‘The Roller’: the lost Oasis song picked up by Beady Eye
Given the mania surrounding the Gallagher brothers in the year of our lord 2025, would you believe there was a moment a while ago when Liam Gallagher seemed completely washed? It’s true; in a couple of years after Oasis originally split in 2009, Noel’s solo career took off at a canter, and Liam’s… didn’t. He instead took the remaining members of Oasis’ live band, Gem Archer, Andy Bell and Chris Sharrock and formed the absolutely hopeless Beady Eye. A case of misunderstanding your own appeal so completely he might as well have taken up opera.
There’s something weirdly respectable about the whole endeavour, too. Their modus operandi was originally to just play their own material. Absolutely no Oasis tracks, and definitely none written by Gallagher Sr. Good on the lads for taking a bet on themselves, I guess. However, was there really anyone who was listening to those late-period Oasis albums and going, “Hmm, decent, but they could really do without their chief songwriter”? I think not.
There was at least a stirring of interest when news of the band dropped. How could there not be? It was the heart of Oasis’ first project since Britain’s biggest rock band finally collapsed in a pile of fraternal loathing, but then the music dropped. There was a vague attempt at making music slightly more raucous and loose than they had in their previous outfit. Especially with the lead single ‘Bring The Light’ and its pounding, Jerry Lee Lewis-style piano.
The record, titled Different Gear, Still Speeding, as if the whole endeavour didn’t smell enough like your dad’s first Facebook post after the divorce, was still terminally uninspired. Which is bold considering how much they crowed about their inspirations. A Gallagher brother calling a song ‘Beatles and Stones’ is almost beyond parody at this point. No matter how much they talked about the project being completely different from Oasis, though, there was a huge problem with the band at a conceptual level.
The only two members of the band with genuine experience being the chief creative force of a band, Archer and Bell, hadn’t done so in over a decade, and it felt it. So, you end up with a record that, like I alluded to previously, sounds like a late-period Oasis record made up entirely of the non-Noel songs. We know today that it sounds like this is almost a Boschian depiction of hell because that’s exactly what it was.
While the band released ‘Bring The Light’ and ‘Four Letter Word’ as their initial singles, the first single promoting their album was a Gem Archer number called ‘The Roller’. It’s an uninspired plod of a song, but what’s so much worse is that it was written over a decade previously for the Oasis album Heathen Chemistry. Around the album’s release, Noel Gallagher said in an interview, “Gem’s written his first song for the band, called ‘The Roller’ – it’s like T Rex doing ‘Instant Karma’.”
Let that sink in for a moment. This is a song that didn’t make the cut for Heathen Chemistry, not even as a B-side. Gem Archer’s 77-second instrumental ‘A Quick Peep’ made the cut. Not ‘The Roller’. And it’s the lead single for this album. Christ. Needless to say, Beady Eye had them in stitches over at Supernova Heights. Considering that all Liam needed to do to sell out Knebworth was go by his own name and play ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Star’, I can’t help but think that even with his legendary self-esteem, he must think that Beady Eye was a waste of time.
