He won the ’90s with Oasis, survived noughties meltdown and solo regeneration. But why doesn’t he like Wonderwall? And what is that itch he’s scratching? “All my songs are about yearning for something,” says Noel Gallagher.
IT WOULD NOT TAKE A MASTER DETECTIVE TO work out who owns this bijou new studio in King’s Cross. The walls bustle with vintage Beatles posters, a motorway sign for Manchester City’s former Maine Road stadium and a photographic gallery of music icons: Neil Young, the Sex Pistols, Public Enemy. This is Gallagher country. Since the studio was finished between lockdowns last autumn, it has become a haven for Noel Gallagher. “We decided we’d prolong the kids’ childhoods a bit and move out to the country and of course fucking lockdown happened and we were pretty much stranded so it’s been a test for all of us,” he says with exasperation. “If I hadn’t had this place I’d be suffering now. What’s really annoyed me is watching celebrities say, ‘Well, I’ve been having a great time.’ Keep that to your fucking self.”
Gallagher’s been busy. Revitalised by working with producer David Holmes on 2017’s freewheeling Who Built The Moon?, he released three disco-curious EPs in 10 months before lockdown and is now halfway through album number four, which is “turning out to be a cross-section of everything I’ve ever done.”
EP highlights and two new songs round out Back The Way We Came Vol. 1 2011-2021: The
Best Of Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds. That “Vol. 1” may seem like a flex, but Gallagher puts it down to pragmatism. “The title was so fucking good I thought I’m fucked if I’m coming up with another one. I couldn’t believe it had never been used before.”
All Best Ofs tell a story. Oasis’s 2006 compilation Stop The
Clocks traced the dramatic arc of the Mancunian’s first act, from the point he joined his younger brother’s band aged 24 and steered them to success on an era-defining scale, combining sing-along ’60s pop and ’70s rock heaviness with an edge that had deep roots in never-resolved differences between Liam and Noel, singer and songwriter. That arc ended in 2009 after one final mid-tour bust-up in Paris, exhaustively replayed and picked-over by interviewers ever since.
Back The Way We Came tells a very different tale. Following the Oasis methadone of Gallagher’s eponymous debut, he pushed the boat out on Chasing Yesterday and sailed into uncharted waters on Who Built The Moon?. Once the captain of a battleship, he now pilots a nippy little speedboat. Study the lyrics and you’ll notice an abiding theme of running away from something, or chasing the unattainable, that sits oddly with his family-man life. (He has two sons, 13 and 10, with Sara MacDonald and a daughter, 21, with first wife Meg Mathews.) “It’s a pretty stable life but it would be boring to write about that,” he says. “All my songs are about yearning for something. When
I was young I was yearning for something: a better life, nicer surroundings, fame, wealth, whatever.”
He still has one toe in the past, launching a film production company with Liam, Kosmic Kyte, for an Oasis documentary
project due later this year. The further away he gets from his time in the stratosphere, the clearer his vision. “At the time we were just living it,” he says. “It’s only as the years have gone by that you look back on it and try to make sense of what it all was.”
How important was music in your house growing up?
My dad used to DJ in the Irish social clubs so he had a big vinyl collection. He would make up tapes and sell them on Longsight market. Country & western and Irish traditional music were huge but I wouldn’t say my mum and dad were pop music fans. I remember my dad going out once and not coming back for a couple of days and when he came back he had a guitar: a blonde Gibson Hummingbird. Maybe he won it at cards. I picked it up one day and started playing Joy Division (hums Love Will Tear Us Apart) and it just went from there.
He was infamously violent towards you. Did music provide any kind of father-son connection?
Not in the slightest. They were rough times. Your family weren’t the kind of people who encouraged you to follow your dreams. Get out to work, earn your keep, that was it. I had no dreams of becoming anything until I was in my late teens.
How did your Beatles obsession start? They were generally considered naff mum-anddad music when you were a teenager…
I remember listening to City on the radio and the match commentary was interrupted to say that John Lennon was dead. You know the name but you’re not really aware of what he’s done. But there was this outpouring. I was interested in who this guy was and going backwards. I was always an inquisitive child.
You had a three-year rave phase at the Haçienda in the late 1980s. Did you ever try to make dance music?
When those ecstasy pills came out called doves I did a track with [future Oasis producer] Mark Coyle called You Are My Dove. It sounded a bit like Sneaker Pimps. Those three years in the Haçienda, that was life. The outside world did not exist, the future didn’t exist. It was just the nightclub and the music and the drugs.
You and Mark were both roadies for Inspiral Carpets at the time…
I’d grown up thinking, Wouldn’t it be great to be in music? When they asked me to audition for the singer’s job I thought, This is it. And then when they offered me a job as a roadie I thought, No, this is it. This is better. I still say to my crew they’re jammy bastards. They get paid a lot of money, travel the world and nobody knows who they are. I fucking loved it.
What’s the first song you wrote that you thought was any good?
Before I left home I met this guy Pete through an ad in the Manchester Evening News. He had a little 4-track and we wrote these songs together. I remember playing the demo tape to people and the overriding reaction was a look of surprise: “Fucking hell, is this what you do?”
And the first song you thought was genuinely great?
Live Forever. I wrote it on John Squire’s Gretsch Country Gent because one of their roadies lived at Mark Coyle’s house and it ended up at my house. When I played it at the next rehearsal Bonehead said, “You’ve not just written that fucking song. That’s from somewhere else.” I’d listened to enough music to know that was a classic. It was Mark Coyle that came up with the drumbeat because when he was checking the drums on the last [Inspiral Carpets] tour I would play those chords. It’s funny how a song changes everything.
You moved into India House in central Manchester when you were 19 and wrote most of Definitely Maybe there. Can you describe that room?
At one end was a window looking out onto Whitworth Street, at the other end was a little kitchen area, a couch, a fish tank and a TV. I was living with this girl who worked at Benetton. She’d go to work and I’d be at home getting stoned and writing songs all day. I still do it now. Lockdown has actually reminded me of being on the dole a bit.
There was no precedent for a band from indie origins becoming remotely as big as Oasis became. What was the scope of your ambition back then?
It was one phase at a time. We only actively pursued a record deal when we gave our initial cassette to the head of A&R at Factory, Phil Sachs. He told us [Factory boss] Tony [Wilson] thought it was too baggy. He was right. I often think if we’d have been signed by Factory we’d have been a step up from Northside. I think we were very, very lucky not to get signed for a couple of years. [Alan] McGee was the first person to go, “You were great.”
You didn’t dream of stadiums then?
Fucking hell, no. Indie music wasn’t in arenas then. The biggest you could get was Brixton Academy. When Definitely Maybe took off, our promoters said: “There’s this new arena opening in Sheffield. We’re thinking of putting you on there next month.” I was like, “Do you think we’ll fill it?” And they said, “We could probably do 10 nights.” We didn’t realise what was going on. I kind of shut it all out. The thing that kept me grounded was the songwriting. I thought as long as I don’t take that for granted, I can handle everything else. The ‘that’ll do’ era would come later.
Have you seen the movie Creation Stories?
I was going to watch it from behind the couch
but it’s actually all right. We forget how fucking amazing that record company was – not just for the records it put out but for the characters who passed through the doors. Kevin Shields, Bobby Gillespie, our kid, to name but three. It was great reliving those years. But I did say to McGee nobody wants to hear about rehab. Every story that contains the Oasis story should really end at Knebworth.
Did you always know if a song would be sung by you or by Liam? Could any of them have gone the other way?
No. The only time I laid down the law was Wonderwall and Don’t Look Back In Anger. I was so fucked off with him walking off stage and me having to take over and do the gig. I remember thinking, If I’m going to keep doing this, I want a big fucking song to sing. I said, “You’re singing one or the other but not both.” He hated Wonderwall. He said it was trip-hop. There speaks a man who’s never heard trip-hop. He wanted to sing Don’t
Look Back In Anger but it became apparent during the recording that Wonderwall was going to be the tune. If I’m being honest, I shouldn’t have sung either of them because I wasn’t really a singer then.
So you don’t like the recording of Don’t Look Back In Anger?
I don’t like any of the recordings on [(What’s The Story)] Morning Glory. It’s the only album we never did demos for. I was writing on tour and I’d planned on finishing the songs when I got to the studio and we just never got around to it. Cast No Shadow is half-written. Wonderwall. Morning Glory.
Last year, Wonderwall became the first song from the 1990s to exceed one billion streams. Any theory as to why it’s become The One?
I have no idea. It beggars belief. Wonderwall is one of my least favourite songs because it’s not finished. If I could somehow twist time and go back there, I’d pick a different song for our calling card. Probably Some Might Say.
Your lyrics pursue a feeling rather than a precise meaning. Do they change for you over the years?
Yeah, totally. I’m just trying to serve the melody. I don’t hold on to the meaning of any song. I remember being asked back in the ’90s, usually by Americans, about that line in
Champagne Supernova: “Slowly walking down the hall/Faster than a cannonball.” What does it mean? The tour before last, I was on-stage in Scotland and everybody’s got their top off – these kids who could only have been 10 when Oasis split up. And I thought, That’s what it means. It’s a 20-year-old kid crying his eyes out.
I always assumed it was about acid.
It’s definitely a drug reference. You know when you do loads of coke and your brain’s racing but your limbs weigh a ton? I was out of my fucking mind writing Champagne Supernova in the Landmark Hotel in Marylebone. Typical ’90s scene – everyone had left, champagne bottles, carnage on the coffee table – and the song fell out of the sky. Songs used to fall out of the sky every fucking day in the ’90s.
Did you ever feel like you needed drugs to write songs?
I don’t think I ever did need to be on drugs, it’s just that I always was on drugs. What it did for me was take away the second guessing. When I started to second guess everything, that’s when it didn’t have the vital thing.
Perhaps the ultimate proof of your imperial phase was when your deranged Chemical Brothers collaboration, Setting Sun, went to Number 1 in the UK. How did that come about?
“Your family weren’t people who encouraged you to follow your dreams. Earn your keep, that was it.”
I knew them from [notorious London club night] the Sunday Social. I remember being at the bar with them and I said, “I’ll do a fucking tune with you.” City had played Wycombe on a Friday night away, we’d lost one-nil, and I went from Wycombe to the studio. I did it in about 20 minutes. I even left the taxi waiting outside. And then the next thing I knew it had knocked [Deep Blue Something’s] Breakfast At Tiffany’s off Number 1. That felt like a proper triumph. The ’90s! What a decade! You had an idea, you did it, you moved on to something else.
Oasis were associated with hunger and hedonism but you wrote a lot of melancholy songs about lost youth even then: Fade Away, Half The World Away, Live Forever. Where did that come from?
Well, I didn’t have a great childhood. And I always had an old head on my shoulders. Even when I was 19 my mum used to say, “You’re like a fecking old man.” I’ve never been a puppy. I’ve never had that wild abandon. One of the great things about Oasis is Liam was the puppy. Everything I didn’t have, he could deliver and everything he didn’t have, I could deliver.
Moving on to 1997, some of the Be Here Now B-sides – Going Nowhere, The Fame – felt like cries for help…
Yeah. There’s a B-side [from 2000] called Let’s All Make Believe: “Let’s all make believe that we’re still friends and we like each other.” Some of my least favourite work is from Be Here Now to Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants when I thought it’s time to get serious. I started to write about fame and drugs, comedowns from drugs, and other people being fucked up by drugs. The melodies deserted me. When I hear Be Here Now
I always think of the missed opportunity. Not many people get to be the sole songwriter of the biggest band in the world and this is your statement to the world. And I just said, “Fuck it, that’ll do.” But it didn’t ruin the band. It just sent it into a lower orbit. It’s all character-building.
“I started to write about fame and drugs, and comedowns from drugs.
The melodies deserted me.Ó
Which songs would you keep from those lean years?
D’You Know What I Mean. I fucking love it. My Big Mouth. Stand By Me. Go Let It Out is brilliant nonsense. Stop Crying Your Heart Out. Little By Little. Look, some songwriters would die to have two of those songs in their entire lives. The live thing sustained us. We were still playing stadiums while not being very good.
So the bad reviews were fair enough?
Yeah. You’re looking around and other bands are making career-defining albums: Urban Hymns, OK Computer, Parachutes. They’re a step ahead of you. You know that whatever you’re doing is not as good.
Don’t Go Away on Be Here Now is a good song smothered by production. Did some songs get away from you in the studio?
When a band becomes a phenomenon like Oasis you get to a point where the only thing the guy you meet at a party’s got to say about them is, “I don’t like them.” Because it was so omnipresent. Once Be Here Now was a bit underwhelming, the backlash started. Alan McGee did not do us any favours by announcing that it would sell 20 million copies and Sony didn’t do us any favours by not letting people talk about it. There was a perfect storm of lots of little niggly bad press things. All that being said, if those tunes had been undeniable it would have been great. But they weren’t.
How did it feel to have a songwriting gift and then lose it for several years?
It’s really frustrating. It would be like (long pause) going to have sex with a beautiful woman and not being able to get it up. Weller had a period when he was lost and I asked him, “What’s that all about?” And he said, “When it goes, do not chase it.” What he meant is, Don’t think everything you write is going to be good but you still have to write it because that’s another shit one out of the way and eventually you’ll get to something worthwhile. The next song after Live Forever that changed everything for me was The Importance Of Being Idle [from 2005’s Don’t Believe The Truth]. I remember thinking, “It’s back.” We’d been a straight-up rock band, then it started to get a bit quirky, and that’s stood me in good stead since.
It’s obvious now that you have a broad and interesting taste in music, but in Oasis you came across as a classic-rock reactionary. Were you holding back?
It’s difficult to make this statement without sounding like I’m slagging Liam off, but… he was way more conservative in his tastes than I am. He literally listens to The Beatles and John Lennon and that’s it. When we were doing Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants, Spike [Stent], who was producing, got the drum machines out and I said, “Our kid will be up in 40 minutes. Have them out of the room before he gets here because it will frighten him. All these flashing lights will freak him out.” Oasis were such a brand, it was difficult to step outside that. Bonehead and Guigs never really said why they left but I think they thought, This music is changing and it’s not the way that it was.
So it was changing too much for them but…
Not enough for me. Yeah. When you play a song to your bandmates you need them all to stand up and say, “That’s amazing.” If one of them is going “pthrrrt”, and that one happens to be the singer, forget it, it isn’t happening. It’s like you want the love of a parent. You do things to please people. After Be Here Now I wanted to throw it up in the air a little bit but I didn’t really have the chops. If I’d had 10 songs like Go Let It Out, I’d have hammered them home. The material had to be undeniably great.
Was your solo debut originally intended to be a side-project before returning to Oasis?
No, that was going to be the next Oasis album. On that last tour I wrote If I Had A Gun, Everybody’s On The Run and (I Wanna Live In A Dream In My) Record Machine. AKA… What A Life! was the last thing I wrote. That’s my birth as a solo artist. It’s a feeling I’d only read about: when you’re doing something you know is great but you know other people will heavily question. I’ve had that feeling a few times, like Black Star Dancing. That’s right where you want to be as an artist. You’re daring people to dislike it.
What story does Back The Way We Came Vol. 1 tell?
The story is, without being too flowery about it, like a flower unfolding. It starts with me still wearing the same clothes as Oasis and shedding that layer on the first album, then getting a tiny bit further out on Chasing Yesterday and then finally, with Who Built The Moon?, feeling that I’d left that behind and had no boundaries. With the EPs I’m free as a bird.
You used to be not just aware of your limitations but proud of them. What changed?
It was David [Holmes] that made me realise I haven’t got any limitations. If he’d said to me, “Put the fucking guitar away, nobody wants to hear that,” I’d have been like, “You cheeky cunt, fuck off.” But it was like psychology. He said, “You’re the best at that. But really? Do you want to keep doing that forever?” The night before we started we were at his house playing records and he’d say, “You’ve got great taste. You should make the music that you listen to.” I was like, “Yes! How do I do that?” And how you do it is you go to someone who can drag it out of you.
Could that approach have worked earlier?
Not in the band, no. Producers for us were referees because the songs were already written. I remember Paul McCartney’s golden rule was you must have the songs written before you go to the studio. David was like, “Forget that, that’s no fun.” The two biggest musical influences have been the Amorphous Androgynous and David Holmes. I wouldn’t be where I am without them. They opened the door to tons of music I would never have bothered trying to find, like obscure French pop and Krautrock and world music. I found it really fucking inspiring. If you’ve been really successful at doing one thing, why would you have the notion of not doing that?
How much of songwriting, for you, is craft and how much is inspiration?
I’d say it’s 50/50. I like to feel that I’m switched on and waiting for it to happen. I’m available for work every day. When you’re younger you’re available for work 24 hours a day. It’s no coincidence that the general pattern of a songwriter’s life is that they do most of their best work up to their thirties and then it becomes more hit-and-miss. That’s when you have to start changing it up.
And the longest you’ve taken to finish a song?
[2015 solo single] Lock All The Doors. Half of it I used for the Chemical Brothers track. I had that song knocking around from before we got signed. I thought I’ll use that verse because it fits and I’ll write another one. It took me 20 years.
Have you ever plagiarised a song by mistake?
It’s not ever intentional but once it’s in my brain I can’t get it out. It’s like the Gary Glitter bit at the end of Hello. I remember doing the demo and that bit was just a joke. Of course I couldn’t get rid of it. And of course I didn’t know Gary Glitter was a raving nonce at the time. I guess the inspiration for that comes from Weller when he did Start! and it’s Taxman. He said in an interview, “Well, I wasn’t expecting anyone not to notice.” I thought that was really fucking cool. There’s been a couple of times when I’ve been advised to sue other people and I’ve always taken the moral high ground.
How long can you go without writing?
The only time I’m not within arm’s length of an instrument is when I’m on holiday with Sara and the kids. The first thing I do when I get back is play the guitar. I have this irrational fear – if I even think about retiring, it will go away and never come back. I have to keep chipping away just to check that it’s still there. I’ve no hobbies. If I worked in an office, this would be my hobby.
How are your motives different now from when you started out?
I do it for the love of the craft and the pursuit of writing songs that people will love and take into their lives. Back when we started, because you’re skint, you’re like, Right, I want a massive telly, a big house, a bird with big tits, a fucking chimp and an aeroplane. It’s more pure now.
Back The Way We Came Vol. 1 2011-2021: The Best Of Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds is out June 11 on Sour Mash.