Liam Gallagher Says New Band Is "Bigger" Than Oasis

One year ago, Noel Gallagher quit Oasis with "great relief" nearly two decades after founding the band with his brother, Liam. Though the two still haven't spoken since their massive final fight in Paris last August, both are moving ahead with music: Noel got back onstage in March, performing a set of Oasis rarities at London's Royal Albert Hall, and now Liam is preparing to step back into the spotlight. Gallagher reports that he's three-quarters of the way done with his new band Beady Eye's first record, and that the disc is a collaborative effort: "We've each wrote four." A debut single is due later this year with a second track to follow at the top of '11. The band's album is expected next summer.

Gallagher tells the U.K.'s Sunday Times the group's sound is "Beatlesesque. But there's a lot of it sounds more like T. Rex or really old rock & roll like Jerry Lee Lewis." The band will provide the soundtrack for Gallagher's adaptation of the Beatles book The Longest Cocktail Party, which tells the behind-the-scenes story of the Fab Four's Apple Corps, and Gallagher promises the tracks will be "mega."

Asked if the band will be as big as Oasis, the singer responded, "It'll be bigger. I've got no doubt about the music, no doubt about me. I've never sounded better. It's proper rock & roll. Oasis was a pop band compared to what we're doing."

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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