After an attack by a hooligan in September, you might expect the Oasis guitarist to be more careful than usual when he plays London, Ont., tonight. Then again, he's not one to worry, Brad Wheeler writes
Before sitting down with him, if I had to describe Noel Gallagher.
I might have said something like "quotable British rock star" or "the talent half of the battling Oasis brothers" or "the bushy-browed Wonderwall writer."
I would probably have added that he fancies a pub session now and again, that he's a blokey football fan, that he picks the Beatles over the Stones, and that even though he's the band's guitarist he's a far better singer than his testy sibling Liam.
After meeting with Gallagher though, "unfussy, polite and unworried" would be attached to the full assessment. And, sure, I'd stick with "bushy-browed."
On the morning before Oasis played Toronto's Virgin Festival in September, Gallagher tended to the media.
The Manchester superstars were talking up their seventh studio album (the blues-stomping, psychedelic Dig Out Your Soul), and the headlining festival set on the city's Olympic Island would showcase the new material. "I have no idea who puts that stage up, or where those lights come from or how it all works," said
Gallagher, no micromanager. "It's not something I sit and analyze. Somebody else organizes it, and they point me to the stage. I just get up there and I do it. And I go get drunk and do it again the next day."
Until I mentioned it, nobody had told Gallagher that Liam wouldn't be fulfilling his share of interviews that day. "Oh, is he not feeling well," he asked, his voice dripping with something other than sympathy. "Well, he better be brilliant tonight hadn't he?"
Gallagher suspected his younger brother, bunked at another hotel, had over-socialized the night before. As it turned out, it would be Noel's condition, not Liam's, that mattered.
As we all know now, Oasis's performance was wrecked outrageously by a hooligan who violently charged Noel from behind on stage, sending the guitarist tumbling awkwardly into a bank of stage monitors, damaging his ribs in the process. It was a brutish, shocking incident, as YouTube videos show so clearly. After an interlude, the band finished its set in a subdued manner. A few gigs were cancelled as a wincing Gallagher recuperated.
The band has since resumed performing, including a concert tonight at the John Labatt Centre in London, Ont., where, you might imagine, the slapdash Gallagher will pay more attention to security details than usual.
When Gallagher referred to being pointed to the stage, he was responding to a question on the rock 'n' roll grind, and the balance of family and professional life. He finds it easier than you might imagine to deal with the double routines, choosing to separate them, rather than straddle the divide.
"On the last night of the last tour, the very next day, when I get back to England, I'm just the guy who's got two kids then," Gallagher, 41, explains. "I spend time doing the things you would imagine a dad with a young family does."
And then, after a year or two of puttering, dad puts his songwriting hat on, which is the initial step back into the rowdy music life. Eventually an album is written, recorded and released, and then the pipes call. "My family knows," says Gallagher, dressed sensibly in jeans and a windbreaker. "Like now, for instance, I'm in a band and I'm on the road. And that's the way it's going to be for the next two years."
That's the way it has been since 1994, with the release of Oasis's breakthrough debut Definitely Maybe, continuing with the fellow mega-selling (What's the Story) Morning Glory in 1995 and Be Here Now in 1997. Asked about the pressure to produce material that measures up to those early albums, Gallagher says he doesn't feel it, that any monetary concerns were taken care of with Morning Glory. "If I wanted to take five years off after this record, I could do it easily."
If Oasis, notorious for its wild ways and sibling rivalry, were to break up, Gallagher still wouldn't fret. "If the worst was going to come, I can always pick up an acoustic guitar and do a gig anywhere in London," he says, not to boast. "I could sell out Albert Hall like that," he says with a dry snap of his fingers. (Okay, now he's boasting a little bit.) Noel did tour without Liam while promoting the band's rockumentary Lord Don't Slow Me Down in 2006, and he recently said he wouldn't mind seeing the four band members pursue their own projects after the current Oasis tour.
As of now, after a slate of European dates in January and a Japan tour to follow, Oasis is scheduled to launch its biggest-ever tour of open-air stadiums in Britain in the summer, closing with a pair of concerts at Wembley Stadium in July.
Gallagher has his music career and his domestic life, the two rarely meeting, even though Oasis typically breaks for a week for every three on the road. "I'll still be in rock-star mode," he says, referring to the monthly furloughs. "You can't be all things to all people all the time. You can't be on the road and try to be a good dad and a responsible adult."
Irresponsibility these days, as Gallagher tells it, runs mostly to drinking and related capers - "there's nothing else to do" - but not to the heavier stuff. "I've done all that," he admits, with a wave of his hand. "It would be quite sad if I was into drugs. I mean, what would you have done if your parents were into drugs when you were growing up?"
I had no answer, but I suspected Robert Downey Jr., in town at the time for the Toronto International Film Festival, might. Before I could suggest we ask the actor about all this, Gallagher, whose morning glory used to be cocaine, continues with what might wryly pass for a public-service announcement to school children. "There comes a point when you've got to grow up, you know what I mean? I'll leave the drug-taking to the youth, and get on with it."
If Gallagher isn't indulging in hallucinogens himself, Dig Out Your Soul is awash with psychedelic moods, starting off with the acid-rocked Bag It Up, with lines about freaks rising up through the floor and heebie-jeebies in hidden sacks. Gallagher describes it as "the Pretty Things vs. Pink Floyd on glue"; I would counter with "the White Stripes take a Magical Mystery Tour." Beatles influences abound elsewhere, from a guitar riff scalped from Helter Skelter, to a taped John Lennon spoken-word clip, to the Revolver-era existentialism of To Be Where There's Life.
On the whole, it's the most produced album the band has put out, with fade-ins, fade-outs and lavish, hazy textures. For all of that, the group's leader takes little responsibility. "It was great fun, but I'm not one for experimenting," says Gallagher, who does not own a computer (or even a driver's licence, for that matter). "I don't really have the time to sit around all day and make things sound like airplanes taking off. I'm not interested in effects pedals or anything like that, but, luckily for me, other people are."
Gallagher acknowledges and dismisses the material's spiritual bent in one fell swoop, pointing out that the lyrics of Waiting for the Rapture, The Nature of Reality and the album-closing mantra of Soldier On were written independently by himself, bassist Andy Bell and Liam, respectively. "We seem to have made a record with the most cohesive thread to it, and yet it all happened by accident.
"If I were to go away and write an album that I thought had a common thread to it," Gallagher continues, "for one, I'd pick the wrong thread, and two, I'd lose it after about three songs."
Non-conceptualist Gallagher acknowledges Dig Out Your Soul isn't the style of record Oasis fans have come to expect. He guesses the next album will be more "song-y" and melodic. "I write rock 'n' roll pop music that tends to be accessible to a lot of people," he says. "When I pick up the guitar, I'm not trying to challenge myself and write space jazz or anything like that."
Nor would anyone wish him to. Oasis fans would settle for a wistful singalong like Don't Look Back in Anger or the grand ballad Wonderwall. They'll probably come, either on a solo album or the next record from Oasis, don't worry. Gallagher himself isn't.
Oasis plays the John Labatt Centre in London, Ont., tonight at 7.
Attack aftermath
Noel Gallagher doesn't look back in anger. The concert tonight by England's Oasis in London, Ont., makes up for a show postponed from September, after the rock-star guitarist was attacked on stage at Toronto's Virgin Festival. Recovered from the blindsided assault, Gallagher recently commented on the incident publicly, saying that he actually didn't remember much about it. "I was just playing away in my own little world. I had my back turned, and the next thing I know it was total chaos all of a sudden."
Gallagher insisted he had no hang-over effects from the attack, physically ("It was two months with three broken ribs and five bruised ones") or mentally ("I'm not that fragile upstairs"). The alleged assailant, Daniel Sullivan, a father of three from Pickering, Ont., is scheduled to be in a Toronto court for a hearing tomorrow.
Source: www.theglobeandmail.com
