Noel Gallagher On Britain's Glory Days And More

He's cleaned up and straightened out, but remarkably, given his own wild past, he despairs of today’s feckless youth...

'We were brought up under Thatcher,’ Noel Gallagher is saying.

‘There was a work ethic – if you were unemployed, the obsession was to find work.
'Now, these kids brought up under the Labour Party and whatever this Coalition thing is, it’s like, “Forget that, I’m not interested. I wanna be on TV.” It was a different mindset back then.’

We’re halfway through a wide-ranging conversation in a north London studio, and the man whose brawling band’s conspicuous drug use, bad language and swagger were irresistible to Tony Blair (you’ll recall the 1997 photo opportunity) is sipping a hot drink and telling me this country was better under Margaret Thatcher.

‘Under Thatcher, who ruled us with an iron rod,’ he says, ‘great art was made. Amazing designers and musicians. Acid house was born. Very colourful and progressive.

'Now, no one’s got anything to say. Write a song? No thanks, I’ll say it on Twitter. It’s a sad state when more people retweet than buy records.’

Gallagher, who doesn’t tweet, has got a point. He may yet prove to be the last British rock star.

It’s hard to imagine another arising whose hold on the public imagination is so strong that the News At Ten reports when their single fails to hit No 1, as happened in August 1995 with the great Oasis v Blur clash.

‘I had a tendency to say horrible things about Blur,’ Gallagher says ruefully. ‘We were like two fighting cocks for the music press.

'But this is what Damon and I were saying when we saw each other recently: we were of the shared opinion that it was bloody great. And that it doesn’t happen any more. We were two great bands who had big egos. Me and him, and Liam. We wanted to be the best.’

So Gallagher has mended fences with Damon Albarn, having once wished he’d ‘catch Aids and die’.

He hasn’t done the same with his younger brother, whose yobbish behaviour supplied the bulk of Oasis headlines when times were good. When times were bad, they couldn’t be in the same room. Liam’s behaviour drove Noel to walk out of tours in 1994 and 2000.

A backstage altercation in August 2009 saw Noel walk out for good, effectively ending Oasis.

Before this interview, I was told Noel wouldn’t be answering any questions about Liam.

‘I decided, now I’m not in Oasis, I don’t have to do that any more,’ Gallagher says when I ask him why.

‘Because all that needs to be said has been said. There’s no need any more. I just want to forget the personality wars.’

There’s more to it than that. Last August, Liam sued Noel for saying he’d pulled out of the 2009 V Festival because of a hangover.

In November, Noel lodged his response with the High Court: a writ accusing Liam of leaving abusive voicemail messages on his wife’s phone, attacking him with a guitar and ‘spiteful and childish’ behaviour on 12 occasions.

It’s not hard to deduce the ban on discussing Liam could be for legal reasons.
Since 2009 the Gallaghers have pursued rival careers; Liam with three Oasis bandmates under the name Beady Eye, Noel with session musicians as Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds. Noel’s album went to No 1 in October and a UK tour begins this month.

‘I still need a band on stage, because unfortunately I can’t play everything at once,’ he says. ‘But I’ll master it one day.’

He seems happy on his own. I wonder, if he hadn’t fallen out with Liam, might he have disbanded Oasis anyway?

‘I did find it difficult the longer Oasis went on,’ Gallagher agrees, ‘because no one out there was really interested in the next record.

'We rode out a few bad tours and bad albums, then got it back. But put it this way – three million people were coming to see us play live; we weren’t selling three million records.’

You’d become a nostalgia band?

‘In the same way that no one at a Rolling Stones gig cares about their next album. The more records you make, the more difficult it is to say new things.

'Anyway, in the end personal things had got so bad that it was best for everybody if we just called it a day.’

Two years on, and despite the court case, Gallagher hardly looks freighted with woes. Five feet eight inches tall, he’s wiry and alert, with a confidence £30 million in the bank will tend to give you.

He’s toned down his wolf-man eyebrows, too.

‘Grazia put me at the top of their Chart of Lust twice last year, so I must be doing something right,’ he says.

‘A woman of a similar age wouldn’t look as good. I feel sorry for girls in the music industry. They do have a very short shelf life. For instance, Duffy: who? Gone. She was massive. And I don’t doubt for a second that the same thing will happen to Adele.’

Although he’s bullish now, there was a time when Gallagher wasn’t so sure of himself. Oasis’s fortunes peaked in 1995 with the Knebworth gig attended by 375,000 over two nights. Then the troubles began.

‘We went through a period as a group from 1998 to 2000 where everyone was getting divorced,’ Gallagher says.

‘Creation (the record label) was going down the toilet. My daughter didn’t have two stable parents: her mother wasn’t a rock star, but unfortunately was behaving like one.

'I was trying to get off drugs, but I only swapped illegal drugs for prescription drugs. If you’re on private health care, they’re only too willing to dish them out. Ask Keith Richards.’

Gallagher is entirely clean now, bar the odd beer or cigarette. He’s in no doubt as to what turned him around.

‘Meeting my wife,’ he says. ‘She was the catalyst for everything.’

Noel met publicist Sara MacDonald in Ibiza in 2000 when still married to first wife Meg Mathews. She was cited in the 2001 divorce, although Gallagher later said he’d only claimed to have committed adultery to speed up the proceedings.

‘When I met her, I was in a circle of friends where the party from the Nineties was still raging,’ he says.

‘I’d sold my house in Primrose Hill to get away from it, but the party just moved out to the country with me. I’d done too much and my insides couldn’t take it any more. I decided I’d go straight for two weeks. Then two weeks became two months.

'Suddenly you think, “Hang on, these people are quite mad – I’m not sure I like any of them.” My entire life was 12 to 20 people and I walked away from them for good. It was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. Then out of nowhere, I met Sara and the road to where I am now became apparent.’

The couple have been together 11 years and have two sons – Donovan, four, and Sonny, one. They married last June. Asked why he bothered after 11 years, he plays it down.
‘There comes a point where a 44-year-old man sounds stupid saying, “This is my girlfriend.” What am I, Rod Stewart?’

Nevertheless, marriage is an institution he didn’t need to enter. Could he finally be turning… conservative?

He bridles. Don’t use the c word. He never would have visited Number 10 if John Major had invited him, he says. But, it turns out, he will be sending his sons to private school.

‘I don’t want them coming home speaking like Ali G,’ he explains. ‘Anyone in my position, you owe it to your children to send them to a school where they don’t have to walk through a metal detector in the morning.

'There were riot police outside our local school the other morning. Turns out there’d been a stabbing. Rival gangs. We shouldn’t need riot police at schools. This is Maida Vale. This isn’t Handsworth or Tottenham, do you know what I mean? I don’t want my kids going to a school like that. I’d rather they were at a school with Russian oligarchs’ children.’

We talk about how his boys’ childhood is going to differ from his own. Gallagher’s mother walked out on his abusive father in the Eighties, taking Noel, Liam and their elder brother Paul with her. In a way, Gallagher says, it was the making of him.
'I found solace in music,’ he says. He doubts his own sons will have the same need for songs. There’s too much technology, too much Twitter. That’s when he says people were more ambitious under Margaret Thatcher.

‘Kids now watch America’s Hardest Prisons and want to be in a gang,’ he says.

‘They’ve no imagination. When I was 16 I’d watch The Godfather, but I didn’t think, “Right, I’m going to go down the barber’s and get some protection money off him.”

'Our generation was more likely to go, “I wonder where the nearest acting school is? Who wrote that soundtrack? Who’s Francis Ford Coppola?” It’s the de-education of the masses.

‘Last August I was on tour in Europe and people were asking me about the riots. All over the world, Syria and Egypt, people were rioting for freedom. And these kids in England are rioting for tracksuits. It’s embarrassing.’

Gallagher was arrested in his early teens for petty crimes including stealing a milk float. He puts this down to a hatred of authority, a reaction against his abusive father.

One of the rioters arrested came from Burnage, where the brothers grew up – in fact, he stole £175 of clothes from Liam Gallagher’s Pretty Green shop. But Noel has no sympathy at all with the looters.

‘It would have been beautiful if, after the MPs’ expenses scandal and the bankers’ bonuses scandal, people took to the streets and smashed the living daylights out of the City of London,’ he says.

‘Instead, it started because a drug dealer was shot. He was carrying a gun, he was shot by a policeman, it’s all on Twitter and before you know it there’s a riot going on. It was a mass outbreak of robbery and I was embarrassed to be a Mancunian. I saw kids on the telly saying in their Ali G voices, “It’s payback for the po-lice.” What does that mean? “Cause they arrest yer for stupid things.” Like what – hopping on one leg? Doing a silly walk like John Cleese? Get home, you idiot.’

Gallagher is by now in his stride. He’s seldom been at a loss for an unkind word about his fellow man – and nowadays, the things he’s angry about are the same things The Mail on Sunday’s readers are angry about. And the things he cares about, we do too. Older, wiser and rid of his brother, it’s starting to look like Noel Gallagher’s one of us.

‘It’s a sign of the times that I used to get offered sex and drugs after gigs and now it’s free driving lessons,’ says Gallagher, who was offered lessons by a fan last year.

And his politics have been shifting recently.

‘Up until the last election, I voted Labour all my life,’ he says. ‘But I’ve lost all faith in the Labour Party. After the expenses scandal and what happened with the banks – that “There’s no money left” note and all that – I just look at them and think the Labour Party should really be ashamed of themselves for the way they let the country down. I voted for a pirate at the last election.’

Ah. Not quite the doughty burgher I’ve been trying to paint him as, then. Fair enough. As if to prove a point, he tells me about the psychedelic album he’s working on for release at the end of the year, which will alienate his more musically conservative fans.

Is the idea to show that he’s more than the crowd-pleasing rocker once taunted with the jibe ‘Oasis Quo’?

‘I don’t want to be “interesting”,’ Gallagher scoffs. ‘I don’t want critical acclaim. I don’t want my songs to be social commentary. Radiohead can have that. That’s why they’ve never done three nights at Wembley. I want the money. I want the jet, the holiday and the first-class lounge.’

But he’s already got all of that, in spades. He says he wishes his sons were old enough to come out on tour with him now – implying that by the time they are he’ll be retired. I suggest he could retire now and enjoy the fruits of his labours.

‘Paul McCartney’s still touring,’ he counters. ‘While you can still write songs, you should.’

With respect to McCartney, nobody wants to hear his new songs. They all want to hear Beatles songs. Which brings me to the inevitable question. Given that an Oasis reunion tour, once his feud with Liam is patched up, would be one of the biggest money-spinners in history, how long is he going to wait?

‘I don’t mean to straight-bat this,’ he says, ‘but what people want me to say is, “Yes, I’m bang up for the reunion.” They’re talking about 2014, the 20th anniversary of Definitely Maybe.

‘As it draws closer, yeah, the bandwagon will get rolling, the drums will beat louder – but let’s wait for then, eh? It’s years away.’

It’s two years away. If I were you, I’d book your seats at Wembley now.

The new single from Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, ‘Dream On’, is out on March 12. His UK tour begins in Manchester on February 13. Visit noelgallagher.com

Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

The interview apears in THE SUNDAY MAIL'S LIVE MAGAZINE, thanks to @JonnySKK