An accidental stop on Strings of Life
Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds released AKA… What a Life! as the second single from the debut album on 9 September 2011, and it did not start as a dance record. Gallagher said it began as an acoustic shuffle he linked to the Kinks. One afternoon he landed, by accident, on Strings of Life by Rhythm Is Rhythm, Derrick May’s 1987 house track, and stopped at the piano in the intro. He got the guitar back out, decided the figure would fit, and cut a demo with a bass drum and that piano. He thought it was disco and was not sure he could dance to it. He kept it. Between 1987 and 1990 he had been at the Haçienda in Manchester, and he still liked acid house. The piano was the proof that the song could carry a different pulse.
Dave Sardy produced the track, the same producer who had worked Oasis records and who mixed this album at Hillside Manor in Los Angeles. Album sessions had started in February 2010 at State of the Ark in Twickenham with Paul Stacey and Jeremy Stacey. Sour Mash put the download out on 9 September. The CD and 7-inch, with B-side Let the Lord Shine a Light on Me, followed on 17 October, the same day as Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, which entered the UK album chart at number one. The single peaked at number 20 on 24 September, number 15 in Scotland, and number two on the UK indie chart. It spent twelve weeks on the main singles chart. The UK year-end list placed it at 172.
Mike Bruce directed the video. The band posted it in early October 2011, and it shares props with the rest of the Ride the Tiger trilogy: the same women and the “Soulsucker” camera that turn up in the other films. On Radio 2, Gallagher and Matt Morgan sat in for Dermot O’Leary and Noel played an acoustic version on air. The first band show, at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre on 23 October, was already sold out while the single was still new. At the HMV Forum in London a couple of weeks later, the crowd sang the chorus back even when the keyboards sat lower in the live mix than on the record.
One afternoon I was listening, not on purpose I might add, but completely by accident, to Strings of Life by a band called Rhythm Is Rhythm. I stopped at the piano bit at the song’s beginning and thought, how can something like that bit fit in my song?
(Noel Gallagher, on the song, 2011)
The demo later issued on the International Magic bonus CD is titled Ride the Tiger a.k.a. What a Life!, which is where the film got its name. On the O2 tape from 26 February 2012 the song is already a set-list lock, slotted between the new album and the Oasis songs he was still playing. Chart position was modest next to the album’s number one. On the record itself this is the moment the debut stops sounding like a pile of songs he could have given Oasis and starts using a four-on-the-floor pulse under a straightforward chorus.
Later High Flying Birds records, especially Who Built the Moon? with David Holmes in 2017, pushed the dance idea further. AKA… What a Life! is the first clear step: a Manchester house memory bolted to a song he had started on acoustic guitar. The chorus is simple on purpose. The piano is the decision that lets the rest of the solo career leave the stadium template when it wants to.
