The Amorphous Androgynous Speak On The Album They Recorded With Noel Gallagher

Garry Cobain from The Amorphous Androgynous has spoken about the scrapped album with Noel Gallagher to the NME, below are extracts from the interview. 

You can read the interview in full here.

What happened to the album you did with Noel Gallagher?

“He hasn’t destroyed the masters because I’ve got them, haven’t I? Of course! How has the producer who made the record alone in a room for 18 months and only worked directly with Noel for three weeks not have the masters? I wouldn’t release somebody else’s music because he’s paid for it, but I may or I may not be still working on bits – interesting question.”

How far out did the record get?

“I’m used to really battling to get things through the final hurdles. It required the kind of artistic process that I’m used to, but when you’re dealing with the chief songwriter of Oasis who’s got his own ways of producing things, it took a long time to get over those hurdles. It’s gonna be very different to the way he does it. It wasn’t our album so it was like, ‘We’re making an album for you, remixing, putting different backing around your songs, collaborating directly with you at points’, but then I delivered that work with loads of forks in the road.”

And then it all came to a halt?

“He basically went on tour and we never got to do the final mixing. To me, that’s more of a mystery than anything else. It was really wild and it’s a real shame because it wouldn’t have taken that much more of a relationship. There was some art, it got to almost being finished and I think it’s a real fucking shame. It’s still sitting there and it’s still extraordinary. I think people would love to hear it.”

He said he felt like he was making a record for you…

“Absolutely not. I couldn’t be more co-operative if I fucking tried. My job as a producer is to try to gently encourage people to surprise themselves. I’ve got better at that [but] I wanted collaboration [in a way] that maybe he wasn’t prepared to be collaborative. The truth is I think he thought we were gonna remix his songs and we weren’t gonna push collaboratively. The absolute opposite actually happened. I became the producer and I got really involved with him deep down and dirty, started trying to illicit deeper performances from him and I got them on some occasions. I think he even surprised himself. We got in a room with him, we pushed him, we argued with him.”

So it felt collaborative to you?

“I was very collaborative. We had the odd little argument but generally we were really buzzing. I was DJing at his album launch, he came over to me at that party and said ‘I’m gonna finish the mixes on these, it’s gonna be the second best rock album of all time’. Then I start to get bad-mouthed in the press, but I don’t really hold him much malice. Take it from me, the record is great, a lot of work was done, he was inspired by it.”

Have you fallen out?

“No, we’ve not fallen out at all. The way I view this is that it’s a relationship. As a producer you have to work with the person you’re with and I could’ve done better at that. So I’ve learned from it. I love Noel, I don’t agree with the way he’s handled some of it, but I understand – he makes his decisions that work for him at that point. I sat with him in a room, I’ve seen him surprised by what he can do when he’s inspired in a slightly different way.”