When Oasis formed in Manchester, England, the Britpop band’s shaggy-haired, parka-swathed, simian-faced frontman, Liam Gallagher, was just 19. Now, a quarter-century later, the 44-year-old’s signature bowl-cut, baggy streetwear, and sullen pout remain, but he finds himself without a band for the first time in his adult life.

“I still want to be in a band. Bands are where it’s at,” he admits, a bit pensively, sitting with Yahoo Music in an L.A. hotel room as he promotes his first official solo album, As You Were, out Oct. 6.

Liam wasn’t always band-less. After Oasis broke up in 2009, following an explosive backstage altercation between famously feuding Gallagher brothers Liam and Noel at the Paris Rock en Seine festival, he wasted no time in forming Beady Eye with all of the members of Oasis not named Noel Gallagher. “It was like all that s*** was going on with Oasis, and I just wanted to stay out on the road,” he explains. “I wanted to stay with my mates that was in Oasis. So we carried it on, really. It’s nice to be in a bubble when the s*** is hitting the fan. So I guess that’s what happened. And then when [Beady Eye] ended, that’s when the s*** hit the fan — with me having no band after 20 years. That’s when it all went a bit dark, as you say.”

There is a certain darkness that permeates Yahoo’s conversation with Liam. Yes, he’s often hilarious, dropping F-bombs in practically every sentence and cracking snarky jokes about Paul McCartney, Bono, and Simon Cowell. (Regarding the latter: When asked if he’d ever judge The X Factor — a £2 million job that Noel turned down a few years back — Liam expresses surprise that his “star-f***er” brother actually rejected the show, then says, “I’d end up f***ing elbowing Cowell in the face. … I know I would be good — I am good on TV, man, I’d be amazing — but I think there’d be a bit of violence going down.”) Yet through it all, Liam appears cagey, weary.

When asked about the Oasis split, which seemed so abrupt after years of the beleaguered group somehow sticking together through countless other tabloid-fodder blowouts, he retorts, “Oh, it was very ‘sudden,’ but it was very planned out. Oh yeah, it was one of the masterminds, man. Like Noel and his management, they definitely planned it. I got left with the s*** sandwich. So that’s the only problem I’ve got with [Noel]; other than that, I think he’s great, he’s a top person, and I love him dearly, but he f***ing threw me under the bus and so did the management team that I was with for 20 years. … Basically like, he wanted to go do a solo career, it was planned out for a long time, and he set a few booby traps for yours truly. And I walked right into ‘em. It’s very sad, isn’t it?”

Sad indeed. However, when Beady Eye called it quits in 2013, fans’ hopes for an Oasis comeback sprung anew. But despite his earlier declaration that he misses being in a band, Liam is now focused on his late-in-life solo career, and he flatly says an Oasis reunion “ain’t happening. … Everyone thinks that [Noel and I] are kind of making this little master plan together, but me and him f***ing hate each other. As sad as it is, that’s the way it is. He’s that side of the coin, and I’m that side of the coin. So we have to get back to liking each other as brothers before we start thinking about making music [together]. And that might never happen.”

At least Oasis fans will get a double dose of Gallagher music this fall, when, oddly, the siblings release albums only a month apart. (Noel’s still-untitled third LP with his band, High Flying Birds, is due in November.) Comparisons are inevitable, but Liam appears unconcerned.

“Oh, mate, I don’t care who releases [music the same time as I do], if it’s the Beatles or the Stones or Jimi Hendrix; I feel confident. It ain’t a competition. I’m sure [Noel’s album] will be great. But he don’t know how to rock like me, man. He might be a good songwriter, but he sings like Dolly Parton.”

When Liam isn’t bashing his brother in various expletive-riddled interviews, he often utilizes Twitter to keep their feud going. “Oh, I’m amazing on it,” he laughs, bragging about his Twitter skills. As for his most notorious Twitter insult — that his brother resembles a certain beige, lumpy vegetable — Liam elaborates, “[Noel] looks like a potato in some pictures. I’ve got a few potatoes in the fridge, in the cupboard, and I look at some of the pictures that he takes — they’re pretty similar.”

Pouting Potato LG x pic.twitter.com/K8y3AOFeYQ

— Liam Gallagher (@liamgallagher) June 29, 2016

The past four artistically dormant years, between the release of Beady Eye’s final album and Liam’s As You Were, have been tough for the younger Gallagher, both professionally and personally. “What was going on? Not a lot, man — just f***ing speaking to lawyers in the morning, speaking to them first thing before you go to bed, then first thing in the morning. I was living in lawyer world, which is terrible for anyone,” he grumbles. (He’s referring to a $3 million child-support suit filed by American journalist Liza Ghorbani over their out-of-wedlock daughter, and a divorce battle with his second wife, All Saints’ Nicole Appleton, that ensued after she learned about the Ghorbani affair.) “So music was like way at the background. I weren’t even thinking about being in a band, weren’t even thinking about music.”

However, Liam asserts, “I knew I wouldn’t be away that long — so four years, I needed it off, man, to be true. I needed a bit of time off to mop up a bit of s***. But now that’s all sorted. I’m ready to go again, man, and make up for them four years that were wasted. … I never lost me confidence. I might have just lost me way a bit, but I never, ever doubted me in front of a microphone. I’m a singer. If you put that microphone in front of me, that microphone’s going to get hurt. So I never, ever doubted my ability to sing a song.”

As You Were sounds, basically, like classic Oasis, with Liam’s unmistakably snarling vocals front-and-center on stellar collaborations with Midas-touched songwriters like Miike Snow’s Andrew Wyatt and Adele/Sia/Kelly Clarkson producer Greg Kurstin. “For What It’s Worth” has the majestic, sweeping quality of “Don’t Look Back in Anger.” “Bold,” the first song Liam wrote when he was emerging from his four-year funk, has the ragged, shuffling acoustic vibe of “Digsy’s Dinner” or “Married With Children.” The driving, dreamy psychedelia of “All I Need and More” could be a lost track from Be Here Now. As for any critics who might bash As You Were for sounding too much like Liam’s past work, he says with a shrug, “Well, what is ‘new music’? Techno is new music — and that’s a pile of s***, innit? Why would I want to go down that road? For me, it’s like food, innit? It’s like your mum’s, your grandma’s recipe. Why change it? If it tastes good, why start f***ing with it? That’s what I see rock ’n’ roll is about: just another batch of songs, done well, sang well, performed well. That’s the way it is. Don’t start mixing it up with all the other nonsense.”

While Liam admits that the friction he had with his brother often resulted in the finest Oasis music — “Oh yeah, without a doubt. I’d never want Oasis getting back together with me and Noel walking onstage holding hands, you know what I mean? It needs a bit of aggro, man. That’s what made our band!” — he now realizes he can conjure that friction on his own. “Ah, it comes from me. I’m the one. I’m still the young man about everything, whether it’s life, or maybe it’s called passion. I still know when we go onstage and that microphone’s there and the guitars are playing, we’ve got to deliver some good stuff,” he proclaims.

And one thing that inspires Liam’s passion these days? “S*** bands, s*** music, other s***,” he answers. “We need s*** music out there, to counteract it. If everyone was great, God, it’d be boring, wouldn’t it? So yeah, bring on the s***ness!”

Liam’s return to the scene, even sans Oasis, has fans looking to him as rock’s one last great hope, the man who can save the flagging rock genre. But Liam, in a rare moment of humility, says, “I don’t think so. I mean, it takes more than one person to sort that out.”

The subject of the state of rock in 2017 gets the singer — who declared, “Tonight, I’m a rock ’n’ roll star” on the first track of Oasis’s debut LP back in ’93, and tells Yahoo, “I’m a rock ’n’ roll star every day, and the day before, and the day after” — almost more fired up than when he’s griping about his estranged sibling. “Rock ’n’ roll is a bit of a bad word in England at the moment,” he sighs. “You say it, and it’s like, ‘What, that thing from 50 years ago?’ It’s never not been cool; it’s always cool in my world, you know what I mean, whether I’m making music or not. … It’s always been good to me, and I’ve never let it down, ever.

“There’s a lot of so called rock ’n’ roll bands — and they know who they are — in England that are banging on about ‘saving rock ’n’ roll,’ and I think they’re wearing guitars like it’s some kind of jewelry. You got to plug the f***ing thing in, man, and turn it up, and make a racket with it! So that’s what we’re doing, or what I’m doing, or what we’re doing, or whatever. So yeah, man, I’m here to sort of shine a light on the fakes. … I think a lot of kids these days don’t even own instruments. … People have got to close the laptops and use it for emails, and pick up an instrument and learn it, and go play it in a s***ty garage with your mates.”

Liam is proud that his recent solo rock ’n’ roll revues, where he’s performed both As You Were songs and Oasis favorites, have drawn enthusiastic fans of all ages. “A lot of young people down there, not many bald heads down the front,” he notes. “Everyone’s got a head of hair down the front, which is good!” And he thinks that’s a sign that the world is ready for the return of real rock. “There’s a lot of young people out there that’s just sick of the bollocks. They’re sick of watered-down rock stars. … I think they’re sick of being entertained, all this fake entertainment. … Come to [my] gig and have a good time, jump up and down, punch your f***ing mate in the face, throw beer on your head, listen to the tunes, and have a release from your daily life.”

On the subject of rock concerts, with coinciding album releases, the two Gallagher brothers will likely be touring around the same time — but Liam isn’t worried about that, either. “If you want to hear Oasis songs done in their true form, come and see me. If you want to hear Dolly Parton versions, go and see [Noel],” he quips.

So, according to Liam, Noel Gallagher sounds like Dolly Parton and looks like a potato? “Yeah, a Dolly Parton potato,” he chuckles softly, getting in the last word and the last laugh. “Dolly Potato.”

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

“Twice, yup,” says Gallagher. “A guy calls me who works at Sony Records; he’s a good friend of mine I’ve known for years and years and years. His office was across the hall from Simon Cowell’s. Simon Cowell knew this guy was a friend of mine, and this guy called me up and he said, ‘Simon Cowell’s asking for your phone number, can I give it to him?’ I said, ‘What does he want it for?’ He said, ‘I have no idea.’ I thought he might want a song for one of the X Factor winners. A couple weeks pass, nothing happens and I’ve forgotten all about it, and then one Sunday afternoon this girl calls and says, ‘I’m Simon Cowell’s assistant, is it OK to call you in about five minutes?’ And he offered me the job to replace him when he first left The X Factor. I think to this day I’m still the only person who ever turned him down.”

(A representative for The X Factor tells Yahoo Music that Gallagher was merely “considered,” and was never formally offered a job on the show.)

Gallagher insists that it “wasn’t for any novel reasons about music, blah blah blah and all that” that he said no to Simon and a reported £2 million salary. “It’s for the simple reason that I don’t want to be on TV every Saturday night. [The X Factor U.K. airs on Saturdays.] I’ve got better things to do. And with being on TV every Saturday night comes the endless promotion to do that. And I don’t want to be a TV star, you know?

“I explained all this to Simon Cowell, and I do like him; I’ve met him on several occasions. And he was being very f—ing insistent that it didn’t matter, we could work around [my schedule], we could do it. I said, ‘Well, I’ve got an album coming out.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about that either.’ I found it mildly amusing for a while and then he said, ‘Well, just think about it and I’ll call you back.’ And I said, ‘I’ve already thought about it, I don’t want to do it,’ and we left it at that.

“But then a year later I got a call, or my management got a call: ‘The album is finished now. Is he in any way interested now?’ But I don’t want to be on TV. Saturday night is for playing with my wife, f—ing getting drunk. It’s my night off.”

Noel Gallagher won’t have many nights off for a while, as he is on tour through July promoting his sophomore album with his band High Flying Birds, Chasing Yesterday. I’m sure he’s got the X factor whenever he’s onstage.

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

Sure, Bell wasn’t in the original, “classic” Oasis lineup, but if he were ever invited to participate in an Oasis reunion, would he? “If I was asked to, I would, yeah, of course. Absolutely. You’d have to hold me down not to,” he answers without hesitation. But Bell isn’t holding his breath. “It’s really a question for Noel and Liam [Gallagher]. If that makes them happy, they should do it, and if they’d rather not, that’s equally fine with me.”

While Ride was never as popular on this side of the pond as Oasis, the band had a devoted cult following, and in many ways Ride appealed to a similar audience. “It’s like another version of the same thing, in a way — both rely on guitars. We’re basically guitar bands,” says Bell, though he adds: “The difference I can feel is that we don’t put much showmanship into it. With Ride, we’re tied to our pedalboards; we’re like ‘shoegazers.’ What Oasis had different was this incredible frontman, who had this massive presence onstage: Liam, one of the best frontmen ever. So it gave them a completely different dynamic.”

“But Ride made your fingers bleed the other night!” jokes Gardener (referring to Ride’s sold-out, pre-Coachella warmup show at Los Angeles’s Roxy), as he gestures to Bell’s calloused hands.

Yes, truly, judging from Ride’s Roxy appearance and Coachella weekend one set, the band has lost none of its sonic power since breaking up in 1996. While Ride’s split wasn’t acrimonious like Oasis’s — “It was just a collective crash, I think. We lived in each other’s pockets for years and years. I think it’s very natural that you’re going to hit a point where you just need to become free birds again,” says Gardener — until recently, Gardener and Bell assumed that Ride was never, ever getting back together.

“It just became almost like we couldn’t think of any more reasons not to do it. It felt like we were getting more and more noise of people saying, ‘You guys should do this, this is the right time,’” Bell says of this reunion. “And inside myself, I kind of was starting to feel like that. Maybe since I saw the Stone Roses get back together… they were one of my favorite bands when they were going, and it made me very happy to see them again, so it pushed that little button in me that was like, ‘Maybe we should do this.’”

Adds Gardener: “Naturally a path started to clear… I started to think two or three years ago, after the Roses and My Bloody Valentine [reunited], to seriously think, more than I’d ever felt, that there was sort of unfinished business with Ride. Maybe there wasn’t ever going to be a peace of mind if we didn’t do this.

“I can only sort of say how I was feeling about it, and lots of things trigger that, like death. I lost my dad and things like that,” Gardener continues. “You suddenly start to think that time isn’t forever. So I think for me three years ago, I started to seriously think, ‘I really want to do this again.’”

Both Gardener and Bell are humble and dismissive when asked about Ride’s influence on alt-rock music today. “I don’t know, really,” Bells shrugs. “I hear a lot of music I like, and I can’t tell whether it’s us or whether it’s just people with the same influences, you know? But I think the set of influences that formed our band have stayed in people’s consciousness since the late ’80s. The roots of it is the Beatles and the Stones and the Velvets and the Byrds, but then in the late ’80s there were a lot of really good guitar bands, like Spacemen 3, House of Love, a lot of indie music that had really interesting sounds. I think that influential time certainly pushed us into forming the band in the first place, and I think that music is still making people form bands. So we’re maybe some of the first to be influenced, rather than influencers ourselves. We were just ripping people off at the time. No one was quite sure who was first!”

For now, Gardener, Bell, and Ride’s Laurence Colbert and Steve Queralt are concentrating on playing their old (and, yes, very influential) classics like “Leave Them All Behind,” “Drive Blind,” and “Vapour Trail” before considering recording new material. “I feel like we’ve been sort of loved into existence again. People loved our music to such an extent that we’ve been offered these gigs, and it’s rolling and rolling now, so I want to make sure that we’ve satisfied that love and put it back,” explains Bell. “And then maybe after we’ve finished our tour, then maybe new stuff. I don’t know.”

Until then, it’s best just to enjoy the Ride, so to speak. Ride will play Coachella weekend two this Friday at 5:25 p.m.

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.