The album Liam Gallagher compared to “Lennon and Elvis” combined
Liam Gallagher pays few higher compliments than referring to something as being akin to The Beatles. His love of the Fab Four is well publicised, and that’s outside of his band’s obvious dedication to their sound.
Considering that Gallagher has even named one of his children after the bespectacled driving force of the band, John Lennon, his love of the group’s leader is known as far and wide as Gallagher’s music is beloved. So, when he labels a band’s output as a combination of “Lennon and Elvis”, you know there is a lot of love about to be heaped on a project.
The conversation arose when The Quietus asked Gallagher to pick out his favourite albums of all time. Within the list, there are a few LPs you might not expect. The Bee Gees, for example, get a shout-out, with LG claiming that their tour DJ had got him into the harmonising pop group, which he affirms are a “top band”. However, there’s one album on the list that isn’t a shock, the epic self-titled debut from The Stone Roses.
In a week where Liam Gallagher has hinted at forming a supergroup with Stone Roses guitar maestro John Squire, we thought we’d look back at the huge praise Gallagher heaped on the record and how, without its release, we may not have ever heard Oasis. This isn’t the first time he has mentioned such a venture either. In 2017, Gallagher commented on a supergroup: “The ideal ones would be the guys out of The Stone Roses. I think they just split up, so that would be good.”
However, Gallagher’s love for the band was an instant connection that would reverberate through his life. As Gallagher told the publication: “I like to think of this as Lennon and Elvis, you know what I mean? Lennon wouldn’t have been there without Elvis, and I wouldn’t be here without The Stone Roses. Ian Brown, as a frontman, had the look, and he was cool as fuck. He was my Elvis.”
That’s quite the acclaim from a man who has spent the majority of his career rallying against any perceived notion of friendliness between bands. ut brown had the sincer swagger of a Manchester brute, and this resonated with the young Gallagher as much as Gallagher’s own bravado garnered him a legion of undying fans.
Considering that Gallagher reckons himself to be one of the greatest frontmen of all time, that’s some high praise for Brown. But it wasn’t just the swagger either, the music also grabbed LG and convinced him to provoke Noel into learning the songs: “The first time I saw them, that was it! I thought, ‘I want that!’ I’d heard our kid play ‘Sally Cinnamon’ round the house, and I went to see them just before the album came out and it was like, ‘This is it, man! This is the next fucking step!'”
As many people experienced with Oasis in the 1990s, for Liam Gallagher, The Stone Roses represented the evolution of music: “It was like growing up a bit, and you’re thinking, ‘This is the band that’s going to guide me to chicks and being a cool young man.’ You know what I mean? This was the album that was going to carry me through. They were my guiding star.”
The album has rightly gone down as a piece of legendary music. Nailing a scene better than most can hope to, Brown and his band delivered a collection of records that not only felt right for the time, seizing a moment in history when the clothes were baggy, the pills were tight, and the cultural mood was shifting. But they managed to do it while also creating a record which will outlive us all.
Listen to Liam Gallagher’s guiding star, The Stone Roses, below.
