Before we get into this, I need to come clean – I have previous with Liam Gallagher. Sure, it was only a backstage man tussle at an Oasis gig in ’94, and to this day, I bore the man no ill. If anything, I had grudging respect for his brash brand of “no fucks” indie rock, spitting petty invective and toying with self-sabotage like some kind of “Baggy” Kanye West.
The reason I’m telling you this is because I don’t want to be accused of having my judgement clouded in any way when writing this review, as was cruelly levelled at me during the Richard Ashcroft debacle.
And, by way of mitigation, let me say this: I love John Squire. Ever since my teens, I’ve regarded the man as coolness personified – the billowing trousers, the effortless riffs, the impossibly thick hair – elegantly bending the twin disciplines of art and music to his will, he was beyond reproach. Until now.
See, at the end of the day, no amount of hero worship is going to autotune songwriting this weak. I can’t imagine the circumstances that would allow two bonafide titans of the Manchester music scene to ever think that this stuff could pass muster, yet here we are.
So then, to the music. From the off, it’s blowing from the tugs. Stomping, honky-tonk pub rocker ‘Raise Your Hands’ notwithstanding, we rapidly descend into the arena of the unwell. ‘Mars to Liverpool’ is the kind of by-the-numbers indie slop that Dodgy would’ve jettisoned as being “piss weak” in 1995. ‘One Day At A Time’ reheats virtually every track on NOW! Best of Britpop Hits! all at the same time, leaving you with such rage and despondency as to make you give up listening to music altogether. Indeed, much of the album is so despicable, it would be an entirely reasonable response to launch a bottle of Stella towards the house band down your local Wetherspoons if they came out with similar.
Elsewhere, the record mostly settles into an identikit indie blueprint and refuses to shift. Squire noodles incessantly, Gallagher drawls out a tired lyric describing literally the first thing in his immediate eyeline (a river, a tree, a bird, a colour?), Squire noodles again, fade to end. Sometimes, like on ‘Love You Forever’, the music is so hackneyed and obvious that you’d think it had been lifted wholesale from the loop bank on GarageBand.
By the time we get to ‘Make It Up As You Go Along’ any pretence that this album is anything other than a colossal pisstake is entirely removed to the point of parody. If John Lennon was still alive and heard this, he would be begging to be gunned down in the street just to escape the awfulness of it all.
The shame of it is, teaming up the number one guitar icon of the Madchester era with the snarling, swaggering poet of Britpop should have been – on paper at least – a supergroup for the ages. The kind of beer-tinted indie mashup that would have everyone of the polo-shirted and Weller coiffured persuasion reaching for the Dulux to splatter-art their bootcut Wranglers.
Instead of ‘Wonderwall’, we get load of Pollocks. Bye bye bad plan, bye bye.