“I’m quite happy with the formula,” Liam Gallagher told NME in February. “I look cool. I sound good. I talk from the heart.” So he’s still wearing the parka and the shades. Still falling drunkenly out of (grounded) helicopters after festivals. Still channelling The Beatles and The Rolling Stones in big, lairy rock songs; his celebrated sneer amplified by his funnelled hood, dragging those long, rough vowels behind him like a plastic bag of cans. But, despite its lazy shrug of a title, Gallagher’s third solo album is his best so far. It comes charged with more than enough blokey-bluesey energy and bawl-along, arms-aloft choruses to send the crowds madferit at Knebworth next week.
Fences mended after Keith Richards’ Nineties dismissal of Oasis as “crap”, Gallagher, who supported The Rolling Stones on tour in 2018, opens C’mon You Know with the first of many nods to the pirate rockers. The album’s opening bars are filled by a children’s choir, like the one that introduces “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”. Pure little voices sing over a crisply strummed acoustic guitar: “The cut, it never really heals/ Just enough to stop the bleed.”
