We haven’t even sat down for the interview and Noel Gallagher is off on one. “I won’t be walking around with bags of dog s**t,” Gallagher, 47, announced. His two young sons, Donovan, seven, and Sonny, four, have been badgering his wife, Sara MacDonald, to buy a puppy. Gallagher fears he may have lost the battle. “But sometimes they go away, they go up to Scotland, and I’ll be left with the dog…,” he grumbled.
I first interviewed Gallagher more than 20 years ago. It was 1994 and I was in his hotel room in Glasgow. It was the year of Oasis’s debut album, Definitely Maybe, and the band, fronted by his younger brother, Liam, were supporting Verve.
Oasis were in their infancy but already had a reputation. That day in Glasgow, Noel broke off our interview to conduct a drug deal in front of me. Back then, such extracurricular distractions were part of the band’s day-to-day. He bursts out laughing when I remind him of this. “You should have joined in!” he said, laughing.
Definitely Maybe hit number one in September that year, making it at that point the fastest-selling debut album in British chart history. The following year they released (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, an album that has sold 22 million copies.
Oasis peaked, then peaked some more, then finally fell apart. The sibling squabbling that had characterised the relationship between Noel and Liam, five years his junior, turned toxic.
Noel launched a solo career under the banner Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds. An album of the same name topped the charts in 2011, and he will soon release a follow-up, Chasing Yesterday.
‘No, I’m a lazy c***’
His appetites these days are very different. He still likes a drink and a smoke, but he hasn’t touched cocaine since 1998. Like his friend (and neighbour) Paul Weller (former member of The Jam and The Style Council), teetotal for five years and also about to release a new album, he has moderated his highs.
But what of Gallagher’s journey? How is middle age treating him?
“Good,” he said briskly. “Good. It ebbs and flows for me. When I’m in between tours and have f***-all to do, I sit around and I do become like a dad. I don’t really do a great deal. I’ve got nothing. Not a great deal to look forward to, and no projects.”
There are, he cheerfully concedes, no hobbies keeping his idle hands busy. “This is my hobby. It’s what I do. So Sara is constantly on my case. She’ll burst in from the gym, jogging on the spot. ‘What you doing today? You’re watching Storage Hunters?’ Me and my lads love that show!” he said of the American reality TV series about a pair of burly men who auction off the contents of lock-ups. “And I’m thinking, ‘Ha, yes, I am — I’ve just been round the world for the last 18 months, so I am gonna watch Storage Hunters all day!’ But,” he said, “she kind of badgers me into doing s**t.”
Would Sara say he was good around the house?
“No, I’m a lazy c***!’ he replies chirpily. ‘She’ll always pick stuff out of the sink and go, ‘There is a dishwasher here.’”
Gallagher saves his own frustrations for the songs playlisted on the nation’s big radio stations. “Oh, it annoys me,” he said, admitting to swearing at the wireless. “I’ll be going, ‘F***ing hell! That’s s**t, man!’ Or, “I predict a rap in this song –– oh, there it is!’ Sara has said: “Look, you can’t do this in front of the kids any more. They’re growing up.’ And I am constantly apologising to my teenage daughter. Saying that,” he sniffed, “it’s the only thing that brings her up from her phone.”
Recovering from a ‘dogs**t year’
Yes, Noel wrote the lion’s share of Oasis’s songs but Liam was the charismatic, rock ’n’ roll frontman. Noel was the scowly guitarist happy to stand stage left. But Gallagher comfortably negotiated the post-Oasis wreckage. The Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds album was successful on a level that he might not have anticipated.
After the tour finished and he returned home to London, Gallagher found himself stuck in 2013 –– a “dogs**t year”, as he later described it. “It was awful. I had glandular fever, then I went for my annual health check-up. And honest to God I felt all right when I went in, and the doctor made me feel like I was about to drop dead in the street when I came out. I won’t go into it,” he said, alluding to an unspecified medical condition, “but I [also] got tinnitus in my ear, and I pulled two muscles in the back of my hand. Not from playing guitar; I cracked it on the side of something, and I bashed round the casing of the nerves. It was horrible. I couldn’t even put my hand in my pocket.
“Then I went on holiday with the kids. And I was getting out of a swimming pool with one of them in my hand and did my back in. Then my doctor put me on these tablets –– I won’t tell you what for,” he said again, “[and] told me that if I didn’t take them I would virtually drop dead. I was taking them for months and they made me feel awful. So I quit taking them and I feel great again. But I was thinking, the health game’s a racket.
“So that was a terrible year. But then again, as soon as I got back to work –– I started this album on January 6, 2014 –– that took my mind off it, and I was all right.”
‘I don’t consider myself a frontman’
Gallagher insists that he is not entirely indolent when he doesn’t have a guitar in his hands. “I go to the gym every day –– I’m lucky enough to have a gym in my house, so I don’t have to deal with the general public,” said this multi-millionaire who, it should be noted, is still a committed user of public transport, patron of supermarkets and corner shops, and is a famously generous giver of time and attention to selfie-seeking fans.
This far into his solo career, is Noel Gallagher now comfortable as a frontman? “Not really. The frontman doesn’t play the guitar, right?”
What about Chris Martin? Or Bono?
“Let’s get one thing straight about Bono,” he said of the occasional dining companion he credits with/blames for persuading him to ditch his new album’s original title, ‘Show Me the Treasure’. “The further away Bono stays from a guitar, the better. Chris Martin is a frontman, but not when he’s playing the guitar. Mick Jagger is a frontman. When he plays the guitar he looks like a d**k. Liam used to pick up the guitar and we’d all go, ‘Ha ha, no. What are you playing it up there [on your chest] for?’
“I don’t consider myself a frontman. You think Paul Weller is a frontman? He’s fronting nothing; he’s fronting himself. But I know what you mean. And lucky for me, if you’re coming to see me, don’t bother, because there’s f***-all to see. But if you’re coming to listen, and to have a good night singing, yeah, great, I’m your man. But to see? There’s no pearls of wisdom, I’m afraid,” he said, smiling. “All I’ve got is the music.”
So, what would 24-year-old Noel make of the 47-year-old incarnation? “Phew,” he exhaled, pausing for an uncharacteristically long time (about three seconds). “I would look back at the 24-year-old and think, ‘Well, he had a vision.’ And I guess the 24-year-old would look at me now and think, ‘Well, he carried it through. He did it.’”
Craig McLean
(The Daily Telegraph)
Noel Gallagher rocks because.... Tell t2@abp.in
