Noel Gallagher - The Biography. Lucian Randall
someone so intimately associated with rock’n’roll mayhem he was a surprisingly upbeat and positive character.
Yet he was also a realist and while he could be deafeningly vocal about his talent and his standing in the rock’n’roll hall of fame, he talked like a man very willing to pay his dues as a solo artist in order to win his audience over again. The month after his wedding, Gallagher held a press conference to confirm the details of his solo album. Ever aware of his duty to entertain, he said he had decided that ‘Noel Gallagher’ on its own didn’t sound ‘showbiz’ enough. ‘It’s hardly Ziggy Stardust,’ he said. Oasis, for all its plain dealing in its public persona, had been designed to be about escaping the mundane. Not for Gallagher the leap from Style Council to plain old Paul Weller. ‘I didn’t see my name in lights. I was passing Shepherds Bush Empire [in west London] one night and someone was on there and… I just don’t see it.’ The line-up was fluid, he said, but if it ever became something more permanent he would just drop the ‘Noel Gallagher’s’ bit. His new trading name itself hinted at a kind of ambiguity in his feelings about the solo life. There was the practical inclusion of his name, so there could be no doubt as to who was behind it – he said the inspiration came from Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac. But then there was the rest of it, as if he was still not entirely sure that he didn’t want a band around him.
Of the rest of the High Flying Birds, bassist Russell Pritchard came from the Zutons, the quirky Liverpool indie band who had come to Gallagher’s attention after frequently supporting Oasis in the early 2000s. Hearing that a new band was on the cards, he had simply asked Gallagher if he could be in it. The drummer was Jeremy Stacey, brother of Gallagher’s friend and sometime collaborator Paul. Keyboardist Mike Rowe had often appeared with Oasis live and had contributed to Be Here Now and Heathen Chemistry, while US-born Tim Smith had been in a number of bands such as the quirky American pop act Jellyfish and as part of the back-up for Sheryl Crow. The album’s supporting musicians included, from the unremarkable north London district of the same name, the Crouch End Festival Chorus. They were also enlisted by Gallagher to accompany the band on their arena tour in 2012. And the ‘High Flying Bird’ itself flew in off a track on 1974’s Early Flight, by US rockers Jefferson Airplane.
The band had impeccable pedigree but the chart experience of Beady Eye showed that success was not at all ordained. Yet Gallagher had been prepared for reality from the start. He had already said he was fairly certain that he wouldn’t be doing stadium gigs without Oasis. When a journalist suggested that one man like Paul McCartney could fill a stadium, Gallagher said, ‘But then he was in the Beatles… Well – I suppose I was in Oasis!’ It was almost as if he needed to remind himself that he could do this thing. He was as blunt about his chances now as he had been confident about the future as a younger man. Almost hesitatingly, he said he could probably fill an arena – at least in Manchester. ‘I’ve not been in this position since Definitely Maybe, where it’s just like, “We’ll put this album out, don’t know what’s going to happen”.’
At the same time as plans for the High Flying Birds were announced, Gallagher said that he was collaborating with eccentric electronic duo Amorphous Androgynous. It was an intriguing counterpoint to the more traditional line-up of his other new band, although perhaps a little too different, as the results seemed unlikely to see the light of day at the time of writing. Amorphous Androgynous had previously provided one of the more sprawling remixes of Oasis’s final single, ‘Falling Down’, clocking in at over 20 minutes. Gallagher had first got in touch with the pair, Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans, after enjoying a psychedelic compilation album they issued. Like Gallagher, the two were veterans, their work dating back to 1980s’ act Future Sound of London. It would be far from the first time that Gallagher had dabbled in electronica, having guested before with the likes of the Chemical Brothers.
Gallagher’s interest in working with Amorphous Androgynous again showed how wide he was casting his net. It was almost as if he couldn’t be sure that rock’n’roll with Noel as a front man would work out and he was going to try all sorts of different projects. Yet while Gallagher confirmed work was advanced with the Amorphous Androgynous collaboration, it almost immediately began to recede into the background. The sessions were reported to be at the experimental end of the studio – and it was easier to see how that was more possible without Liam around. ‘He has an irrational fear of keyboards,’ Noel had said back in 2008. ‘But this is the man who thought we had gone too dance when I wrote “Wonderwall” because the drums didn’t go “boom-boom bap, boom-boom-bap”.’ Noel’s attitude was not so straightforward. Oasis would seem to suggest that he adhered to the absolute basics, but he had always been intrigued by the possibilities afforded by embracing samples and loops. His frequent references to Radiohead in interview, although mostly mocking, suggested that something about the process of playing with technology held some kind of fascination for him, however uneasy.
Conventional strings and choir would be a hallmark of the High Flying Birds’ album and they were recorded in the same night on hallowed ground for Gallagher, the legendary Beatles home turf of Abbey Road. The guitar sound was also augmented in less traditional ways. When it came to ‘The Death of You and Me’, Gallagher couldn’t make the melody work any other way but on trumpet. He was a long-time admirer of Kasabian, who had come up in Oasis’s wake and had indeed been seen as pretenders to the throne. It was their trumpet player, Gary Alesbrook, who he recruited to lead the New Orleans-woozy brass section for the song. It went on to be the first single from the album, with a video shot near Los Angeles, in and around a diner that had been first built for the 1991 Dennis Hopper movie Eye of the Storm. Over the chirpy rolls of the guitar, the clip depicts Gallagher in the diner, writing and gazing out from his table, meeting the prickly gaze of the Mojave Desert through his shades. ‘My favourite pastime,’ Gallagher said, ‘is staring out of the window. When I get on tour I can spend hours and hours just staring out of the window, just thinking of nothing. I love all that.’
The diner provided a setting that was continued in the promos for the next two singles, the follow-up ‘AKA… What a Life!’ featuring former best man Russell Brand in full flow. More importantly, ‘The Death of You and Me’, released on 21 August, answered the most immediate question of how the world would take to a Noel without an Oasis by hitting UK No 15. ‘AKA… What A Life!’ was released on 9 September and that peaked at UK No 20. Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds followed on 17 October and was a UK No 1, also hitting US No 5 in Billboard’s 200. The world had decided it liked Noel Gallagher on his own. By 2012, the album had sold more than 600,000 copies in the UK alone, making it a double platinum release, while by contrast Different Gear, Still Speeding had managed just over 165,000.
The NME was rather equivocal in its review of Gallagher’s album in the main, although it did end with a shout of encouragement: ‘Fuck radio, fuck the charts and fuck nerves. Noel’s still got it. Only a fool would write him off.’ Meanwhile, the dependably acerbic Alexis Petridis in the Guardian noted of the traditional aspects of Gallagher’s writing that some had said that ‘“Dream On” represents a diversion into “Dixieland jazz”: it’s got a trombone on it – which in fairness is one trombone more than Oasis ever featured – but then so did “The Floral Dance” by the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band.’ Even the Guardian allowed that for all its conservatism, ‘For now, it’ll do that it’s a more enjoyable album than Oasis’ latter-day catalogue.’
And there was certainly no bluster on the album. Gallagher’s vocals were nuanced and rather than trying to recreate the swagger of the band he’d left behind, he soaked the songs in the experience of his years. There was an arresting brightness to the album which marked it out as an assured statement. …High Flying Birds never needed to sound like an album with from somebody with something still to prove – but it did. In a way it seemed like the album he had been building up to, sounding all the more coherent and rewarding for not attempting to recreate the primal energy of the first Oasis albums. Its invention and atmosphere were something very different. Gallagher seemed very much to have remained in love with making records. He had said it himself over the years but it never seemed truer than after he left Oasis.
His music was still fuelled by his belief that it should be essentially