Beady Eye - Different Gear, Still Speeding
Olaf Tyaransen, 24 Feb 2011
“Life’s too short not to forgive/You can carry regrets but they won’t let you live/I’m here if you wanna call/Staring at this spot on the wall.” So sings Liam Gallagher on ‘Kill For A Dream’, the eighth of thirteen tracks on Beady Eye’s much anticipated debut album. You get the feeling that he might just be addressing Noel Gallagher, his brother and former cohort in the biggest Brit band of the 1990s, Oasis...
Throughout their highly turbulent, sometimes drug-fuelled, musically patchy, and entertainingly egomaniacal 18-year history, Oasis had always been a band beset by volcanic sibling rivalry, but on August 28th, 2009, backstage at the Rock en Seine festival near Paris, Liam and Noel Gallagher had the motherfucker of all bust-ups. Following this particularly serious fight, which reportedly resulted in Liam petulantly smashing up his elder sibling’s favourite guitar, the group’s beleaguered manager announced the cancellation of the show, along with the rest of the European tour.
A couple of hours later, Noel released a statement on the band’s official website: “With some sadness and great relief... I quit Oasis tonight. People will write and say what they like, but I simply could not go on working with Liam a day longer.”
“Great relief”? Did Noel, as has been suggested, provoke the fight in order to have an excuse to quit? Who knows? Whatever happened, the other band members have subsequently gravitated towards Liam. (“How many cunts were there in Oasis?” Liam asked Stuart Clark, in last issue’s Hot Press cover interview. “Here’s a clue – it was more than zero and less than two”). Within less than a month, it was announced that Gem Archer and Andy Bell would be continuing to work with the younger Gallagher. Oasis live drummer Chris Sharrock was also recruited, and the birth of Beady Eye was announced soon afterwards. In yer face, bruvva!
It’s taken more than 18 months, but their debut album – recorded last autumn at London’s RAK Studios with Steve Lillywhite on production duties – has finally arrived, carried on a high tide of mouthy press interviews. As the title Different Gear, Still Speeding suggests, this is basically Oasis II. Or Oasis III, if you factor in the departures of Bonehead and Guigsy in 1999. Or Oasis IV if you consider that, although Noel thought up the name, it was him who joined Liam’s band, not the other way round.
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