Oh brother
As Oasis celebrate their tenth anniversary, Noel Gallagher comes clean on the rock wives (now ex), the drugs (though now he prefers a good book), the musical borrowings (doesn't everyone?) - and, of course, that sibling rivalry. Interview by Robert Crampton of The Times
Noel Gallagher sits there for two hours and never plays a false note. I have no reason to doubt him when he says his approach to interviews is: "You ask me a question, I will not tell you lies". (Actually, he says "f— lies", but if I left in all his expletives, this article would have more asterisks than words.) For instance, Noel admits he always wanted "to become very, very, very, very wealthy". He says that he had nothing to write about on Be Here Now, the (disappointing) third Oasis album, because "I was just a big, fat charlied-up rock star sitting in limos and going to parties". He is "well aware that as a group, and me as a songwriter, from Morning Glory (the best-selling British album ever) onwards, it's sort of levelled off a bit".
He says that the lyrics to Don't Look Back in Anger, considered a modern classic, are "just nonsense", the result of "sitting down with some Red Stripe and a spliff". He agrees that the intro sounds a lot like Let It Be.
He cringes at fans' favourites such as Roll With It (the single which came second to Blur's Country House in the Britpop battle of summer 1995). "Before we played Wembley last year, they were interviewing fans outside. There was this guy, skinhead, couple of teeth missing, Ben Sherman shirt. I'm watching the television thinking: what's this character gonna say? He's going: 'Oasis! Best band in the world! Better than the Beatles!' And he looks into the camera and recites the words to Roll with It! 'You gotta roll with it/You gotta take your time/You gotta say what you say/Don't let anybody get in your way', and I'm thinking (he covers his eyes and grimaces): 'What the f was I on?'" (Cocaine, lots).
He admits that he used to borrow melodies, not just from the Beatles, which is unavoidable -"I learnt to play guitar by opening a Beatles' songbook" - but also from T. Rex, Slade, David Bowie and even (vindication this for Blur's Damon Albarn, six years on from his "Quoasis" tag) from Status Quo. Yet Gallagher isn't saying, as Malcolm McLaren once did of the Sex Pistols, isn't it funny how we managed to swindle everybody?
He is instead being candid about how a songwriter starting out starts to write. Most songwriters' early efforts don't sell in millions.
"When I was a roadie, I made up a compilation tape of strictly Slade, Bowie and T. Rex. That's all I listened to for two years. Everybody on the bus would go, 'Turn it off!' and I'd say, 'Listen to the guitars!' I'd copy the songs, like Cum on Feel the Noize, change the chords around a bit. I make no bones about it, man. I wasn't taught music by anybody. I didn't learn music at school. I can't play the piano." He lifted the melody for Cigarettes and Alcohol, their first top ten single, from Get It On by T. Rex. "I wouldn't attempt to do that now. That was written before I had a record deal."
"We were playing in pubs in Manchester. I brought the song to the band, expecting they'd go, 'We can't do that!' and of course everybody went, 'This is amazing!' I said to McGee (Alan, boss of Creation Records and The Man Who Discovered Oasis) 'Er, are you allowed to do that kind of thing?' and he was, 'Oh, I don't know -but it's great'. We never got sued." (Except by the New Seekers, of all people, who took exception to Shakermaker's resemblance to I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing. The New Seekers got £175,000. And Gary Glitter got £200,000 after they nicked the line "Hello, hello, it's good to be back." It's worth noting that these songs, along with almost all of the others Gallagher used, had been Number One singles in their time. There's no faulting Noel's ear for a popular tune.) I say: a really harsh interpretation of your songwriting might follow that old quote about a piece of work "being both good and original, but the parts that are good are not original". He finishes the line, "and the parts that are original are not good". You could say, here's a guy who put some memorable melodies together, but many of the most memorable had, er, I'm not being funny, already been written by other people and since then, what's he done?
"It's true," he says disarmingly. "I would agree with that because factually you're exactly right. I would disagree because: Don't argue with the man in the street. There is no greater accolade than Joe Public." Going back to the man in the Ben Sherman shirt, Gallagher says: "I'd love to sit him down and say: 'What does that song mean to you?' 'Cos I don't know what it means to me, but he'd probably have a very good explanation for it. It means summat in his life."
He's not all self-flagellation. "Couple of songs on the last record I'm really, really proud of. The six I've done for the new one I'll stand up and fight anyone for. I'm still learning as a songwriter. I'm never happy anyway. I think I'm equal parts genius, equal parts buffoon in the one day." On a Lennon and McCartney timescale, I say, you should be about to write your Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt Pepper trilogy. He says, with sadness and determination, "Yeah, yeah. Definitely. I've put out a lot of crap in the past. Not crap, but stuff I don't like any more. I have to live with it. Gonna take a bit back for me now, say (to the band and the record company): 'Well, you might like it, but I don't'."
Next month, Oasis will play a short tour to mark their tenth anniversary. For several of their ten years, the band was the biggest thing in British rock. Seven consecutive singles went to number one or number two. In 1996, they sold 18 million albums and, that August, played to more than a quarter of a million people over two days at Knebworth. Critics loved them. Twenty-year-olds who'd previously bought only dance music loved them. Thirty-year-olds who'd given up on the charts loved them. The new prime minister invited Noel to Downing Street. They were, defiantly, much more than the sum of their parts. If some of the tunes were derivative, the Gallagher brothers had a sound and an attitude all their own.
The time was ripe for them, too. They liked booze, drugs, football, fighting and women; popular male recreations which had become fashionable again. They weren't pretending. "I used to think it was just because the music was so fantastic," says Noel. "Looking back now it was as much that people just knew Oasis wasn't bullshit. None of the characters were tarted up. Liam's Liam and Noel's Noel." They worked hard, too, touring relentlessly. "We were like, 'I ain't doing anything better with my life, show us the bus'."
Adding to their appeal was the mythic, Celtic, love-hate relationship between the boys: the soap opera of the two warring brothers who close ranks against outsiders. The elder, more focused, more responsible Noel snorting his control freak drug, at odds with the sexier, wilder Liam clutching his larrikin Stella and prettier wife. "I want to be a songwriter, he wants to be a singer," Liam once said, encapsulating the rivalry. (I met Liam briefly at the photo shoot. Seemed like a perfectly nice young man.) I talked to Noel Gallagher in a bar at Stamford Bridge, Chelsea Football Club's ground, on the day before the attack on the World Trade Center. He is small - about five seven - and ten stone. He wanted Guinness but had to settle for John Smith's. He drank one pint. "It's Monday night," he said. "I only have a proper drink maybe once or twice a month. You get to 34, the last bad hangover I had, I was literally crying. It was awful." Liam, he says, remains "a f— good drinker".
As the bar filled up, I worried that people would interrupt. He was untroubled. After his rock-star excess, he is trying, consciously, to lead a "normal" life. "We go to the studio every day by train, just to be around other people, not to have to sit in the back of a limo with some bloke in a suit going, 'Is it too hot? Shall I turn the music down?' If you wanted to, you'd barely have to breathe sometimes."
Wasn't that what he had always wanted? "You read the stories about Marc Bolan, John Lennon, David Bowie - you want to see what it's like to fly in a Lear jet and be extravagant." He can't drive, but he owns five cars because, when he bought his big rock star's house in Buckinghamshire, "If you've got nothing to put in the driveway it's a bit of a shame, isn't it?" Does he like cars? "No, don't like 'em at all." His philosophy is: "For a while, it's cool to have a great big telly. But it's not the be-all and end-all." He doesn't know, doesn't want to know, what he's worth. "My manager phoned me when I became a millionaire, told me I had £1 million in the bank. I said, 'Right, don't ever let it fall below that'."
He seems like a man taking stock after many years of upheaval: geographical; financial; chemical; emotional. He left Manchester for Camden eight years ago with "a guitar and an Adidas holdall". He then made "more money than I could believe" inside a couple of years. He travelled the world. He "took more drugs than I should've". He became a father in January 2000, divorced Meg Mathews, the mother of his daughter, Anais, a year later, now lives back in London with his new girlfriend, Sara MacDonald, a public relations consultant.
MacDonald was educated privately, in Edinburgh. "She reads a lot. She'll think nothing of sitting down for two hours on a Sunday with a book. I'm at a loose end, I'll go, 'What's that book about then?' We'll talk about stuff and she'll say, 'How did you get all this knowledge?' I'm like, 'Well, I used to watch television, all day, every day. And read magazines.' I read more books now than I ever have done. Vietnam, the Kennedys."
His ex-wife and child live in the house in Buckinghamshire. He sees Anais Thursdays and Fridays and every other weekend. "It's the most awful feeling in the world giving her back. Awful." The "nameless people" that used to fill his old house, Supernova Heights, have fallen away. The biggest change, the start of the stocktaking, came in June of 1998, "halfway through the World Cup". By then, he was spending hundreds of pounds a week on cocaine. "People I know now who are heavily into it are not doing half as much as I was." He says, "For that period, it was great. I felt invincible."
But he also says, "Most of it was pretty fake and soul destroying because all my opinions were clouded by drugs". He had also put on two stone, following the standard coke monster's diet of "Jack Daniel's, lager, crisps, KitKats and McDonald's". He decided to stop. The reason was straightforward: his doctor told him to.
"I'd called him out a few times for panic attacks and each time it was getting worse, like, 'I'm going to have a heart attack!' The last time I was lying in bed going, 'I can't live when I feel like this!' My doctor said, 'Well, there's a simple solution: if you stop taking drugs you will stop feeling like this'." With no counsellors and no programme, Gallagher did, astonishingly, as instructed.
Maybe his acquiesence is not such a surprise. For all the Up Yours swagger of Oasis's heyday, Noel has usually heeded authority when it mattered, usually showing excellent judgment in those he has chosen to follow. He plumped for the ambitious, something-to-prove McGee and Creation over other, more lucrative record labels. He chose Marcus Russell, 20 years his senior, as the band's manager, "a proper, proper manager, with a briefcase. Most bands have their mate who can't play bass, thick as pigshit". He says Russell, who does not have children, is a father-substitute for him.
Early on, he embraced the friendship and patronage of Paul Weller, a man who commands the respect of a generation. "He's a top man, the only person in the whole world who heard the demo of Be Here Now and said, 'It's shit, man. I'm not having it'." More recently, Gallagher has made friends with Bono of U2. They discuss religion. "I said to him: 'Look, you believe in it all. I'm Catholic same as you. Can you explain it to me?' He sat down for two hours and made a lot of sense."
"I was going, 'You drink and all the rest of it and make millions of pounds, tell me how you pray?' He made tons of sense. Couple of days later, this parcel turned up at my house. A book each for me and Sara. One's called What's So Amazing about Grace? And the other's Searching for My Hidden God, or summat. And his dad had just died! How difficult must that be? Takes time out because two people were interested. What a guy. I'm going to have a good read of this book." Gallagher's poor relationship with his own father, a labourer, is well known. His parents split when he was 17, Liam 12. Until then, "they were together because they were Catholics. It was verbally violent, and physical violence did rear its head. There was an overriding sense of tension all the time." The problem? "Drink, circumstances, no money, no job. It was the same for every kid in my street. Everybody's dad was out of work then. Everybody's dad drank".
Burnage was and is "a respectable working-class area. It's got a Spar, a bank, a chippy, a pub. It's not the worst bit of Manchester". For a time, he admits, "me and Liam were pretty much out of control, robbed lots of stuff. But we were never major-league criminals." School (Catholic, all boys) was a failure. He left with nothing. "None of the teachers were my friends, they were just there to lay down the law. I didn't want to learn." He had friends and, from 13, he had his guitar.
Most importantly, he had his mother, Peggy, originally from a farm in County Mayo, telling him, "Nobody owes you anything, you've got to
get it for yourself". As boys in "short trousers and Man City kits", he and Liam went to Mayo every summer. "I'm as English as they come, but I feel Irish, too. I got my actual education there, my sense of humour, my sense of music." Last year, when she died intestate, he bought his grandmother's farm, "to keep it in the family".
We talked a lot about all the aggravation between him and Liam, how it has lessened, partly through getting older, partly because Liam, now 29, is songwriting himself. He says, had they not been brothers, Oasis would certainly have split up, probably still would. "(But) If we split, I'd still see Liam every Christmas. We're brothers and our kids are cousins. It'd be too much, too emotional - and it'd upset me mam. I don't want to upset Liam either. If I'd thought Liam could stand on his own two feet, I maybe would've." He can, now, though, can't he? "Yeah, but see, I get angry and walk off tours and stuff, but once I've slept on it, I think: it's nothing that important. And it's my band - I'm not walking away from it. The band shouldn't (have to) split up - it's just that me and Liam have got to shape up a little bit."
He painted a picture in a recent interview of how, now that Patsy and Meg, who didn't like each other or their husbands' brothers, are out of the way, he and Liam have started to go for agreeable Sunday lunches as a foursome with their new girlfriends. "It happened once," he says. "The whole band went. Liam dragged us up to Hampstead to this pub where he's got his own little chair in the corner, probably got a tankard behind the bar as well. And he paid. It was weird not seeing him at 5 o'clock in the morning."
They still argue in the studio. When Noel recently delayed their new single so he could write "more meaningful lyrics, Liam said, 'These lyrics are too complicated, man! What was wrong with the old ones?'" Fatherhood has probably done more than anything else to put his rivalry with Liam in perspective. "If I were single and didn't have kids I'd probably stillI I'd be mad. I'd be addicted to something." When he left Meg Mathews, whom he refers to formally as "my ex-wife", never by name, Anais was just nine months. "Now, we've just started to click. She knows who daddy is. I would get nervous when she was gonna come, 'cos I always think I'm a shit dad, but as soon as she's there, what was I worrying about?" He is sensitive about his divorce. "What's happening to Anais's mam and dad happened to mine. It's real life. It is awful to give her back, but you've got to be strong about it and have faith that it's going to be all right. You sit at home and go, 'It's gonna be all right, it's gonna be all right. I'll make it all right.' You make decisions in your life. I believed what I was doing (ending his marriage) was right then and is now. This is the right way for my kid to be happy, and me as well."
We talk a little about his own, wasted, education. He says that because "Anais will probably go private" he will have to "get my arse in gear to gain her respect. Upgrade a little bit." But, he adds, "She will have to understand where I come from." This leads us on to politics, Blair's Downing Street party, and as magnificent an Old Labour monologue, brimful of class pride, as I have heard in a long time.
"Got this invite, rang me mam. She said, 'You've got to go. It's the Labour Prime Minister. It's not John Major. It's Tony Blair.' I said: 'You're f— right. I'm gonna go.' I thought, 'I pay the rent on Downing Street. I paid for the carpets.' Even when I was on the dole, they taxed me, f— bitch. Hundreds of photographers, begging me to do a V-sign on the doorstep. I'm thinking, 'I'm not turning up here in jeans and trainers, so they can say, 'Look at this yobbo'. No! I'm gonna go and buy a suit, get the Rolls-Royce polished up, and I'm walking up that street, in my brand-new suit, and I'm gonna shake his hand.
"I thought, 'I'll get slaughtered for this'. And people come up to me and say, 'That was out of order,' and I say, 'Listen, right: the invite comes through your door. What would you do? I've always voted Labour. My uncle was a Yorkshire pit-worker, given redundancy. Not asked, given. Oi, you, there's your pay, f— offI" He pauses for breath. "If there's one thing I regret, it's that photograph of me with the glass of champagne."
Did he vote Labour this year? "I was in the States. But I would've, out of principle, because the other lot tried to take away the identity of my class." Does he now feel used? "I feel used as a voter. Never thought it was gonna end up like this, big business running hospitals and schools. But we all got carried away back then, didn't we?" Indeed we did, with Noel Gallagher as much as with Tony Blair. Noel Gallagher, especially, got carried away with Noel Gallagher. Who can blame him? He said and did some daft things, wrote some good songs, survived, wants to write some more. He says: "To go for a walk in the park with someone you love, and people come past and say, 'I met my wife listening to your music', or whatever, you think, 'Sound'. You've touched people's lives. That'll do for me."
—september 2001 noel gallagher interview with the times as transcribed by strange thing on oasis fan group poststamped 21 june 2002 (part of the interview here)
