Beady Eye to open live shows with four letter word

6 February 2011 by Steve Lamacq
It’s been a busy week. I can feel my eye-lids drooping.

GANG OF FOUR at Heaven (grown men, as excitable – more so? – than teenagers). They jumped around, agitated and awkward, jubilant and apparently pleased to be there. Thirty years after they were 20 years ahead of their time, the new songs mixed well with the old, and yet throughout, you couldn’t help feeling that it must have been all so much more radical back then. It was a bit weird really.

Though not as strange as standing in a corner of BEADY EYE’s rehearsal room in north London, while Gallagher and Co cranked out the opening songs of what will be the live set on their impending tour (unless they re-jig it, they’ll be starting with album-opener ‘Four Letter Word’, a chugging, live-for-the-moment call to arms).

In conversation – which was the reason we were there, to record an interview for 6Music – Liam is as happy and energised as I’ve ever seen him. He gets mildly sulky on only two occasions (once over whether the name of the group is any good and then again when the conversation drifts perilously close to his brother).

But then he’s back in an instant. His trains of thought are still legendary, his sense of pride in his work, both defiant and modest.

He talks like a man who has nothing to prove, but at the same time still wants/needs something to invest his graft and his love in.

Coincidentally, BE are in the same rehearsal complex where the KAISER CHIEFS did a few days the other week. I know this because a) Gallagher listed all the other recent residents “McFly, Feeder….UB40…they stank the place out” and b) because the following day I was chairing a session with the Kaisers at Abbey Road studios as part of BBC Introducing’s Masterclass day.

Aimed at bringing together musicians from around the country and imbibing them with helpful hints on how to turn their nascent careers into world domination, we were the first act on (at least one of us having just fallen out of bed).