Before you do anything else with your day, you need to listen to this. A new “lost” Oasis album has been released, from the period between their third album, 1997’s Be Here Now, and their fourth, 2000’s Standing on the Shoulder of Giants. Except, of course, it’s fake. It was created by AI – or at least, it’s an AI Liam Gallagher doing its best “hellooooos” and “sun-shiiiines” over a real band. But the eight songs, including Out of My Mind, Coming of Age and Forever, are practically indistinguishable from the real thing, with some seriously catchy melodies that give every post-What’s the Story album – not to mention the whole of Liam and Noel’s solo catalogues – a run for their money. So who made it? How do you get a computer to sing like Liam? And why would you want to?
“We just got bored waiting for Oasis to re-form,” says Bobby Geraghty, a 32-year-old singer, songwriter and producer. “All we have now is Liam and his brother trying to outdo each other. But that isn’t Oasis. So we got an AI-modelled Liam to step in on some tunes that were originally written for a short-lived but much-loved band called Breezer.”
Chris Woodgates, the 31-year-old guitarist and lyricist with Breezer, adds: “We’ve been together for over 10 years, wrote a few tunes back in 2013, but parked them and moved on. Over lockdown, we thought we should try to do something with them, so we released a couple of songs – Alive and Forever – that got a bit of traction, but it soon petered out. Then Bobby had the mad idea to stick in Liam as the singer.”
So how do you turn the world’s most charismatic frontman into a computer code? Do you just upload the entire Oasis back catalogue? “Sort of,” says Geraghty, explaining how he cut up various a cappella recordings of Liam to train his AI one. “Obviously, our band sounded exactly like Oasis. So then all I had to do was replace my vocals with Liam’s.”
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The results are billed as The Lost Tapes Volume One and credited to AIsis. Essentially, it’s a 33-minute concept album imagining what might have emerged had Oasis’s classic 1995-97 lineup continued to write music. “We originally had the idea to put it out as a lost Oasis tape,” says Jon Claire, Breezer’s 38-year-old drummer, but in the end they decided to reveal themselves. “We’re actually a bunch of normal guys,” he adds.
Judging by the overwhelmingly positive reviews posted below the video on YouTube – “It’s like I’m a kid again listening to new Oasis stuff!”, “A biblical piece of work!” – the project seems to have pleased the Oasis community. Says Claire: “We just wanted to give people a bit of nostalgia; a what-might-have-been, because we never really got any closure from Oasis. They just got worse and worse over the years, didn’t they?”
Although their Liam is fake, the songs are genuine. The music and lyrics are all Breezer’s. Could an AI one day take up writing Oasis tunes, I ask? “I don’t think that’s possible yet,” says Geraghty. “AI is still very much controlled by the user. You need to feed it exactly what it needs to replicate. I don’t think it’s at the point where AI could write a song. Although, having said that, a lot of people have asked if the music was AI generated, which it’s not.”
“I think,” adds Woodgates, “what’s more interesting is the idea of humans collaborating with AI, resurrecting artists who are dead.”
“We’ve brought a band back from the dead!” says Claire. “And I think that’s something we’ll see a lot more of.”
But what about the lyrics? Couldn’t ChatGPT knock out an entire career’s worth of Noel’s how-now-brown-cow lyrics in just a few nanoseconds? “Maybe!” says Geraghty. Liam aside, the most staggering thing about the AIsis album is just how like Oasis it sounds. “When we were teenagers,” says Geraghty, “Oasis weren’t around any more, so we felt we’d missed out on this incredible music, like Nirvana, Oasis, the Verve. We honed our writing, playing and vocal delivery on that era.”
Why, I ask, is there no Noel on vocals? Could an album of B-sides with an AI Gallagher Sr be next? “You could do the Noel stuff,” says Geraghty, “but he’s not the singer of Oasis.” Claire adds: “It’s the Liam songs everyone loves. They’re the anthems. I think it’s quite obvious we’re Camp Liam here.”
The anthems do have an authentic Oasis/Gallagher feel. If Liam was to release the AIsis version of Forever, it would be the best solo material he’s ever released. Could the album’s success tempt Breezer back out on tour? Either as themselves with Geraghty on vocals or, better still, as AIsis with a virtual Liam? “We’d rather work with Liam on his actual stuff and make it decent, in the nicest way possible,” says Geraghty.
AI is certainly becoming a hot issue in pop with Heart on My Sleeve, a song featuring AI-generated vocals purporting to be Drake and the Weeknd, being pulled from streaming services after going viral over the weekend. But what do Breezer think Liam would make of his AIsis counterpart? “He’d absolutely hate it because it’s not him,” says Geraghty. “Or maybe he’d love it? Who knows?” – Guardian
