Noel Gallagher - The Biography. Lucian Randall
album track and he had come to record a number of vocal leads himself on the albums. He hadn’t got the nickname The Chief for nothing. Everyone one knew that he was the creative engine of Oasis and there was never any doubt that he could technically do it. But even with the two brothers’ relationship was at its tensest in Oasis, there was always the other one around somewhere – even if that was off stage shouting abuse. That October night there was no Liam.
There had always been hints that Noel Gallagher was a front man in waiting. A fully engaged presence in Oasis interviews he took the lead when the two brothers weren’t involved in one of their vaudeville banter routines. He was an arch manipulator of the press with an instinctive understanding of what made a great quote. He painted himself as a straightforward lad from Manchester’s Burnage, but he could also create as compelling an image of where Oasis stood in the great lineage of rock’n’roll. More arty bands like Radiohead – who he never lost a comic opportunity to dismiss for being clever but lacking passion in their music – were no more articulate and compelling in their vision.
Yet while his brother might take a secondary role with the journalists around, on stage Liam was more than a foil. His brooding, charismatic presence gave even his tambourine shaking a rattlesnake menace. The unmistakable roar of his vocals, their ebullient sneer and the way he could elongate vowels until they were offensive weapons defined the songs that his brother wrote. And the younger Gallagher kept the band visible even during time off with antics that delighted the tabloids. The very instability of the brothers’ relationship had for years seemed to be an intrinsic part of their creativity. It was simultaneously a soap opera and a reminder of real life in a music business that was increasingly engaged in auditioning itself out of real characters with endless talent shows.
Now it was Noel Gallagher fronting the whole show alone with just his High Flying Birds behind him at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin in autumn 2011. The band not only had to carry the weight of expectation felt by any new act but Gallagher had to find some way of presenting himself apart from Oasis. It was an unenviable position for anyone to be in, but Gallagher’s response to the questions that hung in the air was characteristically surefooted. He simply embraced his previous life with both arms.
He opened with not a song that was not only Oasis, the aptly-titled ‘(It’s Good) to be Free’, but had been the band’s first b-side originally sung by Liam on 1994’s ‘Supersonic’. Gallagher said that it had been included in the set after he had been playing around with the song in rehearsal with his new band and the rest of them all thought it was brilliant. But there was a wider significance to the start of the gig which no diverting anecdote could disguise. This opener was followed by another Oasis track – ‘Mucky Fingers’ from 2005’s Don’t Believe the Truth. In total the new band played nine songs from the old band – an incredible statement of intent from Gallagher. Here was a man clearly at ease with his old workplace.
When Gallagher’s inspiration and friend Paul Weller disbanded first the Jam and then the Style Council, he stayed away from much of their output. Robert Plant was initially shy of including Led Zeppelin material as he established his solo career away from Jimmy Page after the break-up of the band. All perfectly natural. The dissolution of any partnership, from the most intimate to the purely business is touchy and for musicians it can be a mixture of marriage and contractual entanglement. In an effort to define their new personas, ex-band mates will often turn their back on what made them famous, confining familiar numbers to the encore, although with time even the likes of Morrissey has allowed more Smiths tunes to creep into the set. Liam was the same when Beady Eye started in the wake of Oasis as – despite being the old outfit without the Noel – Liam, Gem Archer, Andy Bell and Chris Sharrock left the old catalogue untouched as they toured Different Gear, Still Speeding. But by early 2012, Liam was telling the press that future gigs would include Oasis tracks – ‘for anyone who’s bothered’.
His older brother simply seemed to feel no need to put the least amount of distance between himself and his previous output, even including such showstoppers as ‘Wonderwall’ and ‘Supersonic’ on that very first outing. Questions, anyone? He seemed to be asking. The Chief was getting back to business. Yet at the same time he was far from complacent. As much as he kept control of every aspect of his work, from demo to live sound, Gallagher was also a perfectionist. And as much as he was confident of the quality of his songs, he hadn’t been at all sure that the High Flying Birds venture would work until he had a chance to play a few gigs.
‘It’s easier than I thought it was going to be,’ he said. ‘I really thought I’d be a grumpy old man about it – I’ll just play these songs and if they like them, they like them and if they don’t, bugger them – but I kind of feel strangely relaxed about it.’ The old band weren’t around but he was also now only answerable to himself. If he messed up it was only a problem for him rather than something that affected everyone else in a group partnership.
That Gallagher saw no break with the past had already been established by the High Flying Birds’ eponymous album. Second track ‘Dream On’ dated back to the Oasis years, a slight number written towards the end of the sessions for 2008’s Dig Out Your Soul and he had even recorded a demo version of it with guitarist Gem Archer. ‘If I Had a Gun…’ came from the very last gasps of Oasis, having been written around spring of 2009. But these were just ghosts of the old band in comparison with closing track ‘Stop the Clocks’, which dated back a full ten years or so. A finished version of the track was rumoured to have been in line for inclusion on Don’t Believe the Truth in 2005 but Gallagher was never happy with the way it turned out. It was dropped a second time from the compilation album which took its name a year later and the fact that he was now finally allowing it to see the light of day was the clearest indication of how he saw his work as one continuous body. The same was true of ‘(I Wanna Live in a Dream in My) Record Machine’. It was another which had been left off Dig Out Your Soul, the final Oasis studio album, and here he re-recorded the instrumentation in a new key to suit his singing voice and added the choir that he had hoped to use on the original version. Noel Gallagher was showing himself to be a man as happy to claim his own heritage as he had done that of other notable bands in rock history when he first started with Oasis.
‘I probably won’t ever revisit it,’ said Gallagher of ‘Stop the Clocks’. ‘It’s kind of like a gift, clearing the decks for what comes next. The last postcard from the Oasis years.’ For Gallagher the work in Oasis hadn’t run its natural course, even if the band itself had.
And had they not broken up, many of the songs on Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds would no doubt have ended up appearing in some form on an Oasis release. It hadn’t, after all, been inevitable that Oasis would come to an end. The schism between the brothers had been widening for a long time, but then their relationship in public had always been uneasy from the moment they came to prominence. It was this tension that in part drove the band and if anything added to their appeal. Arguments similar to those that any ordinary family might have seemed to help create multi-million selling albums. They would fall out, have a battle of wits and get back together again – sometimes over the course of a single interview. But they always seemed to find some kind of entente cordiale in the end. They were for so long in a state of just about to have a final argument that when it happened for real it seemed more of a shock than had it been a fight that came out of nowhere.
When Gallagher did finally leave Oasis, it was with the end of the Dig Out Your Soul tour in sight. They had been touring the world since August 2008 and there had been disharmony within the band for a while. The end might have seemed to have come out of nowhere as far as anyone outside their immediate circle were concerned – although Gallagher seemed to be increasingly pictured alone or standing slightly away from the rest of the group in documentary footage of the time – but for Gallagher himself much of the tour had been characterised by a background of personal slights. There hadn’t been any one particular thing directed to his face but he spoke at the time of how it had got to the point where, if nothing else, Oasis needed to take a break from each other. It was no longer enjoyable. In an interview he gave to Q that June he was talking again about doing something on his own. The last album was already written before they went into the studio but he hadn’t even started on the next one.