After The Stones Roses's reunion faded out with no new album in 2017, guitar fans wondered if we'd see John Squire onstage and record with a Strat or Les Paul ever again. He didn't have seem to have plans for that himself, until an accident that threatened his ability to use his hand again changed his mind.
Playing basketball one day in 2020 with one of his six children, Squire fell and broke his right wrist, also causing serious damage to his thumb. "It did panic me,” he tells the Guardian. “There was a question mark over whether I would get full use of it back.”
The hours of physiotherapy and guitar playing gradually got him back to where he was before, but also reawakened a musical creativity that's now bearing fruit with his new music alongside vocalist Liam Gallagher.
“I’m still a sucker for a key change, a chord change, a choice lyric,” he adds. “If I can make that happen it’s really exciting.”
With a 10-track album already in the bag, and first single Just Another Rainbow in the wild, Squire is already eyeing his second album with Liam, that he's tantalisingly describing as, "The guitar fights back."
So is this a case of making up for lost time as a guitarist and songwriter after the years Squire has spent between stints with the Roses, Seahorses and solo albums? He's sanguine about that.
“There’d be a trade-off," he tells the Guardian. "I might not be married. I might not have as many children, and I might not have seen as much of them. I don’t feel like I’ve massively fucked up.”
