The Black Keys On Working With Noel Gallagher

Noel Gallagher, Beck and Alice Cooper are on the guestlist for the duo’s “party record”

Taken from the current issue of UNCUT, read the full article here.

Patrick Carney: It came out so easy that we were trying to think of other people that we could throw in the mix, and the person at the top of the list was Noel Gallagher. Everyone was like, “Noel doesn’t really write with other people.” But he agreed to meet us in London. We booked some time at Toe Rag and recorded two songs with Noel in three days. With Beck, most of the time we’d have the music there by the time he showed up, so we were just looking for words and melody. But with Noel, we started the songs from scratch. Noel is hilarious and we hit it off instantly. It couldn’t have gone smoother. He was very meticulous about finding the right transitional chords for each section, it was amazing. Dan started calling him the ‘Chord Board’.

Dan Auerbach: In that particular instance at Toe Rag, we were all in the room: Pat with the drums, I was playing bass, Noel had his 335, and our friend Leon [Michels] was on keyboards. We were just in a circle in this tiny room, recording live, working up songs in real time, literally figuring out chord changes and melodies. Every song that we got with Noel is a live take, “On The Game” is a live take that we cut. It just felt really good.