I’m in a room full of dodgy haircuts and bald heads (those not fortunate enough to sport dodgy haircuts), tonight the Civic Hall is full of LADS. And they don’t seem to mind that Liam Gallagher’s new band Beady Eye (essentially Oasis minus Noel) are half an hour late when they take to the stage amidst the opening noise of instrument feed-back.
The ‘lads’ go wild and the band play ‘Four Letter Word’ closely followed by ‘Beatles and Stones’, a song that’s an obvious shout-out to two bands of far greater importance, you see Liam doesn’t as much wear his influences on his sleeve as have them tattooed across his forehead.
As a band Beady Eye sound tight tonight and make the largely average music from ‘Different Gear, Still Speeding’, sound rather delectable. However there is a lack of truly great songs here and together with the attitude, songs are what made Oasis such an important band to so many people. Despite two seasoned song-writers in the band, Gem Archer and Andy Bell to help Liam, Beady Eye are still finding their feet.
The early exuberance dies down and after the singles ‘The Roller’, and ‘Bring the Light’, are played, there is not much to get truly excited about. As competent as the material is, that spark of genius is noticeably absent.
The end of every song brings a repetitive chant of the frontman’s name followed by the Brit-Pop legend baffling out some nonsense that no-one can understand, (everybody loves it regardless though). For many the rest of the evening is spent at the bar or just gawping at Liam.
The band finishes with a fairly average cover of ‘Sons of the Stage’ by World of Twist, predictably nobody can really made heads nor tails of it.
If Oasis DON”T get back together which is unlikely (although Noel is recording a solo effort as we speak), Beady Eye will need to go some distance before establishing themselves as anything other than Liam’s vanity project.
In the meantime at the Civic the lads in the crowd got what they wanted, a glance at their (working class) hero and for now they are happy.
Beady Eye? Maybe ‘The Liam Gallagher Road show’ would have been a more appropriate name?