Liam Gallagher finds new Oasis
New album “As You Were” owes a debt to Beatles, Lennon
There’s a village in England that Liam Gallagher calls home. Like everyone else there who isn’t a one-time lead singer for Oasis and/or recipient of Q magazine’s benediction as the greatest rock band frontman of all time, he occasionally putters around town on errands, now and then bumping into one particular neighbor with whom he has a lot in common.
Like Gallagher, Ray Davies is a massive figure in pop music history. They draw from a similar stream, each conjuring the sound of mid-1960s English rock ’n’ roll, though only Davies was actually there at the time, as one of the founders of The Kinks. Each has a brother with whom he has famously feuded, Noel Gallagher and Dave Davies, respectively, to the point of brawling onstage as fans watched in horror and delight.
“We’ll say hi,” Gallagher recounts. “Ray will say, ‘Are you speaking with your brother yet?’ I’ll go, ‘No. Are you speaking to yours?’ He’ll say, ‘No.’ Then I’ll say ‘ See you later.’ That’s all we really say to each other.”
Nothing more need be said, especially now that Gallagher, 45, has stepped out with his debut solo album, As You Were, out now. The Lennonesque edginess in Wall of Glass, the guitar chords and rhythms in Bold that recall
Across the Universe, the tambou- rine beat and waltz time of You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away resurrected for When I’m In Need, even the title of the track You Bet
ter Run and the lyric that quotes “happiness is a warm gun” — all of these elements a debt to The Beatles that Gallagher freely acknowledges.
As You Were also confirms that he’s back at full strength after a several-years-long hiatus. “A lot of personal stuff was going on,” he says. “I was drinking too much. Then I thought, ‘You know what? I’m gonna go live in Spain, get me head together and get some sun on me bones.’ ”
Somehow, that didn’t happen. But he did pick up his guitar and, to his surprise, out came a new song, Bold. “Obviously I didn’t write it in a day — I wrote it in half a day,” he remembers.
Others followed quickly. “I didn’t go, ‘I just write a song because I’m not famous anymore and I must get back to the top of the charts,’ ” he explains. “There’s none of that nonsense. I don’t need to get any more famous. God, no. I didn’t miss it terribly.”
His voice showed no rust, either. “I should have taken better care of it,” he concedes. “But I’m a snarly rock ’n’ roll singer. You don’t want to start watering it down because you’ll end up sounding like Noel Gallagher. And we don’t want that.”
Maybe not. But neither does Liam feel apologetic for sinking his sound even deeper into the bedrock of the 1960s with As You
Were. “Yeah, maybe I wish I’d been around back then,” he says.
“But,” he adds, “I was in this little band called Oasis, so I can’t complain. And I do believe Paul McCartney owes me a few quid for keeping that old flame burning.”