Don’t look back in anger
In his only Irish interview, Noel Gallagher tells Barry Egan about Bono, fatherhood, his mother loving Jeremy Kyle, his youngest son wanting a Lamborghini for his seventh birthday — and why he thinks his brother Liam is ‘not well’
THE caterpillar-on-cocaine eyebrows appear to move to the rhythm of his voice. This is just as well, as Noel Gallagher tells a pretty good story. There’s the one about his world tour with U2 this year, where the hangovers were monstrous. He has a foggy recollection of arriving at Bono’s house, where he was staying, at 5am after the after-show party for the Croke Park show on July 22. The next thing Noel remembers is the phone going like something out of Hitchcock and being in a place that he doesn’t know. It’s the even-more-famous-than-Noel owner of the house on the phone, enquiring after his health: “Oh, you’re alive. Where are you?” Noel was, in fact, in a guest house at the bottom of Bono’s garden.
The U2 lead singer continued: “Everybody’s here waiting for you.” To which a bleary-eyed and slightly bemused Noel said: “What for?’ To which Bono, clearly used to this sort of home entertaining, said: “For the lunch I’m throwing in your honour. The 75 guests have arrived.”
When Noel insisted that he had only just got out of bed, Bono told him that “The President of Ireland’s just arrived and you’re sitting next to him. So hurry up.”
Noel quickly showered, got dressed and rocked up at the quasi-Presidential, quasi-State lunch in his honour at chez Bono. It started at 3pm. It finished at 4.10am.The next day, Noel stirred again in Bono’s palatial guest house at the end of the garden overlooking Killiney Bay. He was supporting U2 in Paris that night and so rang his tour manager to make the necessary arrangements. The conversation can be summed up thus: “Neil, you’ve got to get me out of this place. I can’t do it any more”; “Get your bags, I’ll pick you up at 11.45am.”
Not unlike The Eagles’ Hotel California, Bono’s gaff appears to have a similar aura: once you arrive you are never able to quite leave again. Or so it almost proved for Noel. “As I’m kind of walking,” he was met by Bono “in his dressing gown, with two beers under his arm, eating scrambled eggs, listening to opera...”
“Where you going?” he then asked his guest. Noel answered that he was, in fact, going to Paris to support U2 on The Joshua Tree tour that very night and he needed to catch his plane. Bono would hear none of commercial transport; “Stay here and come on a private jet.”
Later that afternoon, Noel and his host et al get on the private jet, where there was yet more liquid refreshment. Upon landing in the French capital, Bono tells Noel that he has an appointment and that he will see him later at the hotel. Noel thinks to himself that once he’s out of sight, “I’m going straight to rehab, this is too much for me.”
A somewhat worse-for-wear Noel is then driven to his suite at the hotel, whereupon he flops on the bed and orders a hangover-helping bacon sandwich, perhaps relieved that he has escaped Bono’s fiendish libertine clutches for the time being.
Twenty minutes later, Noel almost drops his bacon sandwich when he turns on the television and sees “Bono doing a live press conference with the Prime Minister of France about Africa. And I know what we’ve been up to the previous three days, and I’m going — ‘ He’s not real!’”
A 50-year-old father of three, Noel Thomas David Gallagher is definitely maybe real. John Lennon’s quintessential working-class hero on the dole, he grew up in “the rough arse” part of Manchester, the middle child of Irish Catholic parents Peggy and Thomas Gallagher, to become a spokesperson for his generation with timeless classics like Don’t Look Back in Anger, Wonderwall, Champagne Supernova and Live Forever. His precious ma was one of 11. He has estimated that seven of that 11 all moved to Manchester from Ireland and that they “congregate around a five square-mile area.” Despite having two fabulously wealthy sons (the other one being Noel’s younger brother, Liam), Noel says his mother still lives in the same small council house in the same rough part of Burnage he grew up in. Someone got shot in the face outside her house last year. “My mother doesn’t give a f***!” he laughs in his management’s office in London recently. “As long as Jeremy Kyle’s on, and she’s got tea in the pot! She goes swimming. She goes to the shops, she comes back. She puts her feet up and watches the telly.”
Is it true that all she got was a new gate from Noel? “Yeah! And a new gold number five!”
Would he not give her the publishing rights to Live Forever?
“I bought her the place in Ireland!” he laughs.
Noel lives in leafy Maida Vale with his wife Sara MacDonald (who he married in June, 2011) and their two young sons, Donovan and Sonny, and sometimes his grown-up daughter Anais, by ex-wife Meg Matthews (who he married in 1997, lived with in party central Supernova Heights in North London, before they divorced in 2001), in a well-appointed mansion fit for the king of existential Brit rock.
“I live on the same street as Adam Clayton. Five doors away from him. He came to my house recently, and our cat Boots came walking in. Adam went: ‘So, that’s your cat?’ I asked him, ‘How do you know that cat?’ He said, ‘That cat is always at my f***ing house!’”
“My youngest lad Sonny is seven and he is very funny,” adds Noel, who is not unfunny himself. “His birthday is coming up and he loves Top Gear. I think he is aware that he is a funny lad. I asked him what he wants for his birthday and he went: ‘ Dad, can I have a Lamborghini?’”
“I said to him: ‘A Lamborghini? You’re seven!’ He said, ‘We could keep it for a while’!”
Noel can remember when he first moved out of his parents’ house not being able to afford carpet, and the abject social humiliation of bringing lucky ladies backing to his flat — only for them to muse aloud: “You’ve got no carpet?”
Noel can also remember coming to London for the first time and people having no carpet on the floor and saying to his mother: “You know in London, they don’t have carpet on the floor? What they’ve done is polished the floorboards.” It’s impossible not to warm to Noel Gallagher, or his brilliant new album with his band High Flying Birds, Who Built the Moon? Its imminent arrival next week was given due status with Noel on the cover of the new Q magazine with the headline: The Emperor Strikes Back. He started writing Who Built the Moon? in Belfast in the studio with his co-conspirator David Holmes in 2014. Is it more difficult to write songs when he is no longer in a carpet-less bedsit and instead is flying in private jets — with Bono — with a settled marriage and kids?
“The way my song-writing works, it all depends on the tune. The lyrics were always, always, the last. It’s always about the melody and the tune.”
He seems to always find the melody easy enough, I say.
“It’s a piece of p*ss. Well, I am first generation Irish. We have the music in us. I find the most difficult thing about songwriting is the first line,” says Noel who was, of course, the principal songwriter with a band who sold 75million records and played to millions of fans around the world (Oasis’ two concerts in August 1996 at Knebworth were to over 250,000-plus people.) “If me and David [Holmes] are in the studio,” he adds, “and we hit a wall, we go: ‘What would Bowie do here?’”
Noel once said that his passion had gone with Oasis. How did he get that passion back after he eventually left Oasis in 2009? “I was thinking about this recently. People think, or they might think, that it was the first time that I had hit a creative wall. But I didn’t know what that was, because it had never happened before. In the same way that I didn’t know that Definitely Maybe was a peak because it had never happened before. I started to chase it and when you start to chase it, you start forcing it, and when you start forcing it, it is not natural. I listen back to Be Here Now, not that I listen back to it, I just think, it’s trying too hard. I should have f***ing taken another five years off! It comes back by letting it find you. The one piece of advice [Paul] Weller ever gave me was, ‘Don’t f***ing chase it. If it comes back, great’.”
Did Noel ever think it wasn’t going to come back? He shakes his head. “No.” Was he walking around the house with his wife racked with angst? “No. I’m not that insanely f***ing driven. I actually don’t take other people’s opinions at all, when I’m writing. Because you know what? I f***ing wrote Live Forever and Wonderwall and Don’t Look Back
‘I couldn’t bear the fighting and the shouting with Liam any more. U2 don’t do it because they are big mates...’
in Anger.”
I ask Noel is that enough for him. “It would have been back then. If I never wrote another song from this point onwards, I would genuinely, with my f***ing hand on heart, think: ‘Out of all the people, I f***ing smashed it more than 99pc of the people who write songs. I am up not there with the f***ing greats like Dylan, Springsteen, McCartney — but after that!”
Does he think the first two Oasis albums, Definitely Maybe in 1994 and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? in 1995, were his heyday? “In terms of record sales, clearly, but I think now with this record,” he says, referring to Who Built the Moon?, “I’m at a peak. Some kind of peak. And peaks are only relevant to the troughs, right? So you’re down here one minute and up here the next. So I’m at some f***ing kind of peak. How high that peak is, I don’t know, but it is the first time in my life that I feel that I have come to that conclusion, and how I react to it from here on in is going to be fascinating,” he adds.
His childhood was scarred, owing to the alleged abusiveness of his father, from whom Noel is long since estranged. Did he channel that pain into song-writing?
“They do say there’s something in it, your upbringing. So it must be. But I’ve got to say it has never made it into my songs. Like ‘ my abusive childhood’. I suppose, if anything, it made me when I got the chance and I met Alan McGee [Creation Records boss] and we were going to get this record deal [in 1993], if anything my upbringing led me to realise that you only get one chance, and nobody is going to f*** it up for me.”
“And,” he says, “I am going to do all that I can not to go back and live on the dole. So maybe that. But the parental thing, not really...”
Did Noel worry when he became a dad to Anais, Sunny and Donovan that he didn’t have a role model as a father growing up? “Of course,” he says. I say to Noel that he didn’t instinctively have the tools to be a father.
“Men don’t,” he replies. “Whatever people say about being a dad, women have nine months to get used to this thing growing inside them. So they have accepted it. You get 10 minutes as a guy because you think it is all going to go away and then you wake up and go, ‘No, it’s actually real’. Especially if it is your first one. You don’t know how you are going to react. For some people it is the making of them; for some people it can go f***ing off the rails. I was lucky in a way. I don’t really sit and analyse my role as a dad. My wife thinks I’m an appalling dad. And rightly so. Because I let my kids away with murder.”
I ask him why he walked out on one of the biggest bands in the world — Oasis — on the infamous night of August 28, 2009, in Paris?
“I had had it. I sat in the car for five minutes. There was silence until my security guard’s walkie-talkie was crackling and he said, ‘ Are we staying or going?’ And I said, ‘ We’re going.’ Once I had said those words, I thought , ‘That’s it’. But , you know, I felt I had done enough. I felt that I, personally, had done enough. I felt that this was just going to go around in circles, forever. It is easy to sit there and pick up the cheque, travel in separate aeroplanes, separate dressing rooms, go onstage at opposite sides of the venue, and do the gig. 90pc of those big bands do it. U2 don’t do it because they are big f***ing mates.” With Oasis, he adds, it’s like, “You arrive and you leave separately. And you have written all these joyous f***ing songs.”
Did Noel fear his creativity was being killed by being in Oasis? Or did he fear that he and Liam would kill each other?
“I never fought with Liam at all. Liam was fighting with himself. Right now, he is picking a fight with himself somewhere. I don’t suffer fools in any f***ing sense at all, but I suffered him more than maybe I should have done. I felt maybe, looking back on it, that the stadium rock thing wasn’t me any more. At the time, it wasn’t a musical decision. It was literally a case of I can’t bear the fighting and the shouting and the firing people for no reason.”
Noel once said that he felt Liam’s anger came from the fact that he was doing interviews with the press about songs he hadn’t written (and Noel had written). Noel wrote all the songs. Liam is now writing his own songs but Liam still seems just as angry. “I don’t know where that comes from because we had exactly the same upbringing...”
So it is not, as Liam alleged in the recent documentary Supersonic, that their animosity is all about Liam as a teenager once urinating on Noel’s stereo in his bedroom growing up?
“Who knows what’s inside the mind of a village idiot.”
Most of the things Liam has said about his brother have been pretty juvenile fare. What Liam said about Noel performing at the We Are Manchester benefit in September at Manchester Arena — in response to the 22 innocents murdered on May 22 — went beyond sibling rivalry. On Twitter, Liam dismissed it as a “PR stunt” and claiming his brother “doesn’t give a f***.”
“I will say this — and this is all I will say about it,” Noel says, “I don’t think that he [Liam] is well. I think it says more about him than it does about anything else. I honestly don’t think he is well.”
Does their mother ever get involved? “I was out with her, in Manchester, a couple of weeks ago and she never said a word. You know what Irish mums are like.”
Noel grew up in Burnage where, for most of the young men, life consisted of two things: football and beer. Noel used to venture into Manchester to go to gigs. Why does he think he was different? “I do not know because I do not come from a musical family at all.”
Noel’s big brother Paul said he was a military genius as a kid because he had a lot of Action Men?
“I could well have been a military genius, if I had been born at the turn of the century!” he laughs, “or been in the Second World War! I had a lot of Action Men!”
His mother once said about him that, as a boy, he was a very good storyteller. “A good bullshitter.” The songs he has written, the ones that will be remembered for decades to come like Don’t Look Back in Anger, clearly illustrate that Mrs Gallagher was onto something about her son’s knack for telling a good story.
There was something in Noel he was trying to get out to the wider world. “Clearly. And I have been doing this since I’ve been 20-odd.”
Was he as miserable as he appeared after the Be Here Now album in 1997?
“Very far from it!” he laughs. “I was having the time of my life!”
But he was in a band that he no longer seemed to be happy in. Presumably he was unhappy with the Oasis songs from that period? “Some of it. Go Let it Out is pretty good. But I had nothing left to write about. I had this ability, in the early days, before I became a rock star, to articulate the universal truths. Like love and loss. So, once you become an extremely famous and successful songwriter you have nothing left to write about. So I spent quite a few years making shit up for the sake of it, to go on tour, and then it came back.”
Noel is a Manchester City fanatic. We spend 10 minutes when the interview ends discussing his precious team’s mercurial manager Pep Guardiola. Do Noel’s two sons have to be Man City fans? “They didn’t have to be, but it was in their interests if they were. I said to both of them: ‘I genuinely would love you to support City but there are two teams you are not supporting. And that’s f***ing Man United and Arsenal. Liverpool would have been a close third.”
Other than Man City, does Noel have any other religion? God has popped up in his songs over the years. “Logic leads me to think otherwise. I just can’t get my head around God. I definitely believe in destiny. But religious people say, this is God guiding you. When really in the modern age you are looking at the religious Armageddon that we have in the world and you think: ‘Well, if God is a real f***ing thing, wouldn’t now be the right time for you to show yourself... not through f***ing nonsense like a banana shaped like the Hail Mary?’ On the other hand, I absolutely kind of envy people who have the faith.”
Does his beloved mother still have the faith? “No. But my in-laws have it a great deal,” he says, “and I envy them because it makes them feel better about things. I don’t have that. I respect them more because they are just hoping for the best. Whereas it is the nut-cases who will f***ing kill you if you don’t believe in God.”
I say to him that love over hate is almost the theme of Who Built The Moon?
“If you listen to Holy Mountain, I don’t care who you are, when you play that to a suicide bomber on the way to the train, he won’t detonate his bomb. Because it is so f***ing joyous and it is about beautiful things in life. Women. Drinking. Life. All the great things in life, you can crystallise it down into that one song. It is the same with Definitely Maybe. It is a joyous album about melancholic things. I think it is an Irish thing.”
How does Noel’s Irish side come out? “It comes out more when I’m around Irish people. You know, when I was on tour with U2, Sara [his wife] was kind of thinking: ‘Let’s just f***ing move there!’ You feel so comfortable with U2, with Irish people. Because they remind you of your upbringing.”
Dubliners are like Mancunians in a way.
“Yeah. You feel comfortable with the sense of humour. You know the reference points that all the young ’uns that followed the tour [The Joshua Tree], They remind you of your cousins growing up. And all the other people are like your aunties or your uncles. So I feel very comfortable with it. Sara and I go over there, where Bono lives in Killiney. When I’m driving there, I go: ‘I could see myself living here’.” And? “And then,” Noel Gallagher laughs, “you think: ‘I would literally become an alcoholic!’”