Liam Gallagher finally unplugs his spoiled-brat act and starts rocking a new clothing line.
Liam Gallagher was in town last week, and the city is still standing. No hotel rooms got brutalized. No pub brawls got started. The Guinness taps have not run dry. In fact, one of rock music’s most legendary bad boys seems distinctively less naughty these days. It’s probably been months since he’s punched anyone out.
To journalists at least, the former Oasis frontman is surprisingly soft-spoken and polite. He’s even a bit shy. His humble demands for a photo shoot include water, a sandwich and air conditioning — but only if it’s hot out. He’s kind to a small dog wandering around. Most horrifying of all, he takes pride in being punctual.
Oasis disbanded last August when older brother Noel left following yet another epic sibling squabble. Liam insists the group is done, though he continues to work on music with the remaining members.
In the meantime, the singer’s latest endeavor is a clothing line called Pretty Green, featuring menswear of his own design. The collection launched in the UK last June, and just became available stateside via mail order at prettygreen.com.
The line originally began with a pair of shoes.
“I’m into suede shoes,” Gallagher says. “Shoes have been going a bit pointy. I really wanted to make shoes like a desert boot.”
The first pieces were all black or white — “pretty mod, man,” he says — but for spring, the line has broadened to include colorful polo shirts and logoed tees, checked button-downs and a selection of baggy, knee-length jackets that are instantly recognizable to Oasis fans.
“I don’t know anything about fashion. I don’t want to know anything about fashion,” Gallagher says. “I haven’t got a favorite designer or anything like that. I like what I like, you know what I mean?”
The line was created in conjunction with British tailor Nick Holland, from whom Gallagher has previously bought suits after being introduced through friends. The idea is to produce simple, high-quality wardrobe staples — nothing too Jean Paul Gaultier.
Gallagher, 37, says he’s been into clothes since he was a teenager, mainly to impress girls. Back then, his fashion statements involved Sergio Tacchini track suits. Even after Oasis became the biggest band in the world, Gallagher says he always wore his own clothes onstage and in public. He detests fussy looks, and once took a shot at bands that employed stylists, saying, “U2? There’s no way you bought that jacket is there, Bono? Coldplay, they’re at it too.”
His hope for Pretty Green, he says, is for it to have its “own legs, not just Oasis fans behind it.”
He’s also hoping to move to New York. He and his wife, singer Nicole Appleton — who split time between London and a country house in Henley-on-Thames — are shopping for an apartment near Central Park. They’ve seen three, though none big enough.
Gallagher says he loves Central Park and often goes jogging there incognito in a hat pulled low.
One thing he doesn’t like in New York: the club scene.
“I’m done with that,” he says. “They don’t even play the type of music I like anyway, so what’s the point? It’s all f - - - ing techno s - - -. I go to see bands. Go out for a bite to eat. Don’t do too much.”
What he mainly likes to do is spend time with his family, including a dachshund, his and Appleton’s 8-year-old son Gene, and 10-year-old son Lennon, whose mother is Gallagher’s ex-wife Patsy Kensit.
He takes the kids to the movies (they enjoyed “Avatar”) and later this month, he’s treating them to a week at Disneyland.
This hardly sounds like the same man who was banned from Cathay Pacific in 1998 for drunkenly smoking and swearing on a flight, or the man who got his front teeth knocked out in a 2002 Munich bar fight, or who was busted with cocaine on a London street back in the ’90s.
He says he gave up drugs for good last November for his children’s sake.
“It doesn’t work with kids, man. You wake up the next day after a session and you’re looking for bits of your kids’ homework and football boots. You’re all over the place. It’s rubbish,” he told the Daily Express.
He’s also particularly focused on the forthcoming album with the Band Formerly Known as Oasis, with whom he’s spending four days a week in the studio. (Gallagher says the band doesn’t yet have a name.)
“It takes more than a little man called Noel to pull the mat from underneath me,” he says, taking a cheeky shot at his brother.
“I make music,” he says. “I can either sit at home and do f - - - all, which is no good for the soul, or I can do what I like to do, which is making music and being involved with this.”
The new tunes are expected to be recorded over the summer, with a single released around October and the full album in 2011.
“It sounds like Oasis, Beatles-esque,” he says. “There’s a lot of energy. It sounds psychedelic, but when it’s rocking, it’s rocking.”
Thank goodness he hasn’t grown out of that.
Source:
www.nypost.com
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Wednesday, March 31, 2010
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