LIAM GALLAGHER
Aware Super Theatre, July 23
★★★½
Be it the Stone Roses, New Order or, most pertinently in this instance, the much loved and missed Oasis, you know what you’re going to get when an iconic act from Manchester, England, plays a show in Australia: football shirts, bucket hats and Manc accents exaggerated and spoken as loudly and proudly as possible, as the expats come out to drink, sing along, and drink some more.
Liam Gallagher performs at the Brit Awards earlier this year.Credit:AP
This is not Oasis – a group we will likely never see again, due to irreconcilable fraternal differences – but close your eyes for the first 15 minutes and it could be. The band’s erstwhile frontman, Liam Gallagher, swaggers onstage to their recording of F—in’ in the Bushes, just as Oasis used to, and powers into three of their classics.
Actually, why even close your eyes? When Oasis played, it was near-impossible to take your eyes off Liam anyway. Even just standing behind a microphone, hands behind his back, doing little but hunch slightly so he could position the mic between his nose and mouth for maximum nasal effect – he had more charisma than the rest of the band put together, including big brother Noel.
And so it is on this night, where we get the world’s best Oasis cover band with the actual, magnetic frontman on lead vocals and sounding the best he has in ages. Liam will occasionally detour into his solo material, but only long enough for you to duck out and grab another beer, before he returns to the Oasis songs you want to hear.
There is a fair chunk of the new Liam Gallagher album C’mon You Know, and some of it rocks pretty hard – Better Days probably because it shamelessly lifts the drums from Tomorrow Never Knows, but it’s not like a Gallagher stealing from the Beatles is something new.
Still, the key take-away from this show is something that hasn’t been relevant for a while: that Oasis’ 1994 debut album Definitely Maybe is, overall, musically superior to the phenomenon that was the 1995 follow-up, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?
Why bother with a facsimile solo anthem, even one of the better ones such as Everything’s Electric, when you can have the old band’s exhilarating Rock’n’Roll Star, heart-crushing Slide Away or exuberant Cigarettes & Alcohol?
Definitely skip out on feeble newies More Power and Diamond in the Dark because Liam hasn’t played Wonderwall yet, and you know you’ll need to be back with an extra beer inside you to bellow along tearily to that.
There’s less wit than usual between tunes, in its stead too much boorish football talk, but maybe he was having an off night in that regard.
Otherwise, Liam Gallagher gives the majority what they want, so you can just about ignore that nagging, slightly empty feeling inside and live for the moment to Live Forever and the rest.
Liam Gallagher plays at Splendour in the Grass in Byron Bay on July 24, John Cain Arena in Melbourne on July 27 and HBF Stadium in Perth on July 30.
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