Noel Gallagher: 'All I Ever Wanted Was A Bigger Telly'

He thinks he might have wasted his life. Not all of it, you understand. Certainly not two decades during which his old band Oasis sold 70 million albums, swigged from champagne flutes at the British prime minister’s Downing Street residence and played Wembley Stadium. No, the bit before that. From the ages of 17 to 27 to be exact. A complete lost decade. Noel Gallagher has been thinking about it a lot recently.

“When I was 17 I was a typical north-west scally, going to football matches, smoking dope and collecting my dole. I became a self-taught expert on Prisoner Cell Block H and WWF wrestling and the local guide for magic mushrooms. People say to me ‘Oh, but you must have been writing songs, getting your foot on the first rung of the ladder’. I didn’t even notice the ladder was there. The people I hung out with – if you had any ambitions you were seen as a bit of sissy so I didn’t even pick up a guitar.”

He’s been thinking about this time again because, since the acrimonious break-up of Oasis in 2009, he has in effect been unemployed again. There has been a long lay-off during which time he has had a third child, re-married, moved house and thankfully written some new songs. Now at last he has a new job too: Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds are about to release their first album.

“I was better at being unemployed this time round,” he says. “I got more done. Didn’t stay up too late. No mushrooms.”

We are drinking coffee on a sunny café terrace in east London. An office block overlooks us and some female workers spot him and start waving and cheering. He waves back. When they go on a bit too long, he knots his eyebrows quizzically and you can see why some people used to call him “Parker” after the monobrowed Thunderbirds character.

Being instantly recognised, I say, after a long absence and the demise of the band that made him famous, must be reassuring.

“I don’t know about reassuring. I’m trying something new and you never know how people will react. I think there’s goodwill. But that soon disappears if you haven’t got the songs.”

His brother Liam’s rival band, Beady Eye, have had a six-month head-start and enjoyed a raft of “not as terrible as we all feared” reviews. But Noel Gallagher believes that he has the songs to put this rivalry to bed. Wisely, he has taken the precaution of recording them with a band with none of the personnel issues of the old one. Backed by unknown side-men and, as if to emphasise his post-Oasis creative liberation, the High Flying Birds have recorded two albums. The imminent High Flying Birds album and a psychedelic sister album recorded with the electronic dance rock pioneers The Amorphous Androgynous, which will be released in 2012.

“I’m easing everyone in gently,” Gallagher laughs. “You get the recognisable me first time round. And then next year you get the mind-blowing version.”

What drives the most successful British rock stars of the past 20 years? Well, classic post-divorce angst for a start. In the fall-out from the split with his brother it has become a point of principle to show just who the real talent was. Noel Gallagher is prepared to admit that Liam was the handsome, charismatic front man but he is at pains to prove that it was always he who wrote the Oasis classics. And if the melodies aren’t enough, then new song titles such as If I Had a Gun and The Death of You & Me surely tell their own story.

Gallagher realises that the High Flying Birds put him deeply out of his comfort zone for the first time in 20 years. He will once more be proving himself in venues where, as he says, he can see the “whites of people’s eyes”. He is hedging his bets a little: he will play small venues to begin with plus a smattering of Oasis songs. But he is adamant that the days of working with his brother are over.

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Source: www.thenational.ae