Noel Gallagher on Oasis
Broadcast 3 Oct 2001

Ahead of their special gigs to celebrate ten years performing live Noel Gallagher joined Steve Lamacq to talk in depth about Oasis. Along for the ride were four Oasis fans who helped Steve interview Noel, who was on good form proudly talking about the band.

Noel spent a good hour and a half with Steve and the fans, and we've been through the tapes to put together an extended version of the interview which was broadcast on the Evening Session on October 3rd. On these pages you can hear over an hour of Noel talking openly about the band's past, telling what really happened, and looking to the future.

Have you been rehearsing for the weekend?
We've been doing it for two weeks now. The first seven songs sound amazing.

There's a mixture of material, isn't there?
Yeah, I think we're only playing four singles. It's all album tracks and B-sides. There's a few songs we've never even played before- they sound pretty ropey! But hopefully the atmosphere of the gig will carry that off.

I should introduce the people who are with us, who won the competition to come along and join us for tonight's programme. Sean... who is an aspiring musician who once got played on John Peel, is that right?
S: That's right, yeah.
N: What were they called?
S: The Child At Mind.

We've also got Alexis who is from Doncaster and has 'Liam' tattooed on her ankle. Is that true?
A: Yeah.
N: You can always change it to William and pretend you pulled the Prince.
A: I had it done when I was 15.
N: And by the way, if you're listening, it's underneath a picture of a smurf.

And we've got Adam from under the table who first heard Supersonic on the Evening Session, is that right?
Ad: Yeah, I was waiting for the Stone Roses at the time.

We all were!... And finally Luke, whose Dad got him into Definitely Maybe about four years ago.
N: How old's your Dad?
L: He's about forty four... .He's got a wicked music collection.

It's something that's happening at the moment, just in the way people are finding Nirvana after Nirvana split. Is this happening with yourselves?
N: When we wrote 'Live Forever' and we played it to people for the first time to me it should have been a number one single all around the world. People were saying it was a disgrace [that it wasn't] but it didn't really matter because the song is so timeless that it will stand the test of time and it will probably get in the top ten another three or four times. When I die it will get in the top ten, when Liam dies it will get in the top ten. It's just one of those songs. We always felt we had a timeless quality to the music anyway. You have bands that come out now using big name producers and cutting edge technology and it's just like a fleeting moment. It sounds good for that year and maybe a year afterwards and after that you just think 'What was all that about?'

What did you think when Liam first joined the band?
I was on tour with the Inspiral Carpets in Hamburg and I phoned home to speak my mum and she said that Liam's joined the band. I was flabbergasted because he's never picked up a guitar in his life. I'd shared a room with him for all my life and I'd played the guitar and he'd never joined in. So I said, 'What's he doing?' and she said 'Well, he's the singer.' I was speechless and desperate to go home and check it out. I wanted to point at him and start laughing, you know!

Did you want to be in a band at the time?
I'd only just learned to play guitar standing up at that point. I'd be playing the thing for as long as I remember. I got it before my guitar strap so I started playing it on my knee. Then as I was setting up for the Inspirals I realised it was difficult playing guitar standing up, you had to get your hands in a different position and stuff. I think the plan was to be in a band but it's always hard to find the right people. I don't want to be in a band with a bunch of nobs.

What was the first gig like with you in the line-up?
I was petrified. There were about six people there at the Boardwalk. Liam looked pretty cool obviously... Guigsy had this five-string bass, and we had to take him to one side afterwards and say, no Level 42 nonsense here, get a new bass or take one of the strings off. And then they said I'd be their manager afterwards, which I laughed at. Why would I want to be your manager? You look awful. You haven't got any tunes. Then it was like, I'll write some songs then. Then they asked if I wanted to join, and I was like, 'Alright.'

Some time after you started playing in the band... there's the famous Glasgow King Tut gig where Alan McGee saw you for the first time. Now how much of this story is myth and legend and how much of it is true.
We shared a rehearsal room with a girl band called Sisters Lovers. One of them used to go out with McGee, Debbie Turner I believe. She knew a lot of people in Glasgow and it was 18 Wheeler's gig, McGee had just signed them. So they knew them and had invited the Sisters Lovers to play along with them. And for some reason, I don't know why, they thought it would be a good reason to get us up to play. We weren't invited by anybody, they asked if we wanted to go do this gig with them in Scotland and we were like 'Of course.' So we hired a minibus and we got all our mates and we charged them, well we worked out it cost seventeen quid each to get up to Scotland and back again, and we paid for the petrol and the driver and the booze and all that. So we got up there and we knocked on the door and said 'We're Oasis from Manchester.' They said we weren't due to play there tonight, and we said it's alright cos someone else had sorted it out blah blah blah. There was a lot of blagging going on anyway. They let us in with all the equipment, so we sat at the back. They said they only had got a license for three bands because of the curfew and all that nonsense. So we watched 18 Wheeler and Sisters Lovers and some other group who probably got signed by McGee after that.
We went up to see the owner of the club and we didn't threaten to smash the place up, or intimidate anybody, but we did say, we've travelled all this way, we've charged all these guys money- it's not even as if they wanted to see us play! -so out of politeness can you give us ten minutes. So he said fair enough and we did four songs, and one of them was 'Wonderwall' which went on for twenty minutes. What would happen is I would put my guitar down and leave it feeding back and go stand at the back. McGee came up to me and asked what the band was called and if we had a record deal. I said no and he asked if I wanted one. I asked with who, and he said 'With me,' so I was like 'Who Are you,' and he said 'Alan McGee.' He had a skinhead at this point and I had always seen him on telly with this big ginger afro. I gave him a copy of the demo but he gave it back to me saying he didn't want to hear it, so then we managed to persuade him to take it back to London. When we got back to Manchester we phoned a few people who knew him and said, 'Is he liable to be ************ us,' and they were like 'Yeah, absolutely!' Then we got in touch and he was deadly serious, and we went down to see him.

There's various amount of gigging to be done after you eventually sign the deal which leads you all around Europe, and leads you getting kicked off a ferry coming back from Holland.
We were doing this gig with the Verve. We were signed to Sony International and we managed to blag this gig with the Verve in Amsterdam. Sony had organised that all the licensees from all the different record companies were coming to see Oasis. We were in the middle of recording and they were coming to see us in England because we weren't playing after that particular three months. Instead of sending us on a plane they send me, Liam, Bonehead, Guigs, Tony McCarrol, Tony who is our roady, Mark Coyle and Phil Smith who was our front of house guy and basically our best mate, to Ipswich to get this overnight ferry.
Unbeknownst to us it was pre-season and I think West Ham and Chelsea were playing some pre-season friendlies in Holland. Of course unbeknownst to West Ham and Chelsea and us lot we were all on the ferry together. It's taken us nine hours to get up to Ipswich because of the stopping off and drinking and stuff like that, so by the time we get on this ferry there's a disco, right? So we got on the ferry and proceeded to get absolutely ****faced. Proper drinking, none of your nonsense, just proper drinking... Somehow all the West Ham fans and all the Chelsea and got into a fight. So Liam, being Liam, got up to have a look. One of the guys said to Liam, 'If you don't shut your mouth, I'll knock you out.' And he was about to say 'It'll take more than you,' and he got to 'It'll take' and he was on the floor.
One of the police hand-cuffed him and threw him in the dungeon or whatever it's called. So I said I was leaving because they looked like pretty heavy geezers... so I went out for a walk and when I got back it had all kicked off, and when I looked down the stairs I saw Guigs was handcuffed, Liam was handcuffed, Bonehead had had lost all use of the muscles in his neck and his head was just spinning round completely. I don't know what Tony McCall was doing, I think he got nicked just because he looked daft. So me Cally and Phil went back to the bunk and we got up the next day and they [the police] said 'Are you here with these lot?' and we said: 'Never seen them before in my entire life, Officer.' So we just went off to Amsterdam and took two days off and got very, very mellow.

From there you did Radio One Sound City in Glasgow...
I remember Jo Whiley introducing us and saying 'They've got the weight of the music industry on their shoulders.'... I'd just signed off six weeks before, so it was like Thanks for that, stick some more pressure on us why don't you?

Track: 'Wibbling Rivalry' - Liam and Noel arguing

You didn't do many interviews together for a while after that...
We just did the first one since then together for the NME. I can imagine me now walking around the hotel room pontificating; it was a funny night. It ended up getting in the charts, that record, number 50 or something. At that point, we had a single in the charts with us arguing about what it was to be rock'n'roll. If I was sixteen and I was into music and I had heard that from this band in Manchester, and I'd seen a picture of them, I thought 'I'm having that.' It's that un-nameable thing. You don't know why you like it.
It wasn't everyone who decided that Oasis were the next big thing. There were one or two doubters around the country. As we'll see...

The story was that someone got out of the audience and smacked you one...
The whole incident, from the start of the guy giving me a belt to going back on and finishing the gig was only about two or three minutes. It was chaos. I remember listening to Jo's bit of it and she was saying it's really going to get really, really ugly. It was just one of those things. I don't know why the guy did it, but I had a black eye for a couple of days. Which meant I had to legitimately wear sunglasses indoors and outdoors for a week so I was quite made up with that. I wangled another couple of days out of it as well!

Where was the security?
It was in the Newcastle Riverside and we didn't have security guards then. We were travelling around in a transit van. Our manager would just send us out on the road. We were a little cult band and we were selling out all the gigs we were playing and there was a real intense buzz about it, but it wasn't huge. I've spoken to people down the years when we've gone back to Newcastle who have met the guy who started, and they asked him why he did it He said, which I find laughable, that he'd done it so Oasis would never come to Newcastle again and would go off to Middlesborough.

[The success of] 'Definitely Maybe' makes total sense now, doesn't it, when you talk to people who were running the length of cities and buying the album on the first day...
...The fastest selling debut album, yeah. To me, 'Definitely Maybe' will be the album that always stands up because you try so hard when you go in the studio to get the song as you perceive it in your head, and as you grow as a musician it gets more complicated, but with the first album we just plugged the amps in and said, 'Right, after four.' I can be big-headed about that album because to this day, by a debut band, it hasn't been bettered. People say it captured a moment but it wasn't really meant to. I think there's only one line of social comment on there and that's in 'Cigarettes and Alcohol' where it says: 'Is it worth the aggravation to find yourself a job / if there's nothing worth working for?' which I didn't realise was a social comment until McGee was telling me one night. I was like, 'Right. I'm a social commentator. Can I have another large whiskey, please?'

You're in a band that's been going a fair few years. You've gone through a few difficulties in your time. How do you manage to keep it fresh where you still enjoy what you're doing?
I've been asking myself that question. I'm not good at anything else. There are days when you're having a bad time on tour or you come back from rehearsals and think 'I'm not getting off on this anymore.' A lot of bands split up on snap decisions and stupid arguments. I tend to keep my mouth shut a lot more now and just go home and kick next door's cat.

So you think the snap-decision makers are too proud to go back and say 'C'mon, lets forget the arguments and get on with it.'
I can't speak for the people in the groups but I would imagine that maybe the Smiths, the Verve and the Stone Roses are thinking What If? I think The Smiths would have been the biggest band ever, ever, ever if they had stuck together another six months. As I think the Verve would have been, The Stone Roses would have been, if they had got past those hurdles. But people in bands aren't the most easy-going of people. There's all politics going on behind the scenes...

Do you take lessons from seeing what happened?
I don't know what Liam would do if we split up, I don't know what I'd do. I'd still probably make music, and I'd be pretty good at it, but do I really want to be in charge of other people. The answer is No, I want to be with my mates in the dressing room. Me and Liam can really physically punch holes out of each other and then go: What time are we on?

There was an exciting time, picking up the story again... 'What's The Story... ', didn't you launch this at breakfast?
It was at some gentleman's club in Kensington over breakfast. And some bright spark had the idea of us doing a gig at Virgin Megastore at midnight. So we were up at eight o'clock in the morning drinking and doing all that nonsense [schmoozing at the gentlemen's club] so by the time we got to Virgin we were properly out of it and I remember betting Liam twenty quid that he couldn't remember the lyrics to any songs. He forget the first line to something, and the crowd stopped, and I said 'You owe me twenty quid.' The smart ******* turned to me and said: 'I only carry fifties, mate.'

I don't know if you agree with this, but one of the reasons 'What's The Story... ' ended up being such a massive record was its jukebox quality. The amount of times it would come on...
It took on a life of its own. There was a point where we had to put back 'Don't Look Back In Anger' because 'Wonderwall' refused to leave the charts. It's a double edged sword, though. You end up with people you could never relate to in your entire life asking for your autograph. I don't see how my music was anything to do with them. It took on a life of its own and then it wasn't our band anymore. We weren't even the biggest band in England anymore, we were the biggest band in America, biggest band in Sweden, Germany and all that.

Knebworth...
I remember going to a gig we were doing up north and on the way Marcus our manager asked if we wanted to stop at Knebworth because they were thinking of putting a gig on there. One of the promoters said we could put on seven nights easily... These people do this for a living: they tell you where you can play and how many people you can play to. They work it out by a certain percentage of record buyers who buy tickets. Originally it was for one night, but then the one night sold out in a day, then the second night sold out in a day, then we all just stopped being arsed about it. It was berserk, stupid, silly. In three years we'd gone from playing that gig in the Boardwalk, where I wasn't even in the group, to the biggest free-standing gig by any group that wasn't a festival and wasn't free. I was thinking, when is the shuttle arriving to take us to the moon, there has to be a gig there soon.

Was it in the back of your mind that it was your Spike Island?
I remember having an argument with Liam in America and he was saying that we can't consider ourselves to be bigger or better than the Roses until we've played to 30,001 people, because Spike Island was 30,000 people. So we started going through all these things, saying like: 'What was the Stone's biggest gig? Book it now, for seven nights!'

America and you have been odd bedfellows when it's come to touring. It's either him coming home or you coming home.
Or him not going because he wanted to move house which was just ridiculous. I felt we were jinxed there for a long time. Not because we weren't accepted there- the fans are brilliant to us out there and our gigs are always sold out. But the tours there are long. Six to Eight weeks on a bus with thirteen other geezers is a long time, especially when you're young.

When was that time when you came home?
The first time I didn't come home. I went missing. The second time I came home from Chicago because Liam and Bono had a fight about Liam's jacket... I told him about it in the morning and he'd forgotten about it and said he was only having a laugh. I was saying that one day you're going to say something you aren't going to be able to take back, and then I was off.

By this point you were the property of the tabloids as well. You didn't look too good when you came back, you looked very glum.
I was told by my manager not to say a word going through the airport. I'm a bit lippy as it goes and there were so many microphones I thought: 'This is really unfair.'

Doesn't it get on your nerves though, all those cameras in your face?
It's actually quite scary. I was waiting for the bags to come through, and the security guard who was looking after me said he was outside. You could hear him like in a football match. I asked him if there were many people there, and at that point the doors opened and it was like a scene from a film. You have to get to the car, and the driver has the door open, and you just walk in a sea of people. They're knocking each other over, they're knocking over members of the public, and there's you in the middle of it all not allowed to say anything.

Have you got any unfulfilled ambitions?
I've got loads and they're all musical. To be in a five piece band is quite difficult because we've entered, for some bizarre reason, into this new democracy in the group where everybody has to have an opinion, whereas in the past it would have just been mine and that would be the end of it. It's not something I could just explain to you. There's tons of stuff that I want to do musically and there's tons of people I'd love to work with. I'd love to do a record of my songs sang by eleven of my favourite singers.

Have you ever seen The Last Waltz? Would you ever do anything like that?
To do it within the confines of the group is very difficult because Liam is not very open to experimenting. It's not having a go at him, he believes in what he believes in and that's fantastic and that's what makes him what he is. Doing it in the confines of Oasis is difficult because it's got to be acceptable to everybody. I don't harbour any ambitions to be a solo artist but I'd like to do a solo record. But Liam thinks that would mean the band would split up, but trying to explain to him the band doesn't have to split up is difficult. And I think Liam should do a solo record because some of the stuff that he's done for the album is too Lennon-esque. It's all like 'Imagine', but it's too like 'Imagine,' even down to the way he's had his voice affected, he just sounds too much like him [Lennon]. I think he should do it not only for him, but for a lot of other people who thinks that he's some yobo. The guy is a fantastic lyricist. Even to speak to him, he talks in his own language. Sometimes I look at him and think 'What the **** are you talking about.' I'm trying to convince him to do one, so I can do one.

But solo work is perceived as being very lonely.
I think if you take it out on the road it's very lonely. In the studio I work generally on my own, I'm not bothered about that, but I don't think I'd be quite as confident getting on stage in front of a few thousand people playing with a band who I'd only met a few weeks ago and who I knew were only playing for the money.

Do you think one of the reasons that Liam's not keen on the idea is that if you went away and made a solo record you could do it with some of your friends. And Liam would sit there and think, If I wanted somebody to be on my side of the record, who would I want? And he would turn round and think, Well, it's the rest of Oasis...
That's fine and he's well within his rights to think that. We're two completely different people, I'm just not like that. I can have ten different fingers in ten different pies and still carry on giving the same amount of time and effort to it all. Liam tends to concentrate on one thing and goes at it. He's a lot younger than me as well, you know, so he's less tolerant of my old fartness!

You were a big champion of Travis...
It's made out that I discovered this band, which is so far from the truth. I remember going to see them at the LA2 and they didn't really strike me as much cop that night. Then Andy McDonald gave me a demo, I played it and thought it's b******s. A couple of weeks later they were playing and he said come down and see them, so I went down and I thought 'oh my god it cannot be the same band'. I went back to my house and I put on 'All I Want To Do Is Rock' and at that point it all made sense, and I think I blew the speakers up that night. I played that song for months to anybody who would listen. Then when it came to going out on tour there was only one band to go out with us - and they were fantastic on that tour.

You had Pulp supporting you...
They played 'Common People' for the first time, and it was like 'did you hear that tune'.

Who is supporting you on these dates?
We've got a band from Blackburn called The Burn and The Music. We were just thinking if we were their age we'd be honoured. We'll show them the stage and it will be sink or swim, Oasis fans aren't shy at telling you if you're s**t, so get on there and knock 'em dead.

Have any support bands tried to upstage you?
No, we did have this thing once at a festival in America just before 'Be Here Now' came out. We were on after Blur and this message came that Blur had broken down on the motorway and they wanted to know if we would go on before them. And I know for a fact they were parked two miles up the road in their tour bus, so we were like 'I think you'll find they'll be here in fifteen minutes'. So when they were there ten minutes later when they found out the bill hadn't been shifted.

'Be Here Now'...
It's quite ridiculous really, after I'd come home off the 'Morning Glory' tour, instead of having a year off and getting our heads around what we've achieved. We thought if we don't go in the studio and start doing something for a year there is just going to be speculation about the band breaking up. We decided the best way around it was to record an album, which we didn't have and I was going to go away and write in a fortnight in the Bahamas. Thinking of it now it's quite staggering, they sent me off on a plane. Anyway we get to the place and get back to England and stuck it on [the record player]. If somebody would have gone 'have six months to think about it', but everybody was saying 'it's just amazing' so I thought actually it is amazing. Apart from Paul Weller who said 'you are not going to put that out' and I went 'what do you know'. The thing is I wrote an album in fourteen days that sold seven million records - that says more about you lot than it does about me. That's scary. Going through some of the old demos for the songs we are going to do on this tour there was one or two like 'Don't Go Away', which was written during the 'Morning Glory' sessions and if it had been 'Morning Glory' it would have been held as a classic. Because it was in the middle of 'Be Here Now' and never released as a single it's missed. I think 'My Big Mouth' is good and the words are pretty good, and 'Don't Go Away'.

When we did an interview after 'Be Here Now' had been out for a while, I got the impression you felt that you needed to move on, that it was the end of an era, you felt restricted by what you had done. You were talking about making the music slightly differently.
I still get that when I'm in the studio and I'm like 'can we not do this any differently'. Inherently as musicians we are lazy anyway, and we are into rock n' roll music, and we all play the guitar. Nobody can programme anything, play any funky floaty keyboards. So I think the only way would be to get a producer in and I don't think we are ready for that. I don't think we are ready to be told how to make music.

Do you think Bonehead and Guigsy leaving forced you to move on?
I couldn't speak to Andy Bell, who had been in one of the best indie bands of all time Ride, the way I used to speak to Bonehead. It's as simple as that. He'd just be, 'I'm off see you later'. To be fair to me nobody offered any musical support up until about six months, everyone was just: He'll look after it.

Do you miss members you've lost along the way?
No. Not because I didn't get on with them, but if they hadn't left Andy Bell and Gem wouldn't have joined. They are like my best mates now.

Is the new album all done?
No it's not all done. We had a lot of it done just before we went away to go on tour with the Black Crowes. Liam being Liam it's not done. We has eight tracks done and finished off the other three or four when we have back, and Liam said we'll leave my vocals until last. So we gave him the tracks three months ago and he's not done anything.

Has it got a title?
It has, but I cannot tell you because these people here [the promotions company] have to get favours off you for it.

Here the fans list their fantasy set lists, Noel also talked about some tracks and the gig which is transcribed here...
What is it about something like Gas Panic, not one of the 'Oasis standards' that fans like? I wrote that in a kitchen in a studio waiting from them lot to turn up. They had got nicked the night before and banned from the Columbia club. I just sat and wrote a song, and thought 'that's f******g good'. I like the 'sailing down a river alone, I've been trying to find my way back home'

One of the things everyone seems to be saying around the table is they like the Oasis allure, the rawness. Do you think you were loosing that at one point?
Well because, and I can speak personally for me, once you have a huge album like 'Morning Glory' you cannot really go and make a record that costs ten pence - go into the studio and bash it through and say that's us. A lot of people have got to understand that for ten years I've been writing the songs for this group, so it's all down to me and my mental state of mind. People are just going to have to go with it. But in this new album there is one song with strings on it, and it's pretty up and pretty raw. You get that close to it, you cannot work it out, you don't know.

Do you think when bands enforce changes it can sound false?
I think to me, some bands look stupid by wanting to make a cyber-punk or jazz record. We will always make Oasis records, and it's just the way we feel at the time. A lot of it is to do with how it's mixed and stuff like that. I cannot bear listening to the radio and listening to something that I thought was the Beach Boys and it turns out it is Super Furry Animals. I want the Super Furry Animals to sound like the Super Furry Animals. If The Strokes ever make another record, please if you are listening don't experiment, just carry on doing what you are doing that makes you unique.

Are you looking forward to this weekend's gigs?
It's going to be a bit weird for us. We are used to playing on stages that are the size of a football pitch. We are all really close together, so that has thrown us a bit. I know what these gigs are going to be like, you could put five cardboard cut-outs on stage of the band on stage and play the records and it would still be fantastic because it's all about the people. I'm going to find it difficult to sing some songs, even when we played with Neil Young singing 'Don't Look Back in Anger' was quite an emotional experience, sometimes I cannot even sing the chorus because I just go back to being young and writing those songs. It's going to be small and special, it's going to be about the atmosphere. The band are rocking, depending on which Liam turns up. The set list, I hope, does the band justice.

--BBC, Radio 1