Two years and two months after leaving Oasis, Noel Gallagher says that "it's nice to start again and shape things from the bottom up." But he still has ambivalent feelings about becoming a full-fledged frontman with his new solo album, "Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds."
"I wouldn't say I've enjoyed it more or less than when I've been in a band," Gallagher tells Billboard.com. "It can't be more fun being a front man than it is being a guitarist and a backing vocalists. That's the greatest f***ing gig in rock...You don't really have to do anything but play the guitar really f***ing loud and sing harmony. That's easy. That's amazing. To be a front man is going to be a new experience for me."
"...High Flying Birds" is just out in the U.K., where it's pegged for a chart-topping debut, and comes out on Nov. 8 in the U.S. The album includes a pair of songs -- "(I Wanna Live In A Dream) In My Record Machine" and "Stop The Clocks" -- that were demoed for Oasis but never recorded by the band, but that Gallagher felt "were great songs, and...if I don't put them out now I'll never put them out, so now is the time." Some of the other tracks, meanwhile, were written while he was still in Oasis. But you won't find him singing about the group or his bitter relationship with younger brother and former Oasis singer (now Beady Eye frontman) Liam Gallagher.
"I'm not that kind of guy, really," Gallagher explains. "My first instinct when I write songs is not a negative one. It's something positive...Everything I've ever done has some form of hope in it, I think. So I wouldn't write a song about my feelings towards anyone in, let's call them Beady Eye, because I actually like those people."
Gallagher takes his touring lineup of the High Flying Birds on the road starting Oct. 23 in Dublin. An initial North American run kicks off Nov. 7 in Toronto before he returns to Europe at the end of that month, and he promises he'll be doing "a lot" of road work to support the album. "I'm gonna be all over the world," Gallagher promises, including "a bigger, more extensive tour" of North America in 2012. "You're going to be sick of me in about two years. You're gonna think, 'That f***ing guy, is he still here?!'"
The shows will feature Oasis songs, Gallagher says, though he adds that, "I don't think of Oasis songs anymore. They're my songs. Every song that I play I wrote by myself... I won't be doing anything that's synonymous with Liam's voice. I'll only be doing songs that I've sang on records, so it should be OK."
Gallagher will be putting out more music sooner rather than later. He's already completed his next album, a collaboration with the Future Sound of London spin-off Amorphous Androgynous that he hopes to put out next summer. "I don't want to say too much about it yet," he explains, "but it's not an electronic album; it's a psychedelic rock-pop album, and I'm not quite sure how people are going to take it. It's less structured than my traditional English pop music." Gallagher re-recorded four of the songs from "...High Flying Birds," which he says sound "very different," along with 10 new originals.
His game plan for the future, meanwhile, is to make another album with Amorphous Androgynous "because I think we were just getting to know each other's ways of working when the project ended." Gallagher says he'd also like to score a film, but mostly he predicts he'll "just carry on making records, really. I'll just play my music and tour endlessly."
As for any Oasis reunion, he only replies, "Not this year."
Source: www.billboard.com
