Noel would say: "Australians only hope is cricket. Fuck off, cricket players!"
There will be a Beady Eye 3rd album, all the haters (some Noel's fans too) just accept it and fuck off, assholes.
from Clash:
will the bands next album be even bigger, better and stranger then the current one?
Liam: Yeah, I guess so. Who fuckin' knows, man? The door is definitely open. With this album we've definitely gone to a new dimension - whether it's the right one, time will tell and that, but I like it. The gloves are off now - we can definitely do some weird shit, man.
what about the initial ideas for BE?
We demoed all the songs that are on this album, and they were good; we could have gone in and made it like that and it would have been stuck in that '60s kinda rut - but I like that kind of thing. So it would have still been good, but I guess it would have been Different Gear Still Speeding Part Two, you know what I mean? We're always up for a bit of change - we're always up for doing something different - but until it's in front of your face and your ears, it's hard to tell what you want to do. So with [previous producer] Dave Sardy, Scott, our new manager, he said, Look, you don't want to go in with the normal producer, you've got to go with someone who's a little bit out of your comfort zone. I went, Cool. Let's fuckin' check it out.
The first day I met Dave Sitek was in the studio. I liked abit of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs - I've never really heard much about his band [Tv on the Radio] - and then he just started fuckin' playing us what he'd done to [the demo of] 'lick Of The Finger. I thought, Fuckin' yes - it had a dark and menacing edge to it that we didn't have. And then when he got Soul Love out, he'd started putting all these atmospherics on it and cosmic fuckin' shit - ambient stuff that we wouldn't normally do. So that's when we thought, Yeah, this is it, man.
How do you think your own song writing has progressed since your initial forays with Oasis?
Yeah, it's getting better, man. I mean, it's like anything: if you keep practicing... You'll never master the art of song writing, and I don't want to. I'd say I'm a part-time songwriter -I can sing anyone's songs, you know what I mean? But yeah, I'm obviously getting a little bit better. I'm not much of a wordsmith. I tend to go with the first thing that comes down; I just write it and hopefully it has a bit of a root to it. Sometimes it means absolute jack shit and then you listen back to it... Like with Don't Brother Me; you go, Oh, right - I didn't intentionally go out and write a song about our kid, you know what I mean? It just happened.
It's a cleverly passive/ aggressive song.
Yeah. It's not that malicious, you know what I mean? There are a couple of little [digs] in there. Like, he's going on about if he had a gun and all this shit, and it's like, Did you shoot your gun? But there's nothing! malicious, man. It could be a lot worse.
But you've got to be prepared for people asking you about it?
Yeah man, without a doubt. I wouldn't have put it out unless... If| people ask me a question, they're always gonna get a fuckin' honest answer. But I don't care anyway; he's been writing songs about me all his fuckin' life.
Do you prefer to air your feelings in your music rather than keep them private?
Yeah, but he knows my feelings. Everyone knows my feelings, I'm not shy with that. I love our kid - as in the Noel that's not in a band and not in the music business and not all that bullshit that people see he is. But the band Noel? The fuckin' geezer that's in the band? I fuckin' absolutely fuckin' despise [him]. And I guess he feels the same way. But if you speak to him, he'll probably go: Yeah, I know; I hate both the cunts.
But yeah, I love our kid when he's not surrounded by the bullshit.
How do you define what a Beady Eye song is?
A Beady Eye song has got to have attitude, it's got to have a great melody, great chords - you've got to be able to play it on acoustic, you know what I mean? That's how I measure a good song: if vou can fuckin' sit there and strum it on the acoustic guitar in your house to your dogs and it still sounds good, then that's the sound of a good song. Then once you put all the other shit on it, then obviously it gets better, I guess.
Andy: At the beginning of the demo session we were like, Let's direct ourselves at a cross between [George Harrison's] Wonderwall Music soundtrack and All Things Must Pass. We had a sort of orchestral Simon And Garfunkel epicness.
Gem: Yeah, Liam was banging on about Simon and Garfunkel a lot, but what we actually wanted from the lyrics and the melodies was just real strong songs, man. Emotion, directness, vulnerability, hope, broken hearts, paranoia; the usual kind of adult emotions that you pick up.
A: With the first album we would have been saying, Right, we need rock 'n' roll. It needs to be lairy, lean and mean. We don't want to have any indulgent bits on it - not too many guitar solos - we just want it to be arranged to play the fuck out of live. So that was the message there. The message now was more like a bit of headspace. Dave saw that in the tunes and he brought a whole lot of ambience to it as well that we wouldn't have got near without him. Dave added the ambience, the chaos, the invention, the questioning - we questioned every tune on the day. We came out with an amazing record that at times is space rock, other times is ambient, at times it is like Hawkwind, and at other times it's like Oasis or Beady Eye's first album; it kind of runs through the whole spectrum.
About the mindset between going into the new album from their debut:
G: With [the debut] we wanted to play some rock 'n' roll and it was just about getting moving after the band had split - if we'd have left it too long we would have probably got the fear. Now this one sounds like our considered opinion.
A: We were just frantic coming out of Oasis and we just wanted to get moving, and we had a bunch of tunes that we were already ready to do and wanted to build a live set, because we didn't want to do Oasis tunes straight away - we wanted to be Beady Eye and start off and make that an entity of its own. So making the album, you hear it: you can feel that franticness in it, you can feel the fact we are almost reeling a little bit. But these are not necessarily bad things, you know?
were you restricted with what you could do musically in Oasis? since you've been Beady Eye, is there more room to experiment?
A: Yeah. I guess it's all in our hands; it's a smaller concern and it's not so important what we do in the big picture of life and the universe, so we're allowed to just do what we want and are just getting on with having fun with it in our little corner of the world. It doesn't really feel like the world of music is waiting to hear it so we're just kind of getting on with it, and then maybe it will catch fire".
There were a lot of songs demoed. How many did you originally have, and what happened to them all?
A: Well, at the end of our demos we had twenty-one things but they weren't all songs. One of them was just sort of noises...
G: That was the thing that kind of hooked [Dave]. We sent him five songs and he went, 'These are really strong, have you got any more?' So we thought we should send him the lot, because you should be open. And in amongst that there was a thereemin solo and he went, 'Right, you guys' songs are really strong - do you want to go there?' We went, 'Absolutely', and he went, 'Perfect!' Because he didn't know if we were going to be precious and uptight or 'this is how it is', you know? That was it. And then we attempted to record them all in five weeks.
A: That was the only battle, really, being up against it with the time in the studio. Dave was trying to get the number of songs down to cut his workload down but we just wouldn't let him do it. Towards the end of every week he just kind of said, 'You know guys, over the weekend can you have a little think about the priorities?' And we would be like, 'Yup'.
G: Until the fourth week in and he was like, 'Can you guys make a fucking list?!' And we thought, We've only got one more weekend to put him off and we will have done the lot!'
A: We came out with eighteen.
G: Second Bite Of The Apple was the last song to be recorded. Initially it was Liam going, 'Fuck it, we're doing the lot, man, because you never know.' And that's the point of working with a producer: the possibilities are there, everything is up for grabs, and you just don't know until you get your hands dirty.
L: It was a good song, but if we hadn't have kept at doing it, it wouldn't have turned out like that. You've got to give every song a chance, because shit can happen. You can bring it in dressed like summat, and it can come out dressed like summat else.
So it surprises you as much as it does anyone else?
L: Yeah. The first idea might not be the best idea - it might be your third or your fourth. And we're up for that, man, we've always been up for that. In Oasis it wasn't so much - it was pretty much: 'This is if, boom, 'That's it', and that's what we do. But with Beady Eye, the world is our oyster, man. We can do what the fuck we want, because we're all for going with the flow, you know what I mean?
(Clash Magazine, their review rating for the album: 8/10)
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