Oasis Aren’t Done Just Yet

The biggest rock stars of the nineties want to keep on playing. Will anyone listen?

The word rehearsal doesn't really convey what happens when the members of Oasis get together to run through some songs. They are not, by temperament, men of moderation. While you can imagine Sting, for instance, shushing his session cats and suggesting that it might sound delightful to garland "Message in a Bottle" with a tin whistle, the Manchester quintet that utterly dominated the British rock scene in the nineties have a much less subtle approach to the concept of practice: They just get up onstage and clobber you. Even though Noel and Liam Gallagher, along with their bandmates and their touring crew, are alone this July afternoon in a cavernous, black-curtained studio in a strip-mally area of West London that looks more like Phoenix, they perform one heaving anthem after another—"Champagne Supernova," "Supersonic," "Wonderwall," "Cigarettes & Alcohol," "Morning Glory"—as if they're staring down a million drunken followers on a fog-shrouded moor as the sun rises over a mythical rock festival.

They are ridiculously loud. When Noel, who at 41 still sports a George Harrison mop top, picks up and starts to noodle away on his cherry-red 1960 Gibson 355—a six-string that he mentions is worth about $20,000—the first few notes actually stab you in the face. There have been rehearsals in the past where the sound level was so high it affected not only the band members' hearing but their vision. "I nearly wept with the volume," Noel says, grinning. "It was like standing in an onion shop." Liam, who at 36 has abandoned neither his famous Brian Jones bowl cut nor that alpha-orangutan habit of swaying his arms when he walks, doesn't evince any difference between singing in a stadium and singing in an empty room. He still wraps his hands behind his back as though he's been handcuffed, leans toward the mike with a glare that suggests a familiarity with the etiquette of pub brawls, and unleashes a sound that's somewhere between an Italian aria and a sneer. When he's done, he steps down from the stage, swaggers over to the catering table for a banana, and says, "Told ya."

Even the Gallaghers' mistakes are huge. Not long after they've thundered through the self-fulfilling prophecy of "Rock 'n' Roll Star," a dinosaur-size, distortion-drizzled pop blasts across the room and makes everyone duck and wince. It's not a nice noise. It sounds as though a Marshall stack just lost a game of Russian roulette, and a roadie sets out to repair what looks like a minor power outage. "Well, there's no point in our soldiering on until he's got it fixed," Noel murmurs. "Bet this doesn't fuckin' happen to U2."

The wisecrack is revealing. If any British band of the past 15 years intended to follow the Dublin foursome into the glorious pantheon of rock gods it was Oasis, but along the way glitches in the internal wiring left the group stuck in the wings. Everything happened supersonically fast. Within months of releasing 1994's Definitely Maybe, a mix of churning psychedelia and stomping arena-rock riffage, the Gallagher brothers were selling out the same Manchester football stadium whose floodlights had once illuminated their childhood bedroom. The next year brought global domination: (What's the Story) Morning Glory sold 18 million copies around the world and "Wonderwall" became one of the decade's essence-capturing singles. Liam has come to despise it. "Everyone goes, 'You're the "Wonderwall" guy!'" he says. "Well, fuck off. I fuckin' hate it and your taste is shit." Noel has a special place in his heart for the sparkly morning when his accountant called with some good news. "He said, 'You've got a million pounds in the bank,'" Noel says. "And I was on drugs at the time"—Ecstasy and cocaine—"it was 11 o'clock in the morning, there was about 10 people in my room, and we'd been partying all night. I put the phone down and I said, 'I'm a millionaire! Let's fucking re-party!'"

Nobody stopped to notice that the third album, Be Here Now, was a bloated mess. Pausing to take stock was inconceivable for a gang that roared through each day in an impulsive, intoxicated blur. The Gallaghers got married—Liam to starlet Patsy Kensit, Noel to party girl Meg Matthews—but the settling-down phase never quite took hold. "I've got to tell you, being on tour as the biggest band in the world was fuckin' incredible," Noel remembers. "Whatever you needed you got two of. Some ridiculous instrument that you'd fucking seen some guy playin' in a market. I'd phone my manager from Hong Kong at six in the morning. 'What do you want?' 'I want a fucking glockenschplocken.'"

Just as quickly, the days of express-mailed glockenschplockens came to a close. With the release of 2000's weirdly titled Standing on the Shoulder of Giants, it was clear the band had derailed. Two of the founding members, bassist Paul "Guigsy" McGuigan and guitarist Paul "Bonehead" Arthurs, resigned. Divorces drained the band of emotional energy. "That was a rough time," Noel says. "The backlash had started. I was really, really uninspired to write anything. The tour was already sold out—but we haven't got a fucking band. The album wasn't very good. The reviews were appalling." If they were at all sensible, the Gallaghers would've packed up the amps.

But they're not, so they didn't. In spite of the drugs, in spite of the notorious fraternal friction between Liam and Noel, in spite of the fact that your average American rock fan probably isn't even aware of recent albums like Don't Believe the Truth, Oasis have become unlikely evangelists for the art of persistence. They're no longer part of the Sony empire, but this October the band is releasing an album, Dig Out Your Soul, on its own label, Big Brother. They've hired a new drummer, Chris Sharrock; the other two "new" members, guitarist Gem Archer and bassist Andy Bell, have been with the band for nearly a decade.

More crucially, there's been a chemical-philosophical shift: Noel and Liam, two of the high priests of rock-and-roll excess, are experimenting with—dare we say it—moderation. Over the years Liam has developed a reputation for being wildly confrontational—with the press, with photographers, with almost anyone. "I am a cunt," he says. "I can be the biggest cunt in the world, but I can also be the most spectacular person ever made. Depends." These days he's working at being the latter. At the time of the rehearsals, Liam has not had a drink in three weeks. "This is a new me, man," he says. He's getting up at six every morning at the cottage on Hampstead Heath that he shares with his second wife, Nicole Appleton, going for a strenuous run, and then spending the day taking his two sons, Gene and Lennon, to and from school and playdates. "Top kids, both of them," he says. "I prefer going out with them than to hang out with fucking rock stars and celebrities. They're all dicks, man." Twice a day he eats grilled or steamed salmon with spinach and "loads of fucking garlic," and it must be noted that years of hard living seem to have done no damage to the celebrated grandeur of his cheekbones. "Well, I've got good skin," he says. "I get it from Mrs. Gallagher."

Noel—who also has two children, 8-year-old daughter Anais and 1-year-old son Donovan—gave up drugs 10 years ago after one too many panic attacks. "The one drug I was heavily addicted to was cocaine, and there comes a point where you're just like, Man, this can't go on any longer, because it'll fucking fry your head," he says. He's sold his house in Ibiza, figuring it makes no sense to have an outpost in the dance-club Sodom of Spain. "You get to a certain age where you just look ridiculous being fuckin' out of it all the time, you know what I mean?" he says. "I used to go to nightclubs like the Hacienda in Manchester in the eighties, when the rave scene was kicking off, and you'd see people who were like 40 there and you'd just think, You look fucking stupid. I guess we've had our go at being the epicenter of youth culture, and it's now time to leave it to the kids."

He refuses to give Dig Out Your Soul the hard sell. "Listen," he says, "before you've heard our new record, I could make it sound like some fucking rock opera. I could make you believe that each song is about a schoolboy that wakes up in the morning and this is the story of his life and blah blah blah. And you would fuckin' buy it. But if you ask me about my record, I just go, 'I don't fuckin' know. It's the same as the last one.'" Besides, millions of fans want to hear the old hits, and that's fine. Noel doesn't have much patience for contemporaries like Radiohead who evolve from one clangy experimental phase to the next. "Yeah, well, they went to university," he says. "We're just working-class boys trying to make a living. They're middle-class boys worrying about pushing an envelope somewhere, and all that carbon footprint and all that bollocks. Every time there's a polar bear on his tiptoes on an ice cube in the middle of the Antarctic, you know whose fault that is? Rock stars'. That's their fault. Any time there's food running out somewhere— 'Let's do a gig. That'll sort it out. Let's do a big fucking gig. Let's fly everybody in from all over the world and pontificate to poor people about how they should be saving the planet.' Go fucking kiss my ass. It's very easy to just say, 'We're going to become difficult now and challenge our audience.' I like my audience. They paid for my swimming pool. I'm not fucking challenging anybody."

If that makes him a mossback, he doesn't care. "I'm into rock and roll," he says. "That's what I listen to. I like a certain period of dance music and hip-hop, the early stuff, when I feel—and this is my opinion—that hip-hop had more of a social conscience. Now it's all about the bling and who's got the biggest car and all that fucking shit. And that doesn't speak to me. I'm pretty much into everything from the blues to the Sex Pistols, with the Jam and the Stone Roses and the Smiths thrown in. If music doesn't speak to you, what are you supposed to do? Pretend to like it? Fuck that. I like the Beatles, the Kinks, the Who, and the Stones. Bite me."

At the end of a rehearsal, Noel pulls out a collector's edition of Dig Out Your Soul and shows it to the band. It's 12 inches tall and wide, like the turntable classics of yesteryear, and it's stuffed with lyric sheets and psychedelic art and all the other eye candy that's vanished in the age of the download. Noel's an unstoppable joker, but here on a ratty couch he holds the artifact in his hands and gazes at it, silently touching the cover with the tips of his fingers. He might be a 13-year-old kid in Manchester, or he might be an aging rock star who's content with his place in the universe. Oasis will always be prone to the grand gaffe, but he doesn't worry about that. "I don't know how much money I've got, but I said to the girl who runs the accountant's office, 'Give me a call when it's time to fuckin' curb my enthusiasm,'" he says. "Or as we say in England, 'Give me a call when I'm down to my last four million.'"

Source: www.style.com

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