High Flying Birds, Musical Kettles And Exploded Psych: Noel Gallagher Speaks

It was on January 27, 2000, when I was sitting with a group of journalists in the Albany pub on Great Portland Street having a long liquid lunch, when Noel Gallagher caught me napping. We were waiting in the vague proximity of the Portland Hospital – with its celebrated maternity ward favoured by rich and famous Londoners – for news of Meg Matthews who had entered the day before to give birth. I barely had chance to look up from my drink and get my notepad out when I saw the Britpop star striding towards the table. “Alright lads!” he beamed, “What are you having?” He bought everyone present a pint of Guinness, having a half himself, before filling us in on the birth of his daughter Anaïs, the health of her mother and how made up he was. “You got everything you need? I’d better go and get some flowers for the wife,” he said before marching back out to a round of applause.

I was no longer a news reporter by the time Liam Gallagher’s wife Nicole Appleton went into the same hospital to give birth to their son Gene 16 months later but I did read in the paper the next day that after leaving the hospital the proud dad had assaulted a photographer.

The one detail from these two brief vignettes that probably needs illuminating is the fact that Noel Gallagher knew the Albany pub quite well. He’d been a semi-regular at the Heavenly Social held in the basement club below stairs, where he mixed with Tricky, the Manic Street Preachers, Tim Burgess, Beth Orton, regular DJs The Chemical Brothers and other, slightly more open minds during the Britpop period. While Noel had lived just yards from The Chems while they were still The Dust Brothers back in Levenshulme and running Naked Under Leather in the early 90s and they had both been regulars at the Hacienda during its heyday, it was down the rickety steps in the 100 capacity central London club in 1994 that they first met. The next significant time they bumped into each other would be backstage at Glastonbury in 1996 and the plan to record ‘Setting Sun’ - the strangest, most fucked up electronic single ever to make number one in the charts – was hatched.

This was a crucial time for Oasis as John Tatlock rightly pointed out in a feature for us; Gallagher senior was being exposed to the world’s best hip hop, house and techno, recording chart topping psychedelic electronica and was keen on pushing his group out of its Beatles pop phase into its Beatles experimental phase. During the 1997 sessions for the Be Here Now album he was experimenting with playing riffs over hip hop breaks and espousing the joys of N.W.A. evangelically to the rest of the boys but they were looking at him “like I was talking French”.

But if he wasn’t exactly leaning on an open door, then he wasn’t exactly pushing all that hard either, and we know what happened after that. Oasis were simply already too big for the formula to be fucked with. As the Be Here Now producer Owen Morris said: "The only reason anyone was there was the money."

Some 14 years later Gallagher Senior is finally getting to indulge and explore these more experimental tendencies. Now free to embark on a solo career he is preparing for the release of his debut, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, a pleasingly sun-dappled album of warm-hearted psychedelia which could be filed next to Shack’s HMS Fable and The Soundtrack Of Our Lives’ Behind The Music and certainly towers over Beady Eye's Different Gear, Still Speeding. Not only that but the finishing touches are being put on his joint album with Amorphous Androgynous which, if their epic remix of ‘Falling Down’ is anything to go by, should be some Optrex for your third eye.

Talking of which, my third eye is just starting to open in all of its terrible glory as my other two eyes are drooping shut as I nod off. Sitting by the phone, waiting for the call, it looks like Noel Gallagher’s caught me sleeping on the job again.

Noel Gallagher: John, how are you doing?

Er... Hello... Not bad. Alright.

NG: Are you sure? You don’t sound alright.

No, I am actually. I’ve got a five month old boy so sleep’s at a premium but things are actually really great.

NG: My youngest turned one on Saturday, so I know what you mean.

Nice one! Happy birthday to him. Speaking as working rock & roll father of young children, how do you tie it all in with songwriting and making noise after a certain time and all that?

NG: I tend to do a lot on the road now because I’ve given up writing at home. It used to be the other way round but now that I don’t burn the candle at both ends any more I write on the road – that’s where I get some peace and quiet.

My boy will happily listen to any music that sounds like the washing machine, so he’s alright listening to black metal.

NG: [laughing] With the kids we only listen to music on the radio in the morning and in the car, but my eldest boy who is four loves acid house. And when he says, ‘Dad can we have some acid house please?’, I’m going to have to sample it and stick it on a fucking record because it sounds great.

Speaking of house music, there’s a link of sorts between that genre and the debut album of Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, isn’t there?

NG: Well, on the track ‘[AKA...] What A Life!’ definitely there is, and maybe on the other songs simply via their sense of hope. On that particular track, it just came about because of a beautiful accident really. I’d started off writing something completely different and then ‘Strings Of Life’ by Rhythim Is Rhythim came on the stereo at home and totally influenced it. I had one of those moments of, ‘Oh wow, that song might work if I do it like that…’ I went down that avenue with it and it came out great.

A quick Google before the interview revealed to me that the world’s highest flying bird is actually the Asian goose, and while it looks like a rather charming yet undynamic bird it can fly at over 20,000 feet, and clear the Himalayas without troubling its underfeathers. Now I was wondering if you were named after a skein of Asian geese, or if there was an even better story to the name?

NG: [laughing] I’m afraid it’s just a really fucking shit story. When I was recording the album I was passing by Shepherd’s Bush Empire one night on my way home and somebody was on – I can’t remember who – but I remember thinking, ‘Do I really want to see my name up there? I mean it’s a bit boring… Noel Gallagher. It’s hardly Ziggy Stardust, is it?’ And I didn’t think much of it really, because I had all this other stuff going on. I was making an album; no one knew about it; did I want to find a band?; and if I found the band would I have to get a singer, because he would probably turn out to be a dick... - that kind of thing. Then one day I was at home doing the washing up and ‘Man Of The World’ came on the radio and the DJ said, ‘That was Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac. And I thought, ‘Wow. What if I was Noel Gallagher’s Something Or Other? That would be really cool.’ So I thought of loads of different things for months and it never really went away. I liked it because the name could apply to me solo, or a band or to a collective, it could mean anything. And then one day I was at home looking through some CDs and I was looking at Jefferson Airplane’s debut album and I saw the track ‘High Flying Birds’, and I thought, ‘Oh, fucking hell… that’s it.’

You’ve nailed it.

NG: I’ve fucking nailed it. Genius! But there’s no interesting story there…

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