In 2009 the final Oasis single, the Noel Gallagher-sung 'Falling Down', was offered to various remixers to do what they wanted with it. Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans, also known as '90's dance superstars The Future Sound Of London, recorded an epic remix of the song, which they turned into a 22-minute mini-album. Despite doubts that perhaps the band only wanted a five-minute remix, Gallagher was so impressed that he released it on its own 12" format. When Noel finally pulled the plug on Oasis in 2009 and went solo, there was the suggestion that he was always itching to expand his musical horizons, and he launched his solo career with a press conference in July 2011, announcing that he'd already recorded his debut album 'Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds' with Dave Sardy, and that he'd also pretty much finished its follow-up, a collaboration with Amorphous Androgynous. Despite their previous success, the new project was almost immediately put in doubt, when industry insider Peter Cornish-Barlow reported that Noel's team weren’t keen on the collaboration, and that no-one other than Noel liked the reworked material that Amorphous Androgynous had done. Later that year, though, Noel was still talking up the record for a 2012 release, saying that the sound was similar to High Flying Birds, but more psychedelic and tripped out. A month on, he was dialling it back, but only a little, saying that he probably shouldn't have announced it, but he thought "It's finished, so fuck it, here's what I've been working on". The first we heard of the collaboration was 'Shoot A Hole In The Sun', a remix of 'If I Had A Gun', which was tacked on to the single 'Dream On' as a b-side, and meanwhile the album was still being spoken about, with Noel suggesting it would finally be ready for 2013.
An Amorphous Androgynous remix of 'AKA... What A Life!' emerged as the b-side of 'Everybody's On The Run' in 2012, but a month later we got the first whispering from Noel that the album itself might be shelved altogether. Because he'd been busy with other things, he hadn't been involved in any of the mixing, and when he heard the mixes he wasn't happy with any of them. After that, everything went pretty quiet for a couple of years, but then Noel suddenly stirred the pot again in early 2015, complaining about the AA mixes of the album, saying that when they delivered the first mix, they'd managed to pull off the trick of recording the quietest CD of all time. Apart from the two remixes that came out as b-sides, the only things Noel salvaged from the sessions were 'The Mexican' and 'The Right Stuff', both of which he reworked for his second album 'Chasing Yesterday'. Having held their peace for most of Noel's various announcements, Amorphous Androgynous finally piped up, saying that "Gallagher still fascinated them, but the only thing holding him back was himself. It's like he became too afraid to be weird". They tried to force Gallagher to write new material, but he dragged his heels and failed to stretch himself, and so the collaboration fell apart. At one point he announced that there would never be a bootleg of the album, as he owns the master, and had destroyed it, but later, in an August 2018 interview, he said that he'd found a copy of the album in his sock drawer. Despite the fact that we'll almost certainly never get to hear the actual album that they recorded together, the tracks that have been released give us an idea of what it might have sounded like, and so by taking those five recordings and compiling them together, we have a 54-minute "album" from Amorphous Androgynous & Noel Gallagher to take the place of that shelved record.
Track listing
01 AKA... What A Life!
02 The Right Stuff
03 Shoot A Hole Into The Sun
04 The Mexican
05 Falling Down (A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble Exploding In Your Brain mix)
