Liam Gallagher John Squire, however, is very much in one of Britpop's key registers: cocksure optimism. Almost front to back it is tuneful, guitar-driven pop-rock, which wouldn't have sounded out of place in 1995. The album derives at least some of its power from nostalgia for that golden age, and the masterstroke of enlisting Britpop’s Lad King Liam Gallagher for vocal duties capitalised on it. The album cover’s gaudy pop art collage of everyday shopping items, from chocolate bars to an AA battery, captures the throwaway levity of much of the album’s lyrics. ‘You should have fucked me when you had the chance’, Liam Gallagher sings on ‘One Day at a Time’, sounding like someone making a quip between gassy beer burps.

In person Squire is probably the least expressive man in pop: he hasn’t moved a facial muscle since the eighties and his speaking voice has remained a staggeringly inexpressive murmur throughout the intervening decades. Yet he has still always somehow managed to create a forcefield of Manchester boy cool around him, producing jangle pop riffs as good as any written by the Byrds and blues licks Jimmy Page would have been proud of. Squire festooned the Stone Roses’ legendary debut album with melodic guitar solos, which were as hummable as the vocal melodies. But here the everywhere-all-at-once guitar work is heavier and rawer. There might be relatively little providing the sugar rush of the Seahorses’ ‘Love is the Law’ riff, or any solos as achingly perfect as those on the Stone Roses' debut, but it adds plenty of texture and mood.

One of the few detours from the Britpop aesthetic is the partial blues of ‘I'm a Wheel’, which sounds as sparse and raw as John Lennon's ‘Yer Blues’. Then, almost as if the song cannot deliver on its premise, it morphs into a melodic refrain of a piece with the rest of the album. Alongside the progressive folk suggested in the opening bars of ‘One Day at a Time’, it feels like a missed opportunity to broaden the album’s musical palette. There are one or two other near misses. It takes a rare talent to turn middle-age ennui or contentment into engaging art. Now in his 60s, John Squire doesn't quite manage it on ‘I’m So Bored’, a midlife whinge disguised as borderline punk rock. One of the album’s best tunes ‘Mother Nature's Song’ might reference the Beatles’ ‘Mother Nature’s Son’, but Liam Gallagher sounds like a middle-age man sitting in his garden with a nice cup of tea, enjoying a spot of clement weather.

When asked what the Stone Roses’ plans were when they reformed in 2011, Ian Brown answered with characteristic bombast: ‘Our plans are to take over the world’. It was a reminder of their entirely justifiable belief in their own extraordinary talent. True, this would have been a better album in the hands of the Roses, but then it probably wouldn't ever have been finished, had these songs been left to them. There would have been rumours and hearsay, blog post headlines and shaky iPhone footage on YouTube suggesting something was happening somewhere on the distant horizon – tantalising but ungraspable: just another rainbow. But those days of shit-show media rodeos promising another Stone Roses album are over. Instead, we have ten new John Squire songs; Squire’s and Gallagher’s conjoined silhouette against the dying sun of the 1990s – that guitar and that voice. It is more than enough to make you reach forward and turn the volume up.