Flick Of The Finger

Album: BE (2013)
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Songfacts®:

  • This trippy rocker was chosen to lead Beady Eye's second album, BE. The central riff comes from "Velvet Building," an Oasis track recorded for a proposed 2004 EP produced by Death In Vegas, before the band scrapped those plans. It was titled such as the song sounded like the Velvet Underground and it kept building. New lyrics were subsequently added, as well as a brass accompaniment. The track was played for the first time on US radio station KCRW on April 7, 2013.
  • The spoken word piece at the end is read by Fonejacker star Kayvan Novak. It is taken from Tariq Ali's book Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography Of The Sixties. Novak told Shortlist magazine said that he was asked to contribute after performing an Oasis track while pretending to be a mouse on his Fonejacker show. "We recorded it round Gem's house and Andy and Liam were there in big fur coats," he explained. "They like the show - the mouse is their favourite. I did a call where I was a mouse calling a talent agency, telling them I was an Oasis tribute act and sang 'She's Electric' down the phone."
  • The video was partly filmed in The Canine working men's club in the Lancashire town of Accrington.
  • Liam Gallagher revealed to NME that the 'BE' album title was not his first choice and he instead wanted to name the album 'Universal Gleam' but was outvoted by his band and label. "[The title] is nothing to do with me," said the Beady Eye frontman. "I wanted to call it 'Universal Gleam'. But at [record label], Columbia, a lot of people got their knickers in a twist, putting out a record called 'Universal Gleam' when we're not on [the label] Universal. So yeah, it's 'BE'. 'BE'. 'BE' who you are. 'BE' whatever you fu--ing want to be. 'BE'. Fu--ing bumble-'BE'. I find that a bit more hippy-ish than fu--ing 'Universal Gleam'.

    Gallagher added: "'Universal Gleam' was when John [Lennon] and George [Harrison] met up with [Beatles publicist] Derek Taylor when Brian Epstein died. They went to meet him and he just said that they had a universal gleam about them. I wanted to call it that, but other people were going, 'No no no', so I went, 'Look, call it what you fu--ing want.'"
  • Kayvan Novak's spoken word piece came from something that guitarist Gem Archer had had on his TV cable box for several years. "It was from a speech by this guy Tariq Ali," he explained to NME. "He's kind of saying, Look, think for yourselves. OK, you've got to defend your corner of the planet but that's a totally different thing to fighting a war. And I suppose that comes from the paranoia of the times, being parents."

    British Pakistani writer, journalist, and filmmaker Tariq Ali has been an influential hard left poltical figure since the 1960s. His public profile began to grow during the Vietnam War, when he engaged in debates against the conflict with such figures as Henry Kissinger.
    Ali was supposedly the inspiration for both the Rolling Stones' "Street Fighting Man" and John Lennon's "Power to the People."
  • This song, along with the rest of the album, was produced by TV On The Radio's Dave Sitek. Liam Gallagher admitted to The Quietus that he'd never heard of Sitek before he turned up at their studio to man the boards: "I didn't listen to any of Dave Sitek's stuff before we went into the studio," he said. "As much as people like to think that Beady Eye are stuck in a rut, we're not. We like to take chances and this manager guy goes, 'look, you don't want to go with a run of the mill [producer], you want something a little bit leftfield and I think it might work.' If it didn't work then we might have gone back and started again. I thought that by hearing his music I might have been put off so I just went with the flow, man. I just said, 'f--k it. We start at 12 on Monday 'and I knocked on the door, he opened it and went, 'I'm Dave' and I went, 'I'm Liam' and we cracked on. He'd already started work on 'Flick Of The Finger' and we went, 'whoah! I like that, man!'"

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