Liam Gallagher Insists Beady Eye Aren't 'Crap' Without Brother Noel

There was never any question the other members of Oasis would carry on when Noel Gallagher quit at the end of August 2009. In fact, they were working on demos of new songs within two weeks for the band they eventually named Beady Eye.

"It had to be done," singer Liam Gallagher tells Spinner. "This is what we do -- we make music. We're not getting any younger, so all that having time off, two years off -- what for? Ridiculous. You only get in the way anyway. There's music to be made, there's no point in talking about it. We're doing it."

Gallagher and Oasis mates Andy Bell, Gem Archer and touring drummer Chris Sharrock (now a full-fledged member of Beady Eye) spent the fall of 2009 writing and rehearsing songs. A six-week stint last spring recording in London with producer Steve Lillywhite yielded Beady Eye's debut, 'Different Gear, Still Speeding.'

Some of the songs were already under way in the last days of Oasis -- "They hadn't been rejected by the little fellow," Gallagher cracks, referring to Noel -- though the Beady Eye musicians say they followed no template in completing them after Oasis broke up.

"I wouldn't say we wrote the songs trying to get away from Oasis or trying to get more like Oasis, it was just writing songs, trying to do it as naturally as possible," Bell says. "You can't really win if you're trying to please other people, or trying to force your sound a certain way. You're going to end up chasing your tail."

Although Beady Eye is in some ways the successor to one of the biggest bands of the past 20 years, the musicians say they felt so little pressure that it took them months to think of what to call the new group.

"We didn't even have a name until we had finished the album," Bell says. "We had got in there very quiet, very under the radar. We didn't have much press buzzing around us, and if there was press, it was saying how s--- it was going to be. It wasn't really a lot of expectations on our Beady Eye band."

With the album out, Gallagher says there's already plenty of good will toward the new music -- as there should be, in his view.

"We're a good band. You just don't go crap overnight because someone goes walkabout," Gallagher says. "We're in it as much as Noel Gallagher is. We all know what we're doing -- we've been in this game a long time. If people think we don't know what we're doing, I pity them."

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