Nostalgia can feel like an affliction plaguing music – until suddenly, a big backward-facing record comes along that makes that ailment seem not so bad after all. Of all the unexpected products of the current 90s revival, this album-length collaboration between former Stone Roses guitarist John Squire and erstwhile Oasis singer Liam Gallagher (the title simply their full names; henceforth I’ll call it Gallagher Squire) seems so textbook, so route one, as to be almost absurd.
Here is Gallagher, coming off a notable period of solo success with a series of 2024 commemorative Definitely Maybe gigs in front of him, sneering about lassitude on a song called I’m So Bored, passive-aggressively listing things he’s fed up with as only Gallagher, with his chippy hauteur, can. And here is Squire, so long absent from the fray, electric guitar ringing out with affirmative curlicues in between the seemingly random items of clothing, or the times of day, with which Gallagher is bored. Bosses, strikes, war, peace – all these opposites are equal, and such a drag. Twang! If there was a song on Gallagher Squire called Doing What It Says on the Tin, it would not seem out of place. (These lyrics, incidentally, are all Squire’s, but written to suit Gallagher.)
And yet. There is a great deal also going right on this album, not least on how it refuses to disappoint the faithful of both bands while offering an often intriguing rearranging of the Roses/Oasis DNA. It’s a duets album, in which Gallagher is in charge of broad, confident strokes and Squire takes care of the detail, ducking in and out of Gallagher’s smeary couplets like a whippet doing heelwork. It is produced, like the latter-day solo Gallagher LPs, by LA royalty Greg Kurstin (Adele, Gorillaz, Foo Fighters), while veteran session man Joey Waronker plays drums and Kurstin plays keys, piano and mellotron, audibly assisting on the T Rex-in-the-honky-tonk pleasure that is You’re Not the Only One.
At this collaboration’s heights, Squire doses Gallagher with luxuriant psychedelia. On Just Another Rainbow, one of two tracks already released, Gallagher remains tetchy – “I might have known,” he sneers at “just another rainbow.” But then the rainbow starts “dripping on my tree” – perhaps a bit like a Jackson Pollock tribute, the kind of thing that graced the cover of the Stone Roses’ first LP – and Gallagher is reduced to listing the names of colours in schoolboy awe. Squire goes off on a private psychedelic reel: the fade at the end is actually cruel. More lysergics are to come. “I got a kandy-kolored tangerine-flake streamline baby, sassy grassy green and Jamaica Blue drive me crazy,” sings Gallagher, with persuasive conviction, on One Day at a Time.
One of the novelties of Gallagher Squire is hearing Gallagher juxtaposed with guitar solos; his Oasis sibling, Noel Gallagher, tends to play simpler guitar lines. Here, Squire gives free rein to his inner Jimmy Page, present since Stone Roses days but now even further off the leash.
Squire doing Hendrix is another of this record’s impressive touches – as on Just Another Rainbow and the Crosstown Traffic-ish intro to Love You Forever, a song in which both parties acknowledge “growing old disgracefully”. It is, perhaps, no accident that Gallagher Squire opens with the words: “If you’re running outta time.” That’s the glam galumph of Raise Your Hands, a tune seemingly written to reassure ageing big gig audiences that they are not a faceless mass (“Raise your hands, I can see you, we’re alive!”).
After an album with the Seahorses and two solo outings, Squire effectively retired from music to pursue painting after some tentative new Stone Roses tracks in 2016 led nowhere. An injury to his wrist in 2020, however, made the guitarist determined to regain his dexterity, leading him back to his instrument with renewed ardour.
Six-string pyrotechnics can often become self-indulgent, but Squire is liquid and versatile, pulling out little Paint It, Black-ish near-easternisms (on One Day at a Time) or, most unexpectedly, an electric blues. Even better, Gallagher rises to these occasions, revelling in the minor keys on One Day at a Time. He is more than game for the Manchester, rather than Mississippi, walking blues of I’m a Wheel, worth the price of admission alone.
As eloquent as Squire’s guitar is, his lyrics can often be trite. Sometimes, though, Gallagher sings something that makes you sit up. “Thank you for your thoughts and prayers and fuck you too,” he quips on Make It Up As You Go Along.
Occasionally, the pair’s entitled rock star status is a little less appealing. “I know you’re happy in your suburban trance, you should have fucked me when you had the chance,” runs one line on One Day at a Time. More entertaining is the verbal detail on I’m a Wheel, where Gallagher sings “this isn’t happening, lock all the doors, these aren’t the droids you’re looking for” – an ancient Star Wars reference wrapped inside a timelessly fruity blues strut. “There’s blood in my custard,” he avers, as Squire’s guitar echoes his surprise: “I’m misunderstood.”
