For many years I have held Liam Gallagher up, or rather down, as one of the great boils on the nose of modern popular music. It wasn’t so much the voice as the attitude, the short earned swagger, the arrogance and the sheer thick-headedness of the man. It was a combination of characteristics that somehow managed to bring down Oasis, never the world’s best band but an outfit capable of some intermittent yet glorious razzmatazz, even when the peak of their operative power had long drifted into the beyond. I like Oasis much more now than I did years ago, back when they were wrapped in the firm belief that theirs was just about the best band you could possibly imagine. The albums they produced can, in retrospect, be gazed upon and admired not for their consistency but for the fact that somehow every single one has a couple of songs that most bands from any era would kill for; and in a world of music as grindingly bland and soulless as the one we inhabit now that is something to be celebrated. We should also remember that they were a big and bold-as-brass live outfit, less concerned with noodling improvisation and more with blowing the nuts clean off some cocky Mancunian football hooligan somewhere in the very remotest corner of whichever stadium they were playing. I’m glad I slowly grew to love Oasis, as I would an errant child, but I still never had much time for Liam.
So imagine my surprise to find a tiny warm spot pulsing in my heart for him in the last couple of years. Don’t worry, I haven’t done anything stupid like buy his solo records, and for the record I doubt I ever will, but I do finally see some, if not all, of what his appeal is really all about. I can sort of see how it all fits together: that voice, that face, that stance, that unquenchable, implacable northern attitude. He was always funny in interviews but there was a meanness in youth that has sapped away as age has finally dented and mellowed him (a bit). He probably wouldn’t admit this but on the odd occasion he is almost deserving of a little cuddle. Almost. Part of my new-found and grudging respect for the man is that he has made such a success of his singular self, and against some odds. He could have left the ruins of Oasis and turned to shit but he fought back and made a second career for himself by using as much of his charisma and chutzpa as it took to fill the yawning gaps in his credibility as a musician. In fairness he will never have the gifts which have kept big brother Noel in business, but for most Oasis fans the front of the pantomime bull is just as important as the rest; and so it goes. Ultimately, creatures like Liam Gallagher just don’t come along anymore, to the point that he is in danger of becoming that rarest of things – a legend in his own lifetime.
On top of his recent triumphs Liam has found a moment to fulfil a lifelong ambition and sort of be a member of The Stone Roses, the band that Oasis could have been if they hadn’t been so busy sniffing the bumhole of John Lennon’s ghost. Liam always was a poor man’s Ian Brown (not a bad ambition or achievement given that Ian Brown is so peculiar and unique and crammed with his very own chutzpa that he serves as a poor man to no man at all) and so nostalgia and fate have guided him into what will surely prove a shiny little cul-de-sac with none other than John Squire, the softly spoken and prodigiously talented Stone Roses guitarist. Collaborations in music can sometimes leave one scratching the head but this one seems so obvious I’m amazed no-one thought of it sooner; maybe both men are desperate but it doesn’t feel like either of them have anything particular to prove so it is far more likely that they just calculated that there were enough dewy-eyed middle aged, just-up-the-M6, rock fans to justify a little feather-cut dance together while they both still had their hair and health firmly intact.
The first fruit of their labour is a slab of noise, a cliched symphony of magnificently predictable machismo, that sits perfectly between their two former bands – a song called ‘Just Another Rainbow’ – and which literally sounds like the gulf of time in music between now and 1989 never actually happened. It is music as meat-and-potatoes for the genre as you could possibly get, and it comes from a source that is instantly recognisable. It has learnt not a thing from anything else except itself and has the charm to not be remotely ashamed of it. The tune itself sounds like a slightly less agile, slightly longer in the tooth Second Coming era Stone Roses, with the sort of guitar heroics you rarely hear these days and a throbbing, club-foot bass (the drums are bloody awful but somehow get away with it – how does that work?) and then there, front and centre, is Liam. He doesn’t quite carry the song single handedly but there is no doubt who the star of the show is.
There’s a video too, at the start of which we see a man in a parka poncho pushing his seasick sway of a strut into a disused railway tunnel and there is only one man on the planet it could possibly be. His silhouette is a recognisable as Long John Silver’s. He is ripe for impersonation but completely without comparison or equal; a man so in possession of himself he needs no greater self defence mechanism that just to be. As the song reaches its centre, perhaps just to fill time, he starts to sing the colours of the rainbow as if he is back in primary school and especially proud of all the new words he has mastered this week. It could be dreadful and yet I feels strangely touching; a tough guy front man not afraid to sound soft. An edge-of-dirge of a song somehow lifted through the sheer force of the characters that built it. A song capable of lending a certain swagger to anyone’s gait. I wrote a while ago about how huge an Oasis reunion would be, and it would be easy for me to say it would work because of the tunes, because of Noel, but now I realise that the most essential glue of all when it comes to that band is not the craft but the push. The wallop. The face. The immoveable object at the front. That thousand-yard stare and complete self-belief. No wonder Noel isn’t too bothered about getting the old gang back together; he knows that no matter how hard he tries he’ll never be the biggest draw on the block. And while Liam will never be close to being the best of the best of the best, or indeed the rest, I say thank goodness he’s around anyway. And I never thought I’d ever find myself saying that. Perhaps I’m getting soft too.
G B Burton. 17.01.2024
On stupidity......and other causes for concern. 