Noel Gallagher Does Look Back

I WENT TO DINNER with Noel Gallgher one night in April of 2009. An Italian restaurant as I recall, though it might also have been Spanish, in Primrose Hill, North London. An upstairs room set aside for just the two of us and where we sat, and ate, and talked for the better part of three hours.

As I always found him to be, Noel was impressive. Fiercely bright, stand-up comic kind of funny, never once dodged a question. His answers were thoughtful, expansive, peppered with laugh-out-loud observations, brother Liam most commonly being the subject of his skewering.

It was six months after Oasis had released their seventh album, Dig Out Your Soul. A solid enough if unspectacular collection, save for one track, ‘Falling Down’, a psych-rock showpiece and among Noel’s best songs. Within four more, Oasis would have split up, and after an explosive altercation between the two brothers backstage at the Rock en Seine Festival outside of Paris.

A good half of our interview was taken up with Noel expressing his frustrations at Liam’s behaviour, how he’d bailed from the Dig Out Your Soul sessions prematurely, left the job unfinished. He told me then he was intent upon taking an extended break from being in the band, sooner rather than later. The rest we know, and so here is the meat of the other stuff he talked about that evening. His accounting of Oasis’ golden era, from humble beginnings up to Knebworth and the hubristic fallout just beyond.

It is Noel Gallagher unabridged and, possibly, as you won’t have heard him before…

“Liam’s the angriest man you’ll ever meet. He’s like a man with a fork in a world of soup.”

What’s your first vivid memory?

“Of having a big Irish family. I’ve got two brothers, but I must have a thousand cousins. My mother’s got seven sisters and each of them was possibly the most fertile woman in Ireland. They’ve all got at least three kids. We were in Ireland for six weeks in the summer and three at Christmas. My uncles own farms. I remember running around farms and going fishing.”

Can you describe the environment you grew up in?

“We lived on a cobbled-stone street. Our house was a real Billy Liar gaff. We had an outside toilet. It was three-bedroomed. Paul was the eldest of us, so he got his own room. I used to share with Liam. I was a pretty good kid. I got nicked for burglary and robbing the local corner shop, but when you think about what goes on now, they were almost Likely Lads kind of crimes by comparison. Cheeky young scamps nicking cigarettes.

“I was never really interested in school. I loved music and football. I didn’t realise it at the time, but from the late 1970s, going into the ’80s, my parents had started their long journey to divorce. They let us stay out later and later, so we were out of the house till all hours of the night. You’d tend to get into trouble, with the neighbours, or kids from other estates. Liam got into a bit more trouble than I did. It was just a sort of generational step-up. Instead of robbing the local corner shop, him and his mates would be off nicking cars or putting people’s windows in.”

Tell me about your dad.

“He plays a crucial part in all of this. He bought a guitar, and if it wasn’t for that… In hindsight, it seems to me he must have got me mum pregnant and never really wanted to get married. He was a bit of a free spirit. That’s fine. Just have one child, but don’t bring three kids into it. He was violent towards me mum and towards me. But no more violent than my mates’ dads. With the strikes and the Winter of Discontent, those were bleak fucking times. People turned to drink. And when times are hard, who are you going to kick if you haven’t got a dog?

“I bear no malice towards the guy. I feel sorry for him. Not in a patronising way. I bet he feels a bit of a knob now. Because my dad liked nice suits and flash cars. He could have been rolling in it now. Me mum’s the opposite. All she wanted was the quiet life. I think it all hit Liam harder than me. He had a different relationship with my old fella. He was like the golden child. When it all came crashing in… I still don’t think he’s dealt with it, because I’ve never met someone who has so much adoration and yet he’s the angriest man you’ll ever meet. Liam’s like a man with a fork in a world of soup.”

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Where precisely did your interest in music spring from?
“It was an Irish thing. There was no telly in my grandma’s house in Ireland, so they used to listen to the radio. My old fella was also a country and western DJ, so that was my first exposure to music. Then Irish rebel songs. They all seemed to me to be fist-pumping anthems of pride and loss and yearning for something else. It’s no coincidence that passed over into the first Oasis record.

“My dad had a massive record collection and he’d DJ at weekends. He used to make me carry his gear into the pubs. I also had my old fella’s guitar, and I started off playing Joy Division bass lines on one string. Then The Smiths were the first band where I was there from the beginning.”

At what point did you start writing songs of your own?

“At 15, but I didn’t really take it seriously. It was ludicrous to think that anyone from our council estate could go on to be a pop star. This was before Manchester ‘happened’. There was just The Smiths, and you could never aspire to be one of the main protagonists in The Smiths. You can’t be Morrissey – he’s an outrageous character. If you wanted to be a guitarist, you couldn’t be as good as Johnny Marr. It wasn’t until Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses came along that I went, ‘I could do that.’ That gave me the impetus to get going.”

You became a roadie for another local band, Inspiral Carpets…

“I met Graham (Lambert, Inspirals’ guitarist). It was my 21^st birthday, a Stone Roses gig at the International 2 in Manchester. I was stood in the balcony while the Roses were on, and I saw a little red light like that [nods at my recorder]... It was Graham and he was bootlegging the gig. After the gig, I tapped him on the shoulder and asked him if he’d send me a copy.

“We got to chatting and he told me the Carpets’ singer had just left. He asked me to come and have a practise with them. I had to get three buses to where they rehearsed at this old mill up in Oldham. It might as well have been the other end of the world to me. We did a few tunes, a version of the Stones’ ‘Gimme Shelter’, but I’d only learnt to sing in the previous five years. It was a bit ropey. Anyway, Graham gave me a lift back to the bus stop and asked me if I’d fancy going on tour with them and looking after his gear.

“I did that for three or four years from 1987. It was unbelievable. There were drugs everywhere, birds everywhere. I went to Russia, South America, Japan, America. On £300 a week.”

“You’ve got to have a work ethic. Work isn’t a chore. It frees the mind.”

At what point did Liam form a band of his own, Rain?

“I was in Munich with the Inspirals. I called me mum and asked what our kid was up to and she said, ‘Oh, he’s singing in a band with Paul McGuigan and Bonehead.’ ‘Singing?! He can’t sing. What does McGuigan play, the dopey cunt? And is Bonehead still bald?’ They had a drum machine, and then they got in Tony McCarroll. I went to their first gig at the Boardwalk, a local band night. They were alright, I thought.

“They came out afterwards and asked me if I could get them some gigs, because I knew loads of people through the Inspirals. Then they asked me to be their manager, which I found hilarious. Anyway, it transpired they were rehearsing once a week on a Sunday afternoon. That’s how serious they were. It was at a place called the Red House, which to get to they’d have to pass my flat. I’d an electric guitar at home, and one afternoon they called and asked me to come and have a jam with them.”

What did you play together that first time?

“An instrumental version of ‘Columbia’ I’d had lying around for ages. Two weeks later, we had my first gig with them at the Boardwalk. I’d never played guitar standing up in my life. I didn’t even have a guitar strap. I literally had to re-learn everything.

“I never walked in and said, ‘I am now writing all the songs. You must bow to my vision.’ Liam and Bonehead were writing together. It was more a case of them asking me for more and more songs, because they thought mine were fucking brilliant. And mine were better than theirs.”

How did you progress from there?

“We moved to the Boardwalk for rehearsals, five days a week, 9am till 11pm, and if you’re not there, you’re out. For those two years before I wrote the first album, it was like, ‘This is it. This is our chance.’ You’ve got to have a work ethic. Work isn’t a chore. It frees the mind. Me mum worked two jobs. My dad was a grafter. That whole Irish background, they’re all grafters and workers. It’s instilled into you from pretty early on that you don’t get nothing for nothing.”

Give me a snapshot of the making of Definitely Maybe.

“It was not a fun time, because we made it three times before we got the record we wanted. What did my head in was other people were always saying it was nowhere near as good as we sounded live, but I had no idea what we sounded like live. I didn’t know what they were talking about. It wasn’t until Owen Morris got his hands on it and mixed it that everyone went, ‘Oh, wow.’

“There was also the realisation that Tony was going to play on this one record and that was going to be it. I’d already written not just a rough sketch, but pretty much what …Morning Glory was going to be like. I’d written the drum fill on ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’, and Tony couldn’t even play in a straight line. They were fun times, too, but it was hard graft and too many people were sticking their oar in. It was no coincidence that after that, I never let anybody take control of anything.”

“I knew we were in the greatest band in the world, and these idiots were going to piss it up the wall.” - on the first night of the first US tour

The first US tour was eventful?

“We’d gone straight to America from Japan, crossed the international dateline. So Liam had two birthdays. One in Tokyo the night before we flew, and we got banned from the hotel. Absolutely, one of the maddest nights of all-time. We got pissed on the plane all the way to LA and it was his birthday again, still the same day.

“The night before the first gig at the Whiskey, the rest of them all went out. Some of them did crystal meth, which is worse than crack. We get on stage, and we’d been billed as ‘the hot new thing from England’, and we were fucking appalling. I was starting ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’, and someone else was going into a totally different song. Liam sang the wrong words to ‘Live Forever’. I knew we were in the greatest band in the world, and these idiots were going to piss it up the wall.

“I was furious. Still am to this day. We had a massive fight afterwards and I went back to the hotel. In the middle of the night, I got the tour manager out of bed and took the tour float and my passport off her, and a big bag of Charlie. I went to the airport... I’d met this girl who lived in San Francisco, Amy. I had her phone number, called her and told her I was coming. It seemed like the right thing to do, Jack Kerouac and all that.

“It was only when I got to LAX that I realised I was turning up for a plane with $4,000 and a big bag of cocaine. I was in sunglasses, a leather jacket, and flares. Of course, it’s before mobile phones, so no-one knew where I was. I turned up at Amy’s gaff, got drunk and ranted, and she talked me down off the ledge. She made sure I ate. She’s the girl in ‘Talk Tonite’. All those lines are real. I was there for about a week, before they traced my telephone calls from the hotel and found her phone number. They called every day and were threatening her with calling the police.”

“We made that record (…Morning Glory) in 12 days. Twelve days. Sonically, to my ears now, it’s an embarrassment.”

What’s it like to experience first-hand a phenomenon on the sheer scale of (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?

“It was probably the least anticipated second album of all time. Nobody gave a fuck. I only now get what it was all about. If I’d thought at the time 18 million people were going to buy it, I’d still be fucking about with it. I certainly wouldn’t have done as many drugs as we did. Or put ‘Bonehead’s Bank Holiday’ on the vinyl.

“We made that record in 12 days. Twelve days. Sonically, to my ears now, it’s an embarrassment. They were just demos. We were in and out the studio, because we were still on tour. I don’t remember anything about the sessions.”

Does Knebworth seem such a heady peak point to you even now?

“I miss those years of the band up until Knebworth. I don’t want to re-live them – I’ve done it once – but I look back, and everything up to that point was fucking brilliant. After that was when the phone calls came to be about sales figures. Be Here Now was all about the sales. You know, ‘The fastest selling this, that, and the other.’

“If you think about it, everything was crystallised into three years. It was a beautiful madness. Every day was different. I don’t even remember getting a hangover, not once. I down a pint of Guinness now and I get a fucking headache. When we played at Knebworth, I still didn’t own my own house. I was renting a place. Admittedly, it was a nice fucking house... I didn’t feel like a rock star then. I had butterflies all the time. We flew into Knebworth in a helicopter and we were all wearing Adidas trainers. Still a bit unprofessional.”

To what extent did that huge amount of success change you personally?

“My initial reaction is to say it didn’t. But I can’t be so arrogant as to say that going from a council estate to Knebworth had no effect. It’s got to change you in some way. Even if it’s just your outlook on what clothes you can afford. I think once Bonehead and Guigsy became millionaires, they wanted out. I don’t believe that they felt they were good enough to be in a band that big.”

How do you appraise the period after Knebworth through Be Here Now?

“We went mad. I didn’t give a fuck about being cool or reserved about it, someone had let me loose in the sweet shop. I was just going to enjoy it for all it was worth. I think that’s why people have loved us from the start. Given the circumstances, you’d have done the same.

“That being said, we should have let Morning Glory and Knebworth settle, and fade into the distance. Instead, we went straight back in the studio because I’d already written the third album. We shouldn’t have made that record. You have to accept there’s a moment in time when you’re ‘it’, you’re the news, but then it moves on. You have to let it go. There’s no point in chasing it.”

“See, Liam, ultimately in his heart of hearts, thinks he’s unworthy of it so he tries to destroy it. It’s raging fucking insecurity.

Is there anything you didn’t do that you could have done?

“We could have smashed it in America. You are not telling me that Coldplay and U2 are better than we were musically? Never. What they had that we didn’t was Chris Martin and Bono. We blew it over there. The day after Liam had a big dribble of spit coming out of his mouth at the MTV Awards, our record company in America virtually said goodbye to us.

“Up to that point, we’d sold four million albums in America, more than we had in England. We had it right there. It’s a big regret for me, because we could have been bigger than the Beatles over there, I know we could. See, Liam, ultimately in his heart of hearts, thinks he’s unworthy of it so he tries to destroy it. It’s raging fucking insecurity. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut, stand at the back, and leave the rest to me. There’s no need for spitting… No, no, that’s not what I was brought up on.”

And what, ultimately, were Oasis all about back then?

“We had something indefinable. Literally, we changed people’s lives.”