Liam Gallagher John Squire review – their best work since Oasis and the Stone Roses
A few weeks ago, Liam Gallagher took to social media to talk up his collaborative album with John Squire. Proclaiming it to be both “spiritual” and “crucial”, he also shared his thoughts on its potential audience. “The people that are into the Stone Roses and Oasis and that kinda thing, I think they’ll fucking love it.”
You can mock that statement if you want – did anyone think the prosaically titled Liam Gallagher John Squire would sound like 100 Gecs? – but there’s still an impressively targeted sales pitch at its centre. There still exists a sizeable cohort of people who hold Oasis and the Stone Roses in such high esteem that an album involving their respective vocalist and lead guitarist automatically represents manna from heaven. These fans’ continued existence means Liam Gallagher John Squire would probably be a hit if it consisted of a 45-minute audio vérité recording of its two main participants lighting their own farts.
The sense that Gallagher and Squire know this, and that their album is essentially critic-proof as a result, is hard to miss, even before you press play or drop the needle. Any artist worried about what critics might say does not release an album containing songs called things such as Make It Up As You Go Along or I’m So Bored (the latter containing the lyric “I’m so bored of this song”), this being something of an open goal for anyone inclined to pen a negative review. And they particularly don’t place I’m So Bored next to a song called, wait for it, You’re Not the Only One, in the tracklisting.
Moreover, if Liam Gallagher, a man who has spent his entire career beset by accusations that he’s peddling a pale imitation of the Beatles, was concerned about giving his naysayers ammunition, he would not conclude said album with something called Mother Nature’s Song, which is – and you may be ahead of me here – the title of a Beatles track with one letter added to its ending.
The music is similarly unbothered by what anyone who isn’t already onboard thinks, resting almost entirely on a push-and-pull between the sound of Gallagher and Squire’s former bands. I’m So Bored is rooted in the snotty, thrashy Oasis of Morning Glory, while One Day at a Time sounds like it could have slotted on to Definitely Maybe – or at least among the B-sides of the same era. Meanwhile, Mars to Liverpool and Make It Up As You Go Along have far more winsome melodies than Oasis would ever have countenanced, more akin to the kind of thing the Stone Roses essayed on Mersey Paradise or Going Down. Love You Forever is rooted in the heavy riffing and rumbling drums of their 1994 comeback single Love Spreads, and You’re Not the Only One wouldn’t be out of place on Second Coming either.
Of course, all of this is as you might imagine. Nothing happens over the course of Liam Gallagher John Squire’s 45 minutes that you don’t fully expect to happen before listening to it, with the possible exception of I’m a Wheel, which shifts past the Led Zeppelin-inspired bluesrock that fuelled Second Coming into more straightforward late-60s blues revival territory: it literally has one of those lumbering I’m a Man-esque riffs that goes der-NERRRR-nuh-NUH, married to a glammy chorus. And one thing you might reasonably expect to happen doesn’t. There’s nothing here that resembles the hypnotic, breakbeat-fuelled, wah pedal-heavy sound of Fool’s Gold, which seems a shame, not least because it might be fun to hear Liam Gallagher sing over a dance beat, something he made a surprisingly good fist of on the Prodigy’s Shoot Down.
That said, it’s a noticeably better album than anything in Gallagher’s post-Oasis oeuvre, and indeed anything Squire has released since leaving the Stone Roses in 1996. The songwriting is melodically stronger and the performances more vibrant, with a pronounced sense that both parties are sparking off each others’ company. It doesn’t have a song to match either of their former bands’ widely accepted highpoints – a Slide Away or a She Bangs the Drums – although opener Raise Your Hands comes relatively close, marrying Squires’ dextrous playing to a She’s Electric-esque stomp and throwing in a rabble-rousing chorus and a piano bridge nicked from the Rolling Stones’ Let’s Spend the Night Together.
And while you could view its predictability as a failure of imagination, you could also paint it as the work of people who completely understand their market. The aforementioned cohort don’t pony up their money in search of surprises, not even the sizeable contingent among them too young to remember the 90s first hand. You can, if you wish, raise an eyebrow at their willingness to buy into dad’s war stories from the years when he was mad fer it, but if your tastes run to broad-brushstroke alt-rock, 2024 doesn’t have much to offer and you can hardly be blamed for harking back to an era when it seemed to be setting the agenda. Liam Gallagher John Squire serves up a far stronger simulacrum of that era than the handful of wan placeholder bands who have sprung up to service your needs in the years since the Britpop 2.0 of the 00s crashed and burned. The people it’s aimed at are highly unlikely to feel short changed.
• Liam Gallagher John Squire is released on 1 March on Warner Music
quite an achievement’
Daniel Evanson Cleansed, in whichrape, suicide and torture are juxtaposed with moments of tendernessin a university-type institution.One character has their tongue cut out and feet cut off. Evans starred in thepremiere at the Royal Court in 1998.
I devoured Cleansed when I first read it. After Blasted, there was an expectation and Sarah exceeded it – because Cleansed dares to go to places of deep, existential pain in order to talk about love. She was able to say so much with so few words. We rehearsed in a very cold room, which for a play with lots of nudity wasn’t great. We kept having to bring in heaters. I remember Sarah arriving one day and saying she wanted to make a change. It was to turn a comma into a full-stop. I remember thinking: “Is that it?” But then I realised it totally changed the meaning.
We were booed once, which wasn’t very pleasant. But we’re in England, after all, where people don’t tend to boo very often, so it felt like quite an achievement. It was a very physical production. I think most of us were naked at one point or another.
James Macdonald was the director and Jeremy Herbert designed some of the scenes to make it seem as if the audience had a bird’s eye view. Suzan Sylvester had to do this dance, which involved being in a harness, and she did her back in during the last week of the run. It was a huge shock, but obviously hugely exciting when Sarah said she’d do the role. She was so calm. She had to learn a dance, be naked, do the flying. But at least she already knew all the lines. It felt like she was giving her utter truth, unadorned. There was no sense of her having developed any habits, as actors do over time. Her performance encouraged us to emulate that.
‘You can set it anywhere and cast anyone’
Tinuke Craigon Crave, a revival of which she directed in 2020. A nonlinear, poetic work with dialogue, the play encompasses rape, incest, drug addiction, murder and suicide, but also beauty and love.Premiered at the Traverse, Edinburgh, in 1998.
I read Crave when I was at university. Actually, I read all of Sarah’s plays in one night while listening to Antony and the Johnsons. I remember Crave’s extraordinary monologue about what obsessive, destructive love feels like – how exhausting it made love sound.
The play offers its director a huge amount of freedom as well as a huge amount of structure. The characters have letters for names–A, M, Can dB– and it’s up for grabs as to what those letters mean. You can set it anywhere and cast anyone. The possibilities are endless. It gives you this huge scope and you have to really ask yourself what you think is happening. On the other hand, there’s a rhythm that’s inescapable – musical, syncopated and specific. That rhythm dictates what it ought to feel like. As for what it’s trying to achieve, the clues are in the form. You just have to choose any one of a million ways to get there.
Crave is about despair and not knowing but it’s also an incredibly knowing piece. It’s full of winks and nods and understands the cruel irony of life. For us, it was about creating a space that plumbed the depths of our secret thoughts: the parts of ourselves that are needy, desperate and shameful.
It’s really exposing.
‘I was scared to identify with it’
Vinay Patel, playwright and screenwriter, on 4.48 Psychosis,Kane’s final work composed of 24 sections that have no specified setting, characters or stage directions. The title refers to the time in the early hours of the morning when despair and clarity coalesce. Premiered at the Royal Courtin 2000,one year after Kane’s death.
When I first read this, the way Sarah was talking about depression and medicalised despair felt very far away from me, partly because there’s a thing in south Asian communities of not really talking about depression. I used to think that the way you deal with the feelings she was trying to express was not just to leave people with this sense of misery, but to write stuff that leads them out of it.
Rereading the play, what strikes me is how it gets at the idea that you’re always searching for a consistent version of yourself – and you’re doomed never to find it. There’s something about the stillness of the morning that lets you have that sort of sanity and clarity, because the world is quiet. Your thoughts can be slightly more lucid. I realise now that I was scared to identify with that stuff.
The last line of the play is “please open the curtains” and there is a yearning to be beyond that despair. Kane is reacting to a time where everything seemed solid and safe, so the idea of shaking people out of their despair felt important. But now, despair is one click away. It’s really constant. How does that affect the way you react to a work like this?
• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. Youth suicide charity Papyrus can be contacted on 0800 068 4141 or email pat@papyrus-uk.org. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org