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 blues-rock 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
