Since they released ‘Bring The Light’ as a free download last November, talk of Liam Gallagher’s Beady Eye has been on everyones lips. Are they flogging a dead horse without Noel around? Aren’t they a bit too old? Do we even care?
While they may not be the hip young gun-slingers they once were and will certainly be a slightly different entity without Noel at the helm, there is plenty to Beady Eye to keep us interested. The first three publicly available songs, Bring The Light, Four Letter Word and The Roller, demonstrate that the forthcoming album, Different Gear, Still Speeding, should be full of the sort of soulful and committed rock and roll we have been missing since, well, since Oasis split up.
The likes of Kasabian have done their best to fill the ‘working class rock’ void, but since the Gallagher brothers went their separate ways about 18 months ago no-one has properly claimed their populist rock and roll mantle. As has been well reported recently, the music industry is currently being over-run by posh-kids with floppy fringes on a break between public school and a proper job. While there’s nothing necessarily wrong with posh kids making music – music is free for all at the end of the day – it does hint at a bigger problem. Either the only bands who are able to stick at a music career are the ones who have a nice cash-filled middle class safety net, or the angry, skint and ignored youth of today just aren’t turning to music as an outlet as they have done in previous recessions. Either way, it doesn’t bode well for the music industry as a whole.
Let’s not forget that the whole Britpop revolution, of which most of the members of Beady Eye were a part, rose gloriously from the hangover of the early-nineties recession by talking directly to the disassociated working class. This in turn inspired new bands to pop up and developed a music scene which, although it had its bad points, helped to define the era we all lived in.
While a lot of the ‘rock’ music being made at the moment is pretty good – Foals, White Lies and The Vaccines spring to mind – it’s not exactly the kind of inspirational stuff that is going to lead us out of the dirge of synthesised Gaga and Katy Perry pop. That’s why we need the type of life-affirming, swaggering, un-complicated rock that Beady Eye have demonstrated so far – the kind of rock you can both have a party to and sit on your own and reflect to.
So while the cynics are busy blogging and tweeting things like ‘Oasis Mk II’, ‘crap without Noel’ and ‘just a Pretty Green advert’, we’ll be looking forward to what we hope will be the best debut album of the year.
Submitted by John Priestley.
Preorder Different Gear, Still Speeding here:
