NOEL GALLAGHER'S HIGH FLYING BIRDS

NOEL GALLAGHER DOESN’T RECKON OASIS ARE GREATER THAN THE KINKS BUT HE CAN’T HELP IT IF OTHER FOLK BELIEVE THEY ARE. HE ALSO INFORMS 
STEVE BELL THAT HE CAN’T BE “ARSED” BEING LIKE DAMON ALBARN.


After 18 tempestuous years (mainly) at the top of the rock’n’roll dung heap, Oasis’ chief songwriter Noel Gallagher announced his departure from the band in August 2009 following yet another altercation with his frontman brother Liam backstage at a festival in Paris. That Oasis split up was hardly a surprise – the spats between the Gallaghers were both legendary and legendarily predictable – but now the world and their legion of fans waited with bated breath to see what would happen next in this high-profile, profligate musical saga.

Long story short – Liam Gallagher kept the band, re-named it Beady Eye and released their debut album Different Gear, Still Speeding in February 2011. It sold handy figures and was received well enough critically, but didn’t really set the world on fire. The elder sibling took his time a bit more, assembled a new band – soon to be known as Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds – and released their self-titled debut in October just gone, more than two full years after the great Oasis schism. The songs contained therein are a slightly restrained extension of the songwriting and music that Gallagher had already gifted the world and no great departure – ‘If it ain’t broke, why fix it?’ could well have been a marketing maxim for the release.


And already has done everything that a mortal artist could hope for in that it debuted at the top of the charts in the UK, sped to platinum status and, perhaps crucially, sold significantly more copies than his brother’s first effort away from the comfort zone of their alliance. While many would baulk at the prospect of following up such a monumentally successful project – Oasis, after all, did sell an estimated 70 million albums worldwide – according to Gallagher, the prospect of starting over from scratch didn’t bother him in the slightest.


“Well it’s taken me two years to get to this point, so it’s been a gradual thing, if you know what I mean?” the affable musician offers down the phone from Los Angeles, mid-tour. “It wasn’t like I left Oasis and then the next day was doing a gig somewhere else with other guys. It’s a gradual thing. It doesn’t feel weird, it’s just different – that was then, this is now.”


As well as being a commercial success, the new album was reasonably well-received by critics, but unsurprisingly for someone who’s spent so long at the top of the musical mountain, the reception afforded his opus hardly registered on the Gallagher radar.
“It’s always nice when you sell half a million copies of a record in under a couple of months and fucking journalists all give it four out of five stars – that’s great, but it’s not the reason why you do it,” he posits. “If it had sold 50,000 records and got shit reviews it wouldn’t change my opinion of the record any, do you know what I mean? I know what I think about it and I know what the songs are about and I know what I put into it and I know what I get out of it, so really the critical acclaim and the commercial success, they’re just a bonus. For instance when you see these polls about the Greatest Albums Of All Time, in England we’d have two in the top five and The Kinks wouldn’t have any in the top 20 – that doesn’t make me think that I’m better than Ray Davies. It’s just other people’s opinions. But it’s handy that people are still buying records, that’s for sure.”

The Davies analogy is pertinent, not so much for the fractured brotherhood that threatened at times to overshadow both bands, but because …High Flying Birds contains a number of clearly Kinks-ian moments. “Well I am the sum of my influences – I don’t pretend that I’ve created anything original,” Gallagher laughs. “I don’t give a shit about that. I’m a product of my record collection, that’s it.”


However, he must be over the constant comparisons to the Beady Eye album – surely somebody who’s just created a piece of art would want it taken on its own merits rather than being forever held up against the work of his feuding brother? “Well I don’t compare anything that I do to anyone else,” Gallagher rails. “I don’t think anyone else does what I do. I think you’ll find if you look at any male solo artist in England, everybody’s co-writing with someone else – I don’t think anybody actually does what I do. You don’t have to look too far down the album credits to see that the songs are written by the artists, but then [affects bemused tone], ‘Hang on a minute! Who’s this other fella? Who the fucking hell is writing these songs?’ So in that respect I don’t think anyone else is doing what I do, so I don’t compare my stuff to any other solo artist, so how could I be possibly compared to another band? But I understand the world in which we live, these comparisons have to be made because what else are you going to write about?


“But just because someone writes in a magazine about the differences or similarities between me and something else – that doesn’t demean the art that you’ve made in any way. Although I’d have to say if people are still going on about that kind of thing next year, I’d be like, ‘Fucking hell, hang on a minute!’ But as long as the records sell, I don’t give a fuck to be honest.”


Clearly Gallagher wasn’t precious about his potential reception, for he concurrently made two albums at once when he got going in the studio, with the second record – a collaboration with Amorphous Androgynous – due in the next few months. “I can give you a brief outline [of the second album], but I don’t want to spoil it because there will be nothing to talk about [when it comes out], will there?” Gallagher offers mischievously. “Of the 13 tracks at the moment – we’re still fucking about with mixes, these guys won’t let it go – the singles off this album are all on the next album, plus ten original songs and it’s kind of like a psychedelic rock record, really. While this current album does not have a great deal of guitars on it at all, the next one quite possibly might have too many. It’s one of those records…


“I’d stockpiled so much material over the years, because in the end we were all writing in Oasis, so I was only writing five songs every three years – well, I was only getting to release five songs, but I was still writing a lot. So when it came to do this I had about 38 songs to choose from and I recorded, with b-sides and all that, 32 of those songs. I’ve still got enough for another album.”


Was that late period of Oasis annoying for Gallagher – who had, after all, written the early über-successful Oasis albums on his lonesome – when he had to cede songwriting duties not just to his brother, but to the other members of the band as well? “Well, no, you have to accept the compromises if you want to be in a band, it’s as simple as that,” he muses. “If you want to be in a band with four other geezers and they all write music, you have to accept the compromise and I accepted the compromise because Oasis was such a fantastic thing, do you know what I mean? Saying that, now I’ve been on this side of the fence I’m not sure that I’d ever go back, in a songwriting sense. It’s like you think it’s great in business class on the airplane, right, until you go in first class. And then when you go in first class, business class seems to be a bit shit all of a sudden. It’s like everything was great in Oasis in a songwriting sense, but now that I’m getting to do this and put out two albums at the same time and do whatever I want, I’m not sure that I’d be able to go back to that and make those compromises again.


“I want to experiment a bit, although I don’t think I’ll ever become like a Damon Albarn-type character and attempt opera. There’s a few factors for that – the main one is I can’t be arsed. I’m not really a proficient musician – obviously it goes without saying that I can play the guitar, but that’s all I can play – and I’m not really interested in doing many other things apart from guitar music. I’m interested in electronic music a little bit, but my own experience in electronic music is that it fucking takes forever to record! You can write a song in three minutes and record it in under an hour, but I’m in a studio with electronic people and they’re fucking sitting around for days fucking about and looking at a computer screen, fucking staring into the abyss of technology, and you’re just, like, ‘Fuck this!’ I was in a studio once and in the time it took them to record one song I could have played Wembley for three nights! Fuck this, I just want a game of tennis…”


Electronic vexations aside, Gallagher seems pretty happy with his lot in life, as well he should be. “I just don’t think I could have written the script any better so far,” he marvels. “Which is a bit of a pain in the arse, because it means I’ve got nowhere to go after the next record. I’ve fucking done it all; I might retire. I’m thinking that after the psychedelic record, what is there left to do? I’ve had a number one in England, I got a fucking Q Icon award, there’s all manner of shit going on that I can’t tell you about – it’s virtually what people take ten years to do as solo artists that I’ve pretty well knocked out in under fucking nine months, while having a baby and fucking moving house and getting married! And my football team is top of the league and, fuck me, I think I’m actually looking younger! I don’t know what’s going on! What the fuck is going on?”



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