The Grounding Process EP

Andy Bell

November 4, 2022

Alternative / Electronic / Folk / Shoegaze

On my debut solo album ‘The View From Halfway Down’ I did all of my promotion via Zoom and pre-recorded interviews and acoustic sessions. I enjoyed making the acoustic versions and decided to do some more for this album. ‘Something Like Love’ is the most popular song from ‘Flicker’ and one of the oldest, starting life in the ’90s. It’s probably the only one that dates back to the Ride era. The riffs for ‘World Of Echo’ were written while I was on tour with Oasis, at the height of my La’s obsession. It went through a few iterations from then onwards, but never had a final melody until last year. ‘She Calls The Tune’ was the first song I wrote after I joined Oasis, ending a period of writers’ block which I had started going through some time in 1999. The ’90s had caught up with me, and I ended up moving to Sweden, seriously considering leaving music behind and becoming a full-time dad. Then a quite random series of events happened, and I ended up being invited to join Oasis, which lifted me right out of the doldrums and gave me a brand-new lease of life. The song is all about getting over writers’ block! Its very first performance was to an audience of Liam Gallagher, Gem Archer and Richard Ashcroft in a Milan hotel room on tour. No pressure! I don’t think I ever saw this as an Oasis song, it’s very introspective, but I have them to thank for the fact that I was able to write songs again at all. ‘Lifeline’ was another riff I came up with while on tour with Oasis and another riff which had to wait a decade or two for a song to fit. I remember being on an Oasis UK tour with Shack, and sitting around backstage somewhere, on acoustics with Mick and John Head jamming around the Simon & Garfunkel version of ‘Scarborough Fair’, to which Noel said, “We need one of those, Andy B!” It was around this time I picked up the nickname ‘Spider-fingers’ because I was always working out these kinds of tunes on guitar. The riff for ‘Lifeline’ followed soon after, along with the one from [Beady Eye’s] ‘Girls In Uniform’. It was always called ‘Lifeline’ but I never found the right lyric for it until very recently. ‘Love Is The Frequency’ is a riff I came up with around the same time as ‘Millionaire’ – late Oasis / early Beady Eye-era. Again, I never had the melody at that time. You can hear the influence of The La’s in this song for sure, but maybe more so The Coral and their sound on the album version. It’s a bit of a sea shanty.