Gem Archer And Zak Starkey Team Up For Charity Album

The drummers and bassists behind many classic bands' rhythm sections have reunited for a charity album.

Zak Starkey, who drummed with Oasis on their final two albums ‘Don’t Belive The Truth’ and ‘Dig Out Your Soul’, has formed the band Sshh with singer Sshh Liguz.

Their album ‘Issues’ sees the rhythm sections of many musicians play together to back the duo as they cover a host of classic songs.

These include Amy Winehouse’s bassist Dale Davis and drummer Nathan Allen play on a cover of ‘Back To Black’, while Starkey’s former Oasis bandmate Gem Archer plays guitar on a cover of The Small Faces’ 1966 song ‘Tin Soldier’, alongside their drummer Kenny Jones and The Sex Pistols bassist Glen Matlock.

The album's first single 'Problems' is a cover of The Sex Pistols featuring Matlock and Pistols drummer Paul Cook.

‘Issues’, out later this year, also features members of Primal Scream, Marilyn Manson, Blondie, The Pretenders, Mott The Hoople and The Ruts.

Starkey, who now plays with The Who, said he learnt more about playing drums from Jones than anyone else in his career – including his father, The Beatles drummer Ringo Starr.

Starkey told NME: “Of all the people who’ve taught me drums – Keith Moon, my dad, all of them – Kenney showed me the most. It was just great to play with him. Two Who drummers, past and present, playing at the same time: just one more unprecedented connection in the making of this album.”

Sshh made their live debut at London club The Box this week, watched on by Starr, Klaxons guitarist Jamie Reynolds, Ride guitarist Andy Bell, Adam And The Ants guitarist Marco Pirroni, The Lightning Seeds singer Ian Broudie and producer Youth.

Profits from ‘Issues’ go to Teenage Cancer Trust.

Source; www.nme.com

Review: Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds At The Orpheum Theatre

On Wednesday night, a guy in the Orpheum Theatre audience yelled out, “Where’s Liam?”

After the question was greeted with loud boos, Noel Gallagher, the former Oasis
guitarist/singer/songwriter playfully asked from the stage, “Who’s Ian?” and then said, “I’m not your brother” (referring to the band once led by his sibling Liam).

Before the haunting mid-tempo rocker “In the Heat of the Moment,” Gallagher turned sardonic: “The last time I was in this building was to see Marilyn Manson with my brother – quite an (expletive) evening, as you can imagine. This is my least favorite song off the new album.”

It may be his least favorite, but that doesn’t hold true for fans in his native England, where the song narrowly missed topping the indie singles chart.

“Heat of the Moment” is the second track on Gallagher’s second album, “Chasing Yesterday.”

Released earlier this year, the album debuted at No. 1 in the U.K. Sonically adventurous, the collection strikes a compelling balance between majestic rock and psychedelia, with more prodigious brass accents and guest guitar work by Johnny Marr.

Back in the mid-1990s, when Oasis had a prosperous run and battled Blur for the so-called Britpop crown, Noel Gallagher routinely made headlines abroad for his frequently provocative opinions. The same holds true decades later. Recent quotes about Ed Sheeran’s success, the shifting of One Direction and the possibility of an Oasis reunion have all made the music and tabloid press.
Performing a sold out show in Los Angeles with High Flying Birds, Gallagher delivered an invigorating 90-minute set that was split between tracks from his solo albums and a handful of Oasis cuts.

The Mancunian musician and his four-piece group (plus a three-man horn section) took the stage to a mellow remix of “If I Had a Gun.”

They launched the 20-song set in raucous fashion with “Do the Damage,” a sax-driven Stooges-meets-Sonics rave-up originally earmarked for “Chasing Yesterday.” The dramatic “Everybody’s on the Run,” containing a swelling keyboard crescendo by the Birds’ secret weapon, Mikey Rowe, was mesmerizing. He proved his mettle again on the rollicking “AKA … What a Life.”

Images of old family photos flashed on the backdrop for Oasis B-side “Fade Away.” Gallagher, playing acoustic guitar, recast the 1994 original’s raucousness into slower folk/rock territory and it worked well.

Lead guitarist Tim Smith unleashed some feedback and then the band locked into a maelstrom of careening sounds during “Lock All the Doors” that packed quite a wallop. The same held true for the catchy stomper “You Know We Can’t Go Back.”

A more subdued, reworked version of Oasis hit “Champagne Supernova” prompted fans to clap along. Gallagher gently admonished them, “Don’t! My kids always do that.” It was still electrifying as people hoisted beers in the air, several males sang along loudly, arm in arm, like they were at a soccer match and others took the chorus to heart by lighting up.

Elsewhere, the ominous and danceable standout “Ballad of the Mighty I” saw Gallagher dominate with a rare guitar solo. Like other tracks that run past the five-minute mark on his albums, it never became tiresome live.

Sinewy ’70s-styled groove rocker “The Mexican” really gave the horns a chance to shine, as did a ruminative “The Masterplan.”

More excellent Oasis nuggets included the quick, blaring “Digsy’s Dinner” (Noel handled Liam’s sneering original vocal just fine) and soaring finale “Don’t Look Back in Anger.”
Source: www.ocregister.com

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Why The World Still Seems Obsessed By Oasis

Exactly 20 years on from the release of Oasis’s first No 1 single, there are good reasons why they still cast a huge shadow over the pop landscape.

Last week, the Daily Mirror ran a story on a supposed (read: 100% not happening) Oasis reunion. It arrived almost exactly one year on from a Daily Star front page that claimed the “chart-topping Manchester band” were “set to headline Glastonbury in a £500m comeback deal”. Coincidence? Maybe. Although perhaps it isn’t coincidence. Maybe the tabloids take turns. Maybe the Sun is readying its own Gallagher-brothers-reunite exclusive for this time next year.

Also likely coincidence, but the Daily Mirror story arrives close to the 20th anniversary of the landmark event that kickstarted the red tops’ obsession with Oasis: Some Might Say, the band’s first No 1 single, was released exactly 20 years ago, on 24 April 1995. The single entered the charts at No 1, a landmark event not just for Oasis, but for what was then “indie” music, and for British music in general. Up until then, the idea of a band like Oasis reaching the top of the charts, as much as Echo & the Bunnymen or the Stone Roses might have boasted it was their aim, seemed like a romantic, nebulous concept. But Oasis actually did it. When Noel Gallagher raised his guitar above his head during a celebratory appearance on Top of the Pops that week (guest presenter – of course – Chris Evans), the alternative, music press-consuming nation felt a collective pang of triumph. At that precise moment, their world became the mainstream.

Within a year, genuine disappointment would greet Bluetones singles “only” entering the charts at No 2. Oasis, meanwhile, graduated from having indie centrefold Evan Dando trail them around on tour and play tambourine badly with them at instore appearances to having Robbie Williams – the Zayn Malik of his day, only with more cocaine – trail them around on tour and dance onstage badly with them during a Glastonbury headline set. Some Might Say was followed by Roll With It, the release of which – for reasons you’ll be aware of – was a lead item on the national news. Enter the tabloid press, bearing daily stories on Liam and/or Noel for at least the next two years. In August 1997, a picture Of Noel Gallagher mooning in Ibiza was the lead story on a Daily Record front page. The second lead was the death of Princess Diana.

In April 2015, pictures of Liam getting pissed would be unlikely to trump the arrival of Kate Middleton’s baby, but the regularity with which reliably spurious Oasis stories are deemed of greater interest to readers of a national newspaper than, say, the general election is testament to a continuing, insatiable public appetite for all things Gallagher. At the more specialist end of the media scale, consider also that NME – a magazine that is in theory primarily for teenagers keen to discover the hottest new bands – has published three Noel Gallagher covers already this year, and 21 Oasis-related covers in the six or so years since they ceased to exist. Even given there have been two Noel solo albums and two Beady Eye albums to contend with in that time, that’s a lot. And it can’t solely be down to the fact Noel is consistently the sharpest, most entertaining interview in town. It is because a lot of people still care, a lot.

There is a tendency to scoff that these people are all nostalgic football-loving British lads in their mid-30s, but that is easily disproved. Noel Gallagher recently expressed frustration that neither Arctic Monkeys nor Kasabian have succeeded in inspiring a next generation of bands. There’s a reason for that. If you look to Catfish & The Bottlemen – easily the fastest rising guitar band of the moment – they’re still going back to Oasis. Their leader Van McCann had his “I must do this” epiphany at their gigs at Heaton Park in 2009. “It was as if Jesus had come back,” he said recently of the occasion. It’s worth noting at this point that McCann was not even two years old when Definitely Maybe was released.

Arctic Monkeys and Kasabian themselves, of course, are both direct, self-confessed descendants of Oasis. And if you want to look beyond white, male British guitar bands, you could pan out to Frances Bean Cobain – born the same week as Van McCann – who continues to be a vocal, B-side referencing obsessive on Twitter (quizzed as to who she preferred out of Nirvana and Hole, she answered “Oasis”). Or to Jessica Alba, who celebrated her 21st birthday at an Oasis gig in Las Vegas. Or further afield to Mish Way, singer with Canadian feminist punks White Lung, who recently wrote an article entitled “It’s literally impossible to hate Oasis”. These are just a few. Marilyn Manson adores them (‘Be Here Now’ is his favourite album). Quite brilliantly, Tupac Shakur once said that they were “true thug life”.

What Oasis still represent to this wide spectrum of people is that idea of a band doing things completely on their own terms and triumphing over ”manufactured” music. Oasis didn’t even make a dedicated video for Some Might Say (Liam didn’t turn up to the shoot, and a clip had to be cobbled together from footage shot for Cigarettes and Alcohol). Nor did they, unlike the supposedly more alternative-minded likes of Blur and Pulp, utilise that most execrable of 90s fan-extortion tactics – the multi-edition CD single – to pump up its chart position. They didn’t, it turned out, need to play either of these games. Their songs and their attitude was enough.

“We’re here to get lids like you out of the charts and bands in,” Van McCann said recently in response to fawning adoration from Louis Tomlinson of One Direction. A fantastically correct attitude for a young would-be rock’n’roll star to have. And one that comes directly from Oasis, a band who will likely still be the template for kids with or without guitars to do the same in even another 20 years’ time.

Source: www.theguardian.com

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