Click here to read an interview with Noel Gallagher who talks about the end of Oasis, his brother’s worrisome facial hair and why he would never pull a Kanye
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Below are a number of videos to promote the Calling Festival: Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds, Ryan Adams & The Shining, The Hives & Echo & The Bunnymen this July at Clapham Common.
Johnny Marr: "He's a competent guitarist and I'm sure he has a bright future ahead of him."
Ed Sheeran: "He runs around all over the stage when he's playing, on podiums, everywhere. Far too much like hard work. But then he is very young."
U2: "I nearly melted Bono's face when I told him I have all the songs written for my albums before I go into the studio. U2 go in without a single note, and have meetings for six months before writing anything."
Paul Weller: "If Oasis ever got back together, he would put my windows in. It's highly unlikely anyway, but he's dead against it."
His hair: "While I've still got this haircut, I'll be making music. The barnet sort of dictates that I carry on."
Click here to read part one of an interview with Noel Gallagher for entertainment.ie, he talks about Oasis, his new album, Amorphous Androgynous and more.
Check out the current collection and offers from Pretty Green here.
If there’s anything that comes to mind when thinking of the band Oasis, ‘world peace’ probably isn’t it.
The Gallagher brothers are just as well known for their epic fall outs as their impressive back catalogue, but Noel thinks things could have gone a little differently.
When discussing his favourite b-sides with Mr Hyde, Noel admitted he thought they could have changed the world if they’d chosen a different path with their song releases
‘From ’93 to ’96 every song I wrote was a classic – I thought it’d last forever,’ he said.
‘If The Masterplan, the b-sides album, had come out instead of Be Here Now, we may have won the Nobel Peace Prize.
‘I don’t think there’d be war in the Middle East, I don’t think there’d be radical Muslims. I think we’d have saved the world, the songs were that good.’
Um, sure.
In fairness The Masterplan is packed full of pretty brilliant b-sides, but we’re not entirely convinced lyrics such as ‘Sittin’ on my own/Chewin’ on a bone/A thousand million/Miles from home’ could promote world peace…
Click here to read an interview with Noel Gallagher for Sterogum, who speaks about Spotify, Oasis, Johnny Marr, Damon Albarn, Paul McCartney and Kanye West collaborating, Jack White his new album album and more.
Check out the current collection and offers from Pretty Green here.
Noel Gallagher has claimed that it really winds Jose Mourinho that he can’t wind Manchester City boss Manuel Pellegrini up, as reported by Match of the Day 3.
Mourinho reacted to the 1-1 draw with Burnley by claiming that poor refereeing decisions cost his side all three points after being denied a penalty and Nemanja Matic being sent off, as reported by Sky Sports.
And now Gallagher has claimed that Mourinho can wind up Arsene Wenger but struggles to get Pellegrini to bite.
Gallagher told Match of the Day:”I think it really winds him up that Mourinho can’t wind Pellegrini up. He tried it with Wenger and he bites a little bit.
Van Gaal doesn’t come into it as he’s not a rival and Brendan Rodgers is his mate. Pellegrini’s just killing it every week, he’s just like ‘I’m not interested’ and it’s really winding him up.”
Former Oasis star Noel Gallagher delivers a stinging assessment of Jose Mourinho during this week's Match of the Day 3, claiming the Chelsea boss is having a "breakdown."
The Manchester City fan also takes a swipe at Manchester United, saying they are not serious rivals to Manuel Pelligrini's side.
And Gallagher, joining Mark Lawrenson, Jermaine Jenas and Mark Chapman in the studio, offers his prediction of who will come out on top in the race for the Premier League title.
Click here to watch an extended interview with Noel.
Check out the current collection and offers from Pretty Green here.
There’s a ton of criticisms you can level at Noel Gallagher and they can pretty much all be dealt with using two words: 'so what?' He’s hugely derivative! So what? His best stuff is behind him! So what? His lyrics are workman like and unimaginative! So what? He keeps repeating himself! So what? The problem with trying to give Gallagher a swift critical kicking is that he’d be the first to agree with you, and the first to not give a crap. As he said himself during a recent interview with the ever-excellent Jude Rogers, 'I've accepted my limitations as a songwriter fucking years ago. I play what I play. I'm influenced by what I'm influenced by, and that's it. I've accepted my limitations, and I work within those parameters.'
You come to a Noel Gallagher album with a set of fairly negative expectations: What’s interesting in the case of Chasing Yesterday is that those expectations are pretty much all met without influencing your enjoyment of the record at all. His way with a melody is still potent, and what’s more he knows how to use the unavoidable sense of familiarity to his advantage. It takes some gall to open an album with the same chord pattern as your biggest hit, but gall is something Gallagher has never lacked, thus the first track here, ‘The Riverman’, starts with the same minor-7th patter as ‘Wonderwall’ (come to think of it, so did Be Here Now). Gallagher repeats the trick a few times: ‘Lock All The Doors’ is basically David Essex’s ‘Rock On’ sang over Oasis’ ‘Morning Glory’ while ‘Girl With The X-Ray Eyes’ is ‘The Masterplan’ muddled with, by his own admission, Bowie’s ‘Starman.’ Somehow the rip offs don’t really bother you - partly that’s because we’re used to Noel pulling this trick by now, but mostly because it’s not an act of creative laziness: it’s a pretty clever tool, drawing you back into Noel-world and bringing you immediately onside without you necessarily realising what’s happened. It’s a bit like sneaking vegetables into a toddler's dinner without them spotting it, or your Mum coming round to read you a bedtime story and adding surprisingly good new bits to your well-worn copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
He gets away with it because in spite of his reputation, Gallagher has definitely evolved. You get the sense of an artist having grown up a bit: Chasing Yesterday is a tasteful, coffee-table record of decent melodies and a pleasantly Seventies-ish cinematic feel. Hence we have the woozy, bloozy sax that brings us home in ‘The Riverman’, or ‘The Right Stuff’s groove-led move into light jazz, or the minor-key, understated disco of the four-to-the-smartly-carpeted-floor ‘You Know You Can’t Go Back’ and ‘The Ballad of the Mighty I’ (thanks in no small part to Johnny Marr’s perfectly pitched contributions on the latter). It’s a record that’s led by feel, that doesn’t attempt to bulldoze the listener with singer-songwriter cliches. Even in its most Oas-ish moments - the ballsy rock of ‘Lock All the Doors’ or ‘The Right Stuff’’s none-more-Noel guitar solo- the guitars sit back in the mix, and it’s the feel or the groove that set the pace. It makes Chasing Yesterday an exceptionally easy listen that manages to stay just the right side of Easy Listening. An excellent record for Sunday mornings or autumn car journeys, staring at the landscape going by.
Admittedly 'So What?' can only cover so much: Gallagher still writes words with an ear for melody over meaning, and he remains far wittier in interviews than he ever manages in his lyrics sheets. “Turn your page and let it go/like your mother told you so/ life it stretches on for miles/the truth is on your stereo” goes ‘The Girl With X-Ray Eyes’, which might be the most Noel Gallagher line ever written if it wasn’t trumped a few songs later with “I’ll try my best to get there/ but I can’t afford the bus fare/ And the storm that’s rolling over, man, it makes me wanna cry.” ‘The Mexican’ feels like a Some Girls-era Stones pastiche that lets its groove take it way too close to the land of self parody, and there’s at least three tracks here (‘In The Heat of the Moment’, ‘While the Song Remains the Same’, ‘You Know We Can’t Go Back’) that are so slight they depart your head as soon as they brush past your eardrum, though their brief stay isn’t an unpleasant one.
Still, it’s never less than an enjoyable listen and Gallagher can write melodies that aren’t just bullet-proof, but probably bomb-proof, tank proof and Death-Star proof as well. Ultimately Chasing Yesterday manages to both defy and justify expectations, good and bad, and proves itself, whether you realised it or not, exactly the record you wanted all along.