Former Oasis star Andy Bell has announced his debut album, ‘The View From Halfway Down’.
The 49-year-old musician was the bassist in the Britpop group between 1999 until their demise in 2009, and he went on to be in the ‘Wonderwall’ group’s ex-frontman Liam Gallagher’s next band Beady Eye as guitarist, along with the other former members of the band: Chris Sharrock and Gem Archer.
Andy – who is also a member of the rock band Ride – teamed up with his ex-Oasis bandmate Gem on his upcoming record, which is due for release on October 9, as he has engineered the LP.
Andy launched the album with the 60s-inspired psychedelic rock track ‘Love Comes In Waves’ today (11.08.20).
It was the death of music legend David Bowie in 2016 that motivated him to make a solo record and the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent lockdown became the perfect time for him to finally lay it down.
He explained: "I’ve always wanted to make a solo album, I’ve always said I would do it, although I never
imagined it happening like, or sounding like, this one does
"I’d been sitting on this pile of almost finished tracks, along with all the other hundreds of ideas that had fallen by the wayside since I’ve been making music. Lockdown gave me the opportunity to find a way to present it to the world.
"The album is not about songwriting. There aren’t many verses or choruses, because this
album is about sounds, a listening experience."
The title of the album comes from a poem by Alison Tafel from the Netflix series ‘Bojack Horseman’, which is about someone taking their own life and it "really moved" Andy.
He said: "The poem describes someone committing suicide by jumping to their death and the regret
the protagonist experiences when he sees ‘the view from halfway down’. Although, of course, it’s too late to change what’s going to happen.
"I read this poem as having a message of suicide prevention: if you could see the view from halfway down, you would never go through with anything that would end your life. I’ve never been suicidal, but I felt really moved by this brilliant poem when I watched the show during Ride’s US tour in autumn 2019. It’s an incredible message."