Liam Gallagher: I am definitely maybe misunderstood
PARIS: Liam Gallagher has a confession to make.
“I am this big-mouthed guy who comes out with rude stuff.” But the former Oasis frontman, whose name seems forever associated with the phrase “foulmouthed rant,” insists that he is misunderstood.
“I am also a guy who is full of melancholy,” the singer told AFP as his first solo album “As You Were” comes out Friday.
“There is a sadness deep inside me. I am that kind of guy. I am not here to talk about my state of mind but, hey, I have the right to, have not I?“
Life has not been a bed of roses for the younger of the two Gallagher brothers since the break-up of the Manchester band, which during their 1990s pomp boasted to being “bigger than The Beatles.”
Their spectacular implosion minutes before they were due on stage at the Rock en Seine festival near Paris in 2009 has gone down in music legend.
Liam apparently threw a plum at his older brother Noel and the two started fighting backstage, with Liam picking up Noel’s guitar and “wielding it like an ax.”
The brothers have since mostly communicated by trading insults in public.
“It is real, real good to come back after all these years,” said Liam, now 45 and a father of four.
“The last four years were very tough for me personally,” he said, referring to his divorce from his second wife, Nicole Appleton, the former All Saints star. Artistically there is not been much morning glory either. His attempt to rekindle Oasis’s strutting magic with two other former band members petered out in 2014 after what he admitted were “two failed albums.”
But now he is back and raring to make the critics eat their words. He boasted in an interview with AFP — peppered with expletives — that he can write “good songs” and “good albums.”
He said he can almost hear the detractors sharpening their knives. In an interview with GQ magazine in August, he suggested critics would be mocking him for his two divorces, illegitimate children, with “two failed bands behind him, three bad haircuts.”
But his new album, “As You Were,” is full of “good songs, good vocals, rock ‘n’ roll, mate,” he insisted. “Stuff you will not have to think too much about.”
He said it has no long guitar solos, no drum solos, “no mad wizardy keyboard, just bang-in-your-face.” “It is good,” he declared.
Gallagher said that if the album does not go down well “I do not know what I will do,” hinting he might quit altogether.