He had the Roller, the fur coat, the crazy party lifestyle. Now he's a sensible father of two who won't smoke in front of the kids. Simon Hattenstone finds Noel Gallagher is all grown up.
Noel Gallagher is listing the world's 10 greatest bands on his fingers, and working out where Oasis sit among this lot. "The Beatles, Stones, Who, Sex Pistols, Kinks, Jam, Smiths, Stone Roses, Bee Gees." He pauses. "I'm putting us at seven ahead of the Smiths cos we've done more." It's classic Gallagher, the great Mancunian motormouth. In the time it takes for some rock stars to muster a coherent sentence, he'll have set the world to rights, written off many of his peers as no-hopers, talked a great deal of sense, said something truly stupid or offensive or both, and provided a potted history of 128 years of Manchester City football club.
Now he's explaining why Oasis are different from other bands. "People like Coldplay, but they don't love them. People like U2, but they don't love them. But people fucking love Oasis. That's the way it is. It's more than the music." He's got a point, as I later witness at the gigs. Though it is also true that plenty of people can't stand the band, regarding them as crass copycats, playing 100 variants of the same song - when they're not ripping off the Beatles, they're ripping off themselves.
It's a bleak November afternoon in Aberdeen, freezing, already dark outside. On the telly, the news is even bleaker than the weather as we hear of shutdown after shutdown, and a recession that has been made official. Gallagher says it reminds him of his childhood days of three-day weeks, followed by industrial carnage and Thatcher. "I remember the 70s constantly being winter in Manchester and the Irish community in Manchester closing ranks because of the IRA bombings in Birmingham and Manchester, and you know the bin-workers' strike, all wrapped up in it... They were violent times. Violence at home and violence at football matches."
It was the 90s when things began to look up for Gallagher. If ever a pop group mirrored a political project, it was Oasis and New Labour. While they couldn't have appeared more different - Oasis all scruffy jeans and swearwords, New Labour smart suits and urbane accents - both grew out of the ashes of Thatcherism and the grey Major years. Both were determined, in their own way, to counter the cult of the individual and the ethos that there was no such thing as society. For the Gallaghers, it was obvious what society was - their mates at the job centre, their mates determined to have a good time despite everything, their mates standing at the bar drinking and taking drugs as they played.
Definitely Maybe, their first album, crackled with energy - in the song Rock N' Roll Star, they don't sing about what it's like to be a rock'n'roll star because they don't know, they sing about feeling as good as one. Live Forever, still Gallagher's favourite Oasis song, is about the invincibility of youth. He wrote it as a riposte to a song by Nirvana, the morbid grunge band, whose frontman Kurt Cobain went on to kill himself. "I heard this song called I Hate Myself And I Want To Die and I thought, I'm not having that, I cannot have this American rock star who everybody is lauding as a genius with all the money in the world sitting there in his mansion on smack saying that. What d'you want to die for?"
Live Forever was Oasis' first top 10 hit - a unique mix of raucous rock and drunken optimism. But while their first album anticipated success, the second (What's The Story) Morning Glory? was about rock'n'roll fulfilment. There was a sense of wistfulness in the famous ballads, Wonderwall and Don't Look Back In Anger, as if Gallagher was already nostalgic for something that had barely started. These two songs became the supreme arm-in-arm, cigarette-lighter anthems of the 90s. They were also archetypal Oasis songs - loaded with emotional meaning, and yet virtually meaningless in themselves (what is a wonderwall, why is Sally waiting, who exactly is looking back in anger?).
He says he often didn't understand his lyrics, yet the larger meaning is transparent - the yearning for something better. One of his strongest memories is collecting the dole every week with his dad and seeing his friends there, too. "That was the Maggie Thatcher age - everyone was there with their dad."
Gallagher thinks he could have done well at school if he'd tried. He was expelled at 15 for throwing a bag of flour down the stairs and over a teacher. His mother Peggy was a dinner lady, father Tommy a labourer when he could get the work. "He was a typical Irish drinker-worker, always at the bookies, always gambling on something, didn't take his drink very well, quite violent." When Noel was 17, Peggy took the boys and moved away from Tommy.
In his early 20s, Gallagher worked as a roadie for the Manchester band Inspiral Carpets. "What a gig! Amazing. I was earning £300 for setting up a drum kit... Seeing the world, wow, couldn't be any better." That was when he started writing songs seriously.
One night he phoned home and asked Peggy what his younger brother Liam was doing. She told him he'd started a band. Gallagher couldn't believe it. "I'd shared a bedroom with him for years, playing my acoustic guitar and him sitting there going, 'You fucking weirdo' and all of a sudden he's a singer." On his return, he went to see the band, called Rain, told them it was a shit name, and gave them some of his songs to play. They changed their name to Oasis, and he joined them. Gallagher had to learn to play guitar all over again - he'd never played standing up before. "Then all at once, I turned into Paul McCartney. I was just like, 'Right, you play this, and you play that, I play this, you sing these words and sing it like this' and we were off."
Earlier this year, in a poll to find the 50 greatest British albums of the past 50 years, conducted by Q Magazine and HMV, Definitely Maybe and Morning Glory were voted numbers one and two respectively. It's incredible that Oasis are still going 15 years on - Gallagher himself thought of them as a here-today-gone-tomorrow band. With Definitely Maybe, he thought he'd done it all, said all he had to say, rocked all he had to rock. Yet here we are, Liam and Noel the only original members left, both embracing a maturity of sorts, the whole world changed around them and the band still churning out more of the same. Even more incredibly, they are as popular as ever (their last album went into the charts at number one, as have all the others) with an ever younger audience. How have they done it?
The one thing both Gallaghers knew was that if they made it, they were going to make the most of it. And so they did. By the time Labour came to power in 1997, Oasis were regarded as the biggest band in the world. Morning Glory sold 22 million copies worldwide, and more than four million in Britain alone. The band were constantly on the front pages of the tabloids - whether for manufactured rows with rivals Blur, hitting photographers, arguing among themselves, almost splitting up.
I ask Gallagher what it would have been like if I'd been here a decade ago. "There would have been a lot more hangers on... And the extracurricular stuff would have started already." I'd have had to kick my way past a mountain of coke? "Not a mountain. No, a little lump. When we started all the crew was from Manchester, and one by one they've all fell by the wayside, and it's a lot more professional now.
"Because it happened so quick, at Knebworth nobody really knew what we were doing. Normally when people play Knebworth it's the pinnacle of their achievement and they put on these awe-inspiring shows. We were just on the piss really. There's not so many fuckin' idiots surrounding the band any more."
What does he prefer? "I loved it then. But we couldn't be like that now because we're all late 30s, early 40s. I'm 41. Everybody says I'd be dead. Well, I wouldn't be dead, I'd just be a little caricature of a rock star. Who wants to be a drug addict at 41?"
In the mid-1990s, he moved to a salubrious part of London and a house he named Supernova Heights. "When I lived in Primrose Hill, I operated an open-door policy. I'd spent so long on the dole, and I'd moved to London and lived in this huge house, it was like, this is it, I'm living the dream, man. I invited a full awards ceremony back to mine once, George Best included. I won summat for summat or other, and it was the last award of the day and I gave out my address and said, 'Everybody back to mine.' And loads came. It was a great day. The police were called and all sorts."
Soon after Labour came to power, Gallagher was invited to Downing Street to celebrate their respective triumphs over Thatcherism. Tony Blair shamelessly tapped into the new wave of pop groups and designers that became known as Cool Britannia. "Alan McGee [Oasis' manager] got involved with the Labour party and he said, they want to meet you, and I was like, well of course they do. Who wouldn't? I was still on that euphoric night out that started in 94."
Did he have any qualms about endorsing Blair? "It wasn't so much an endorsement of him as, get these fuckers out." They all got carried away, he says - Blair thought he was JFK, Oasis thought they were the Beatles. When the band signed to Creation Records, Gallagher told McGee that if he made enough money to buy a chocolate-brown Rolls-Royce, he'd never want another thing.
After the success of Morning Glory, McGee bought him the chocolate-brown Roller and they turned up at Downing Street in it. Of course they did. "It was all symbolic. McGee used to work on the railways in Glasgow, I used to work on the building sites in Manchester. So we all piled in this Rolls-Royce and went down there. It was only four or five years since we'd signed off." Gallagher is a good storyteller. He can still recreate the weirdness of it all. "There was a strange array of people, Piers Morgan, Pet Shop Boys, Ross Kemp, Lenny Henry... It wasn't cool." Ever since, people have asked whether it was good for the band. For Gallagher it was just the first stop on a night out. "We left there and went somewhere else and then somewhere else and then back to someone's house and ended up back at mine at 7am, watching it on the news."
In the end, he says, Labour were corrupted by power, but he refuses to write them off. "Domestically, whatever Blair did will be overshadowed by Iraq and the weapons of mass destruction. But they brought in the minimum wage and for that alone it was worth it." He could never vote Tory. If Labour raised taxes for the very wealthy, would he still vote for them? "Yeah, totally." I remind him of the 70s when income tax rose to 98% and so many stars left the country. "It would be with a heavy heart that I became a tax exile, but then again if you're earning a pound and somebody's taking 98 pence of it, what's the point?" So what's a fair rate? "Well, I pay 40. I dunno - 50?" He settles on 50p in the pound.
I ask him if success changed him. "You'd have to be a fool to sit here and say no." Is it possible to become idolised without becoming a bit of a twat? "Well, I didn't become a twat, but I started to dress like a twat. I wore sunglasses a lot and I might have had a fur coat and I thought that was the correct procedure for being in the biggest band in the world, but no, I didn't become a twat." Nor, he says, did he go mad. "It's only solo artists who go mad; Robbie Williams, George Michael, they go mental because it is all about them, but it's not all about me."
What's the most ridiculous thing he bought? "A Jaguar Mark 2, Inspector Morse car, had it built specifically for me - a £110,000 car. Never had a licence. Never had a lesson. It sits in a garage." He's still got it? "Oh aye. It's got about nine miles on the clock. I've got a gateway that's a quarter of a mile long, and I've driven it up and down the drive. I'm going to give that car to my son, I think." What if his daughter Anais wants it? "She's not getting a big Jag. It's a lad's car. Totally."
Later, I meet Gallagher's girlfriend Sara MacDonald and tell her what he said about fame. She says it doesn't ring quite true. "Noel says to me he became a bit of a cock - being a bit mean to the people he was working with. Everybody says he's much nicer now he's not doing drugs. Everybody is, though. I mean, if you're doing tons of Charlie..."
Ultimately, the endless partying did become too much for him. He remembers the exact moment - when the band got home from a massive tour in 1998. "I dumped the bags, there were loads of people in the house, and the World Cup was on, and I still remember the one last line. I had a moment of clarity - I need a proper fuckin' life.
"I thought I'd done it all. I'd come from that rehearsal room in Manchester, gone all the way from the bottom right to the top, had all the money in the world, massive house in the country, there was nothing left to do beside go and buy a jet airplane and crash it in the lake. That's it. And I went to bed that night, and have never done cocaine since.
"Of course, nobody wants you to stop doing it because it's your house that everybody's in. So I started with a week and then it went to two weeks, and slowly but surely I began thinking, I don't really know any of these people. I'm not even sure that I know the woman I'm married to. It was a gradual dawning of, who the fuck are all these people? I know her, I know she's Kate Moss, I've seen her in the paper, and I know she's here because she manages to be with every rock band at some point so why wouldn't she be here, but everybody else I had no connection with except that they'd seen me on the telly.
"It was like, right, we're selling this house, then we're moving to the country, then the party moved to the country, then, right, this is not working - so I just stayed in, all the time, and just waited for everyone to fuck off. One by one they all left. The next thing was, well, I need to get divorced because this is rubbish. And that was it. It was very liberating."
We're sitting in Liam's changing room. He is the only band member with his own room because his guitar playing and warm-up vocal exercises annoy the others. Although there is an acoustic guitar in the corner, the room is anything but rock'n'roll - his "riders" are laid out on a table: seven bottles of Volvic, three packs of green chewing gum, three packs of blue chewing gum, fruit squash and honey.
How did success affect Liam? "He got drunk. For four or five years. I never saw him sober. I don't know whether he felt he didn't deserve any of the accolades, but he was trying his hardest to destroy everything, that's how I saw it. Like not turning up for American tours."
If you want to sum up Oasis in one anecdote, this is it. The third album, Be Here Now, was rising in the US charts, and with a grand tour to come they were set to conquer the States. Only Liam gets a phone call at the airport from his then wife Patsy Kensit and decides to return home to househunt. Noel decides he'll be fine on his tod, the band hurl a few barrels of abuse at the press, and America decides it doesn't like Oasis after all. With the world in their grasp, they blew it. "It would be like U2 turning up and the Edge going, 'By the way, Bono won't be here tonight but don't worry, I'll do it for you.' "
It's surprising how often U2 are a reference point for Gallagher, but it makes sense - while U2 are just about the most professional (and clinical) outfit going, for many years Oasis were just about the most shambolic. "People love us more for the fact that we went to America and did what they probably would have done - we had a bit too much to drink and we said the wrong things. And they love us for the fact that we never nailed it there and we keep going back and plugging away." The American tour taught him another lesson. Until then he had assumed that because he was the brains and engine of the band, the grunt with the whining voice and hyperbolic sideburns was a mere accessory. After he took over the singing duties for the tour, he soon realised that most of the fans came to listen to the band and stare at Liam.
What did America do for their relationship? "It's always been the same," he says. "I'm not one of those boys from the home counties who'll sit there and seethe and write poetry about him. I give him a clip round the ear and call him a fuckin' knobhead and then we move on."
Would he say they were friends? He's not sure. "If I don't see him from one end of the year to the next when we're not gigging, that's fine by me, and by him. The safety valve is knowing that eventually you end up in a rehearsal room together writing songs. But he's one of the few people who can make me laugh out loud and vice versa. For someone who's not got a sense of humour he's hilarious. He's got a weird way with words. Only me and him can say the things we say to each other..."
Were they ever jealous of each other? "There's a real journalistic way of going, 'Well, Liam would always want to be Noel cos he's the talent and he writes the songs, and Noel would always want to be Liam cos he shags all the supermodels.' Yeah, you can say we snipe at each other all the time... You'd have to put me on a couch and hypnotise me."
The thing is, he says, Liam was born lucky. Fact. "I'm not jealous of him, but I can't understand why someone would get on stage and attack me and not him." A few months ago a "fan" in Canada pushed Noel off stage and he broke three ribs. "If ever there's a bottle thrown on stage, it always manages to miss him and hit me in the back of the head. My point is he always lands on his feet. I always land on my arse. I've always had to work for everything I've got, and he's always just in the slipstream."
As the crowd gathers before the show, I spot three young Liam lookalikes - always Liam, the cool one. I ask one of the Liams why he thinks Oasis are still so popular. "The atmosphere. A lot of the songs are big singalongs, get your mates together, get pissed, have a good laugh," he says.
An Oasis gig is unlike any other I have been to. It is more football match than concert. The young men (mainly boys, actually) walk in with a pint of lager in each hand - more for throwing than drinking. As soon as the gig starts, mini beer fountains fly through the air like so many teenage ejaculations. As boys push their way into the mosh pit, they are patted on the back - young soldiers off to do their time at the front.
There are a good few girls here, but this is a lads' night out. When the band play the ballads, they come together, arm in arm, singing every word, living the dream. From the band, there's no small talk, no niceties, just singing and yearning. Sometimes the band stop and allow the audience to do all the singing and yearning for them.
Four nights later, we're in Glasgow. It's just as bleak, just as bitter. Gallagher has a cold and is knackered, but he's ecstatic. "I've been up all night watching the election. To sit and watch all those states swing to a leftwing politician is amazing enough, but the fact that he's a black man is just mind-blowing. Wow!"
Again, we're in Liam's changing room, and Gallagher is talking about how Oasis reinvented themelves after two of the original members, Paul "Bonehead" Arthurs and Paul "Guigsy" McGuigan, left in 1999. "That's when Oasis mark 2 started. We became more professional. Bonehead was a big drinker and Guigsy was always stoned. So when Andy Bell and Gem joined, I guess they felt they couldn't just rock in with a bottle of Jack Daniel's in one hand and a spliff in the other. They were easing their way in and that helped Liam and me be on our best behaviour."
What interests me is how he managed to keep going when he thought his best work was behind him. He says maybe he shouldn't have done. After Wonderwall and Don't Look Back In Anger became national anthems, he struggled. Paul Weller gave him the best advice when he told him that one day the songs would stop coming, and he musn't force them. He ignored him. "Between Be Here Now and Don't Believe The Truth, which spans five years, I was putting out records for the sake of it. We shouldn't have bothered, I didn't have anything to write about."
The trouble is nobody told him he was writing rubbish songs. Liam would tell him everything was great because he'd be desperate to get back in the studio and record something new. "A lot of it I listen to and think only an egomaniac would convince himself that that was worth putting on. I say to my manager, 'You told me it was brilliant.' And he goes, 'Well, you don't tell the goose that laid the golden egg that his arse is blocked up, do you?' " If he'd been really brave, he says, he would have called it a day after Definitely Maybe. "Morning Glory is for the squares... It's up there with all those great crossover albums like Thriller, and the greatest-selling albums of all time like Phil Collins and Genesis."
I ask him what a wonderwall is. He smiles. "There's a film called Wonderwall and George Harrison did the music. It's about a guy who lives in a bedsit and in the next room to him is a hippy student. He spies on her through the hole in the wall and he christens it the wonder wall. It was made in 67, appalling film - I thought what a great word, though."
These days, he says Oasis is a more democratic band - although he is still the main songwriter, all of them contribute. On the latest album, Dig Out Your Soul, there are two outstanding tracks - Falling Down is written by Noel, I'm Outta Time by Liam. The album has done well around the world, even in America where Oasis reached the top five for the first time since Be Here Now and the disastrous non-Liam tour.
I ask Gallagher if he thinks the songs have returned. "Yeah," he says, with less certainty than normal. Does he think he could write another Definitely Maybe? "No. I wrote that album when I was 21/22, and the people who picked up on that album were 21/22-year-olds. You can only do it once. We went on that tour and we were the same as them. We had no money, the people in the crowd had no money. We're rock stars now, we don't live in the same circumstances as any of these kids, so you can't even begin to write from a position of where they're coming from. But there's a point that lasts for about three years where you're in the same circumstances, you look the same and you dress the same as your audience, and that, my friend - you cannot buy that. I'd give it all up to go back to those three years.
"Listen, I'm 41, I've got two kids, I don't expect a 16-year-old to be looking to me for inspiration. It's the Arctic Monkeys' job now. I've done my bit. Now we go in the studio and it's just like, let's make some records, let's do it cos we love it."
There aren't many other contemporary bands he rates. "People say I seem very negative about new music - well, if somebody asks me what I think of Keane, I'll tell 'em. I don't like 'em. I'll obviously take it a step too far and grossly insult the keyboard player's mam or summat, but I'm afraid that's just me." His most famous insult was directed at Blur's Damon Albarn and Alex James when he said he hoped they'd die of Aids. Unforgivable, he says - he was so young, and off his head to boot. "Looking back now that fight's all so pathetic over two really quite shit pop songs." How do he and Albarn get on today? "He's a great artist," he says. "He's different from me. I'm not an artist - for me, it just comes out. He does Chinese operas and that kind of thing, he's got more strings to his bow than I'll ever have." So how do they get on? "There's always been something between me and him, and I don't know what it is."
At the aftershow party, Gallagher's girlfriend Sara is showing me pictures of their one-year-old boy Donovan. "What d'you mean, he's sweet?" she says. "He's more than sweet." There is no sign of Liam. She says he generally disappears after the gig. "He goes off quietly with Nicole [Appleton]. They're not really party types. Noel likes to chat, you can see, can't you?"
Gallagher's actually playing the DJ - flicking between the Beatles, Bob Dylan and the Hives, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. He says if the children were here he certainly wouldn't be doing that. "The kids rarely come to see the band, and when they do it's a dry night. You wouldn't be like Keith Richards, smoking fags in front of the kids, man, it's not right, is it?"
The drummer from the support band Sergeant has been giving Gallagher an earbashing all night, telling him how thrilled he is. "I told my mum I was supporting Oasis, and she just said, 'What time will you be home?' " Gallagher laughs. He tells me he has never seen crowds as young as tonight, and he doesn't really get it. "That freaks me out a bit, and I'm starting to get self-conscious thinking, wow! I'm some old dude, man, and they're all going mental for these songs I wrote."
It is strange, but there's a good reason Oasis continue to appeal to kids - unlike the Beatles and Stones, say, their music hasn't evolved. And although Gallagher is now one of rock's elder statesmen, his attitudes haven't much changed either.
Well, some have. It's 1am, the party's been going for a couple of hours and he looks around at all the young aspiring pop stars. "Right, let's be having you," he says, in his best pub-landlord voice. Time for bed, he says. "You've all had your fun."
• Oasis' single, I'm Outta Time, and album, Dig Out Your Soul, are out now. The band tour the UK next June.
Source: www.guardian.co.uk
