On the plus side, his voice is fine. The sheeeyiiiine strain that was making his larynx sound like a pair of baggy tights towards the end of Oasis and gave Beady Eye a slight frisson of cement mixer is totally fixed. He sings like a gobby Manc angel again, like everything’s suddenly come up supersonic. And that’s us pretty much done with the plus side.
Liam Gallagher: a man waging a WWE smack talk war with a world that’s not listening, let alone interested in fighting back. While Damon and Noel skip cheerfully off into a Gorillatronic future Liam’s here, as Twitter caps-lock is his witness, to prove to an already pretty convinced world that he can sing the Oasis songs that he sang better than anyone else singing his Oasis songs. And it’s a pleasure to hear him sing them. The problem is, with the failure of his bold, well-intentioned but deeply flawed Beady Eye project, he’s given up trying to surpass them.
By the time we make it past the Electric Brixton’s ticket-losing shitshow of a door team, he’s three songs in and twenty years receded. A bog-standard rock’n’roll rattle called ‘Greedy Soul’ is underway, giving way to a mid-paced plod rocker that could be called ‘It’s Alright Now’ or ‘Lay It On Me, Yeah’ but is actually ‘Bold’. These are what you’d get if you tried to 3D print an Oasis song – spiritless facsimiles of his glory days. Come the country Beatles strumbling of ‘Paper Crown’, “sun” is once more rhyming with “everyone” and the bar chatter of the lairy Oasites of old are rendering its acoustic intro inaudible. A passing friend mutters “tragic” and heads for the door.
When the old Oasis tectonic churn strikes up, electrifying the Electric, it’s only ‘D’You Know What I Mean’, as grey and tiresome as it’s always been. Later we get the characterless glam grunge album track ‘Be Here Now’, a song that must have struggled to stir up much in the way of nostalgic euphoria even when Bonehead guested in Manchester. He opened with ‘Rock’n’Roll Star’ (we’re told), but by now it seems he’s picking Oasis covers like bad headliners pick worse support bands so as not to be blown offstage.
At least ‘Slide Away’ is a full-on Britpop roar-along, but its anthemic wallop only serves to highlight the formulaic weaknesses in Liam’s solo songs. There are brief flashes of the old ‘Definitely Maybe’ ardour in the Zep attack of ‘I Get By’ and ‘You Better Run’, but the latter seems to exist solely to concede lad-glam defeat to Kasabian. And where the gospel rhythm of ‘Universal Gleam’ promises to build to a terrace-shuddering chant classic, it slouches where it should rouse, leaving us wanting to chant, if anything, “come on, come on, come on, get through it”. Awk-waaaard.
It all ends with an acapella rendition of ‘Live Forever’ with just an egg shaker accompaniment, a chance for the ardent Oasis fans to sing along with their hero, a sonic selfie. Yet it rams home the fact that, while even Noel is struggling to escape the shadow of his first band’s songs, Liam is virtually a slave to them, reduced to forging paler and paler fakes and hoping no-one will look further than his vocal signature. The only road left is reunion.
