RECALL PAUL Newsome milling around Royton with his guitar way back in the mid-eighties as I walked home from school. I must have had detention. He also had really great hair.
Our paths only crossed on the train many years later, me heading home from town; him heading into it. He still had really great hair. His band, Proud Mary, should have been right up my street, but something in the rhythm sounded a little stiff. That is unforgivable for a bar-room-boogie rock band. I was never sure if the culprit was Greg’s Americanised vocal delivery or the band's chemistry itself, but either way, it left me a little cold.
They famously blamed ill-timed assistance from Noel Gallagher for their failure to launch, but in truth, they were less than the sum of their parts, sounding more like highly competent session players than a living, breathing rock band.
Paul’s solo effort, Electric and Palms, was a far better-crafted affair. Replete with Elvis’s legendary backing singers, The Sweet Inspirations, it showcased a more restrained palette that swapped derivative rock and roll for genuine soul. Yet, it still sounds self-consciously cosmic in all the wrong places. Ironically, it is exactly the album Gallagher has spent the last two decades striving to make. The last time I saw Paul, he was enthusing about his new life in LA while I was busy talking up British jazz. The lucky bastard still had really great hair.
The Ya Ya’s, Paul’s first outfit, should have been his breakthrough but remained a strictly local phenomenon, and by local, I mean confined to Royton and Oldham's Roscoe Street. Their prophetic seven-inch single is getting scarce now. On it, the slight stiffness in his vocal delivery is instantly forgivable, wrapped as it is in that casual indie-pop charm. Crucially, his brother’s backing vocals do the heavy lifting, elevating what is otherwise a fairly pedestrian track into something well worth spinning.
Far too many musical careers sound infinitely better when played in reverse, making it tempting to ignore everything after a debut single.
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