Their new album is a very spiritual affair, as befits the band's more mature profile, writes Barry Egan.
The Gallagher brothers are not the cokehead bon vivants that they used to be. (What pop star is, in these recessionary times?) Noel once told me one night in Cork in the mid-Nineties that he spent a small fortune on the Devil's Dandruff each week.
He is now father to a nine-month-old son (with long-time girlfriend Sara MacDonald) and an eight-year-old daughter (with ex-wife Meg Mathews). Liam is a father of two boys -- one with an ex-wife (Patsy Kensit), one with his present wife (Nicole Appleton) -- and a daughter from a brief relationship with Lisa Moorish, Pete Doherty's ex. The various tasks of fatherhood haven't, however, stopped big brother Noel from caning it on occasion.
In August, Noel rolled onto Chris Moyles's BBC breakfast show after staying out until 6am on a bender. Later the monobrowed legend said he had "no recollection of actually being in the studio. All I know is what I said was printed in the paper the next day. I kind of take my own disclaimer on that, that morning. If someone starts firing other people's band names when you've been out all night drinking Jager bombs . . ."
Let me refresh Noel's mind for him then. He said that Block Party are "a bunch of middle class kids trying to rebel about against mum and dad. They sit on top of an apex of shit". Keane "will always be squares. Even if one of them started injecting heroin into his groin people would go 'Yeah but your dad was a vicar, goodnight'.'' How "everyone in Oasis hates Coldplay" and how Amy Winehouse, well . . . the less vicious bits were that she should "learn three chords on the guitar and go write a tune".
Her producer Mark Ronson retaliated on his MySpace blog that "I just wanted him to know that I'm actually taking guitar lessons from Jay-Z right now and he's already taught me both chords to Wonderwall (tune!)".
(Noel famously criticised the organisers of the Glastonbury Festival during the summer for having rapper Jay-Z as a headlining act.)
Ronson went on: "In fact, it's so much fun having Jay teach me all of Noel's songs on the guitar (hooray!) that I'm thinking of doing an Oasis/Jay-Z remix album a la The Grey Album. Potential titles are Champagne Superhova or Definitely Jay-Z. I'll keep you posted."
I might point out, now, that Oasis's new album Dig Out Your Soul will have neither Jay-Z nor Ronson shaking in their Converse runners. It is all very good (Waiting For The Rapture -- echoing The Doors' Five To One; Get Off Your High Horse Lady -- pure Plastic Ono Band weirdo-brilliance; I'm Outta Time -- Liam channelling John Lennon) but nowhere near the masterly genius reached on Definitely Maybe or (What's The Story) Morning Glory?.
In fairness, even the dogs on the street know that Definitely Maybe and (What's The Story) Morning Glory? were two of the greatest albums ever made. Still, the band's seventh studio album, their first in three years, might, as one critic astutely noted, "finally change perceptions of Oasis as being some sort of Beatles rip-off. For the first time, they've put away the guitars -- well, sort of -- and embraced a trippier, Stone Roses-type feel. Lyrically, Noel has also turned inward, with religion and spirituality common themes on the album."
There are, as befits the band's advancing years, quite a few mentions of God and the like; which suggests Noel has possibly traded in cocaine -- whatever about Jager bombs -- for that other, allegedly greater, high of religion.
"The strange thing is, is that the lyrics are all quite similar -- they all mention God, and Jesus, and the f***ing light and the rapture, and angels," Noel said recently. "And that's happened very much by coincidence because none of us write together and none of us discuss what we're writing about. That would make us like Radiohead."
Asked whether this is the first album in a while when Oasis appear to be operating outside their comfort zone, Noel, who plays in Lord Henry Mount Charles's back garden at Slane on June 30 next year, snapped to a journalist from NME: "I can't stand it when bands say, you know, on this album we really stepped out of our comfort zone. What does that mean? This is not a f***ing game. This is soul, man. It's about humanity. It's not a test. People who went to university are always trying to get themselves out of their comfort zone and I always say, 'I'm working class. It's taken me 15 years to build a comfort zone and I'm not getting out of it for no f***er'."
Source: www.independent.ie
