As You Were track two: written alone, first sung in a Mayo pub, 2015
Bold sits second on As You Were, Liam Gallagher’s October 2017 solo debut for Warner Bros. He wrote it alone. Producer Dan Grech-Marguerat (with Iain Archer credited additional) keeps the guitars open and the vocal dry, closer to Oasis ballad pace than to the Greg Kurstin singles that bookend other parts of the album. Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs adds guitar, a quiet Beady Eye / Oasis bridge into the solo era.
The song’s public life started early. On 26 July 2015, in JJ Finan’s pub in Charlestown, County Mayo, Gallagher sang an acoustic version on holiday with his brother Paul and son Lennon. A phone video caught a local shouting him on. Two years later the finished track addressed the divorce from Nicole Appleton and the friends who “scarper when the shit hits the fan,” as he told Crack magazine: ticking names off a list of to-dos.
One line, “there’s no love worth chasing yesterday,” nods at Noel Gallagher’s 2015 album Chasing Yesterday without turning the song into a sibling feud track. UK charts placed the cut at No. 60 as a streaming/download entry while “Wall of Glass” took the radio lead. The album title itself replaced an earlier working name: for a while the whole record was going to be called Bold.
Sometimes you’ve got to take a step back and give yourself less of a hard time. The more you’re like [fighting face] all the time, nothing gets done. You’ve gotta just let it be.
(Liam Gallagher on Bold, NME, 2017)
Live, Bold became a mid-set breather on the first solo tours: less sneer than “Greedy Soul”, more room for the lyric to land. In the studio the arrangement refuses decoration; the point is the voice admitting fault without begging for a rewrite of the past.
On As You Were, it is the song that proves Gallagher could write alone after Beady Eye and still sound like himself: blunt, melodic, and done with pretending the list of to-dos was someone else’s job.
