling Noel it’s very entertaining. Anything that puts that big-nostriled cunt in his place is inevitably good.
Moose couldn’t agree more. Oasis were an overrated piece of shit band with two half decent songs and a pile of garbage for the rest of their catalogue. Gobby wankers too.
‘kin hell I thought you were a fan B.C.B.
However I’m mystified, what were these half decent songs these gob shytes were responsible for?
This sounds exactly as I expected. John Squire is incredibly gifted as a player, but he forgot somewhere along the way that his solos exist to serve the song and not the other way round.
I saw The Stone Roses live once, post Reni, just before they broke up the first time. Some of the worse live singing I ever heard from a professional singer, and some of the best live guitar playing I ever heard. Astonishingly good.
In order to serve the song, I think the song needs to have some merit in the first place.
I think it did once – around 60 years ago, before the carbon copying, when it was called ‘Rain’…
Oh, and the middle-eight bit was better when it was ‘Pictures of Lily’…
That’s the thing about this breed of rockers, though: they put the skeleton on the outside because they want you to see their workings. It’s a badge and derision beats no attention.
70s bands nicked stuff and tried to disguise it a bit with that cheeky charm of teenage shoplifters. I remember Kevin Rowland in an interview years later saying he could have simply used the chords from Warren Zevon’s Werewolves Of London, but he thought “fuck it, I can use it all sans credit”. What was the reason for such hubris? LARGE amounts of COCAINE. Hmmmm..
I’d love A.I. to recut the scene where the geezer in the film Yesterday is actually Noel and Liam Gallagher and, post-tandem tumble, they are playing way and their friends are going “The Beatles? John Lennon? Nah mate”, but it turns out to be a Truman Show twist, where a worldwide audience is pissing themselves, while everyone in the Gallagher’s lives is pretending to be amazed as they “become rich” while trying to recreate the hits of The Beatles, Stones, Quo and T Rex as best they can from memory despite having had actual brain damage because the fake reality set meant the bike accident got a little out of control..
First listen: I thought it OK
Second listen: Better
Third Listen: I’m hearing a bit of Shed Seven in there
Fourth Listen: I think it’s a good thing, but find myself hoping for a reformed Shirehorses with Liam on vocals rather than Chris Helme. After all, it was that band that gave LG his first songwriting credit.
Seahorses?
The band Beady Eye could have been…
Erm … yes. The Shirehouses was Mark and Lard
I’ve got that on cassette, and it’s one of the few I didn’t bother to digitise on a cassette rescue binge recently.
I have the CD somewhere, Foxy, and can help. Assuming you want help.
Oh good, someone else admitting to buying the CD
For years in the late 90s I had a DJ gig in a pub playing cover versions. That’s my defence and I’m sticking to it.
We have the CD
Anybody who feels the need to hear the Shirehorses again certainly needs help.
Fat ‘Arry White sez “Ohhhh yeah”
I’d love a Liam fronted Shirehorses – doing why is always dairylea and I wanna roll with it
In related news, Pete Dohety’s son, Astile, is launching his career as a Liam Gallagher tribute act.
Liam Gallagher is the father of Astile’s half-sister.
You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.
It’s quite nice to hear Squire playing in a band with a lead singer who can carry a tune without the aid of a bucket.
(I think IB’s lack of opposable thumbs preclude the use of bucketry.)
It’s ok, exactly as I expected it to sound if i’m honest. However, the bit where he just recites the colours of the rainbow is bloody awful. It’s the sort of thing that will stop me going back to it
Give him a break, he’s showing off the one thing he remembers from primary school.
I expect the B-Side will be Liam repeating ‘Divorced Beheaded Died, (D’Ya Know What I Mean) Divorced Beheaded Survived (D’Ya Know What I Mean*)’
*He can’t seem to put 10 words together without saying ‘D’Ya Know What I Mean’.
I before E especially in shiiiiiiiiiiiiine
Thanks, I’ve had a coughing fit as a result of this.
I’ve heard the B side is called “30 Days has September”.
Well if Noel had ‘written’ it, it would have been the theme from Rainbow.
Now you’re talking.
CHOOOOOOOOOOON!!!
Paint the whole world with a Rainbow!
Dum! Dum! A-dumdumdumdumdumdumdumduhduhdum!
Knowharramean?*
That introduced generations of kids to the joy of air drumming, after all we didn’t have Eastenders in them days.
(*as Liam would say)
Never has a band had and lost the magic as rapidly and markedly as the Stone Roses. Their debut album was original and inspired. To compare two sets of lyrics, She Bangs the Drum gave us “Passion fruit and holy bread / Fill my guts and ease my head”. Then on the second album, Breaking Into Heaven went “Listen up, sweet child of mine, have I got news for you / Nobody leaves this place alive”. So many cliches in just one verse.
And Squire was equally culpable. Most guitarists learn some blues licks and quickly move away from them. He started off all fluid and jangly and then, from Love Spreads, started using a slide; before we knew it, he’d got lost in cliched blues soloing.
I thought Just Another Rainbow showed some potential, being based instead on psychedelic Rain-style guitar. And I quite liked the way Squire’s instrument cleared its throat to make itself heard in the middle. But, really, it’s less than the sum of its parts. It wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow on a later-period Oasis record, some of Beady Eye’s stuff is better, and it suits the middle-aged Liam less than than the shiny over-produced stuff he’s been trading in lately. I also don’t see why Squire has his name above the door. Surely if Liam chooses to use him as his guitarist, he’s just a player like everyone else.
There was also great stuff inbetween the albums, Fools Gold etc. Squire dominated the songwriting on the second album, so maybe Brown had the good lyrics (hard to believe from his solo stuff though)
Yes great stuff inbetween those albums. So many good albums released in that 5 year period only by other acts.
As you probably know I was referring to:
Fools Gold/What the World is Waiting For (1989)
One Love/Something’s Burning (1990)
If you take the extended (superior) versions of those tracks you have about 30 minutes of music, so kind of a mini LP if you join them up.
I do think The Second Coming has it’s moments but agree it is nowhere near the standard of their debut. Can’t say much about the reunion tracks, haven’t heard them more than once.
Being generous there but I do like Fools Gold. Not as good sounding as it used to be according to me.
Standing Here is the best thing they did, or released, after the first album by a mile. Almost their peak. There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors in the production to make them sound like a better band than they are – eg. double-tracking Ian’s vocal to make it sound like he’s always in tune – but people have been doing that sort of thing since Elvis anyway.
I’ve no idea how anyone is getting anything out of FG any more. It’s been done to death, the All I Want For Christmas Is You of indie.
I still like it, prefer the other side though. Some nice crunchy guitar on there.
Begging You was the natural place to go after Fools Gold. That’s my favourite from the second album by a country mile.
The reunion tracks are so awful I simply refuse to even acknowledge they exist.
Thankful the mooted reunion album was scrapped.
That’s cleared something up for me. I’d imagined there was a third album but it appears that there wasn’t. Just a couple of tracks then?
If you haven’t heard them already, Freddy, a word of advice: don’t.
A very good third Stone Roses album already exists: Golden Greats
Turns Into Stone is the one. I actually sort of prefer it to either of the proper albums; Going Down, Mersey Paradise, Full Fathom Five, Elephant Stone (their best song), What The World Is Waiting For, etc.
Love that record.
Oh yes! Silvertone pulled a lot of weird shit in the Roses’ “quiet years” – eg those odd remixes of Waterfall and Resurrection – but that was a blinder. It’s basically The Stones Roses Past Masters. I ended up buying it even though I had everything on it on the singles. Using the 12″ version of ES was particularly welcome.
I’d been away and didn’t know TIS was coming out. Went into a record shop and did a double take – Whaaat, a new Stone Roses album??? Of course a “real” Roses album in the summer of 1992 would have been perfect but… hey. Funny to think that they’d already been gone for two years by then and hadn’t played a single note of music together in that time.
Oh!
I think I might now recall All for One but the other track available on Spotify., nope!
Are they really that bad?
All For One was a shameless rip off of Squid Lord by The Fall too, albeit shit.
Yes, but if LG had released this without flagging up Squire’s involvement, would we bother listening to it, let alone discussing it? I doubt I would.
@fentonsteve @martin-horsfield
It’s not a case of Liam getting a new big name guitarist, John Squire has written all the material alone and was looking for someone to sing it. I think it will be a separate project to LGs band, who he is touring with this summer.
Liam has been on a purple patch of late, and is clearly the bigger name, but it’s great to have some new John Squire songs in the world. His two solo records were 20 years ago now. I’m really excited for the album!
Having bought the Seahorses album, I won’t be partaking, but… enjoy.
The song is fine. It sounds like what it is; a pair of rock stars, in their 50s and 60s respectively, rehashing old glories to greatly diminished effect. It’s what rock stars of this age have been doing since there have been rock stars of this age.
In the interests of balance I will say: two great bands. Or at least two bands with fabulous peaks.
I quite like The Second Coming. There’s a good deal of filler, which isn’t true of the first one, but when it’s good it’s good.
Oh, and I’ll defend Breaking Into Heaven, which is a proxy for the album as a whole in that it’s cokey and overlong but has some great moments. And the full lyric is “No one here gets out alive/they just die and join the queue”, which is – y’know – fine; it takes the cliche and spins it.
The real issue the Roses had was their legal problems. They were built to be the biggest band in the land and to surf that wave, but they lost focus and let the moment move on without them. A lot happened in the half decade between the first and second albums, and when they returned they clearly knew that the zeitgeist had slipped from their grasp, hence everything being bigger! Louder! More!
If they’d released a sophomore album in, say, 1991, like a normal band, I suspect it would have been a pearler, left some room for future growth and prevented them from falling out so monumentally.
But then equally there’s a certain romance to burning bright and fading away, so maybe their story works best as it is. If Oasis had downed tools after two albums you’d be looking at some legacy. Regardless, all of them have earned the right to fuck about in middle/old age, so here they are, fucking about.
I don’t think Liam is fucking about. He takes his job seriously – he’s still a big deal in the pop’n’roll universe, and is surely aware that he continues to be a sort of icon to people half his age and younger.
Squire? Who knows. He’s a cagey cat, and what it does it do to someone knowing that they are the second-greatest musician ever to have come out of Timperley?
It would take a team of quantum physicists with impeccable data and a computer the size of the universe decades to unravel the complex machinations at the centre of any of the actions of the younger Gallagher.
In a career in which he’s consistently played 4D chess, here he is suddenly switching to Ludo, the crafty bastard.
Incidentally, some of his recent stuff is great. Once is a tune.
One thing that struck me about Liam is that he has said categorically that he doesn’t like dance music at all. This is an extraordinary admission for someone of his generation and background.
Even his boringly to list brother went a bit mental when he met the bloke who made the Stakker Humanoid record (quite right too)
For “to list” read “rockist”… I quite like that mistake though…
Some of Liam Gallagher’s solo songs are better than post peak Oasis. He made the right decision after Beady Eye’s failure to get professional songwriters in who often understand how to write songs that suit him. The albums are patchy but a great “lost Oasis” album can be compiled from the highlights across the solo albums to date.
This song unfortunately sounds like what it is with regards to musicians and singers past their prime having creative control. An example of Sick Boy’s philosophy of life from Trainspotting:
“Well, at one time, you’ve got it, and then you lose it, and it’s gone forever. All walks of life:”
Starts off ok, like the first Stone Roses album. Ends up like the Second Coming. Terrible jarring solo. A.I generated Gallagher vocals.
There you go!
“Beautifully f**king illustrated”