Noel Gallagher on his new album, and his love of The Frank and Walters
Noel Gallagher's new album is Council Skies.
Noel Gallagher sits forward, eyes lighting up. “They were really brilliantly melodic,” says the most acclaimed songwriter of his generation. “They were great. They were quirky.”
In a suite at the Intercontinental Hotel in Dublin, Gallagher is thinking back to several lifetimes ago and his brief employment as a roadie for Cork indie band, The Frank and Walters, who later recalled accidentally poisoning one of his goldfish with vodka when Gallagher invited them to his flat in Manchester.
“That is not out of the realms of possibility. I had two nice fish. I don’t know what the f**k I was doing with fish. Maybe it was my girlfriend at the time. Did they poison them?” He is stumped. “When they came out, I loved the tunes.”
The Franks recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of their debut LP. It’s a year of anniversaries for Noel too – May 1993 marks 30 years since Creation Records boss Alan McGee “discovered” Noel and his brother Liam headlining King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow. Within a few months, they were the hottest band in Britain.
A lot has changed since then. Oasis split in 2009, and Noel and Liam no longer speak. Or at least no longer communicate face-to-face. In the period after Noel meets the Irish Examiner in Dublin to promote his latest album, Council Skies, however, plenty is said between the two. In an interview with Talksport, Noel called Liam a “coward” for not reaching out about a potential reunion. Liam hits back by bringing up the time, decades ago, when Noel “wished Aids” on Damon Albarn of Blur.
What a palaver, as Oasis, probably wouldn’t say. In Dublin, Noel’s team has politely insisted that he not be asked about Oasis getting back together. But it is Noel who brings up Liam when asked about Oasis’ iconic 1995 concert supporting REM at Slane – which witnessed one of the first-ever performances by Noel of his mega-anthem 'Don’t Look Back In Anger'.
He says 'Don’t Look Back In Anger' was written because he was frustrated by Liam wandering off stage whenever the fancy took him. He needed something to sing when his brother left him in the lurch. And so he came up with 'Don’t Look Back in Anger' and 'Wonderwall'.
“There’s no way I could have foreseen what 'Don’t Look Back In Anger' would become,” he says. “I knew 'Wonderwall' was a great tune, but I didn’t think it would be sung by taxi drivers in Mumbai. And I didn’t know that 'Don’t Look Back In Anger' would outlast me and my kids and my kids’ kids. I thought it was a good tune.
"The reason I sang that song … Liam at that time had a habit of walking off stage when he felt like it. I thought, ‘I’m going to sing more’. Instead of me trying to save the gig, I better write some songs that I can sing. I was going to sing one of them.”
He gave Liam his pick of 'Wonderwall' or 'Don’t Look Back In Anger'. The idea was that Noel would take vocals on the other. He recalls his sibling not being impressed by either.
“He hated 'Wonderwall' at the time. It was only when someone convinced him that it was going to be massive that he sang it. I’d be lying if I said this is going to be my calling card. When I write songs, I know they’re good, right. But I’ve gone out on tour and would have bet my children’s lives on a particular song being the one. And it’s not happened. It falls by the wayside. And it’s something else [that becomes the hit]. Because the people decide in the end."
Council Skies, by Noel’s High Flying Birds project, is a great album full of big heart-on-sleeve moments for which Gallagher is famous. Still, nobody is going to mistake it for a new Oasis record. It has the emotional punch but lacks that “us against the world” swagger, with the potential exception of the single 'Easy Now', which sounds like a cousin-once-removed of 'Little By Little'. Gallagher isn’t averse to writing Oasis-style tunes. It’s just that, at this point in his life, aged 56 with a growing family, he isn’t in a headspace where he can bash them out to order.
“Ordinarily if I’m writing songs, I’ll have a few on the go. I’ll write something that starts to sound Oasis-y and then I’ll get to the chorus and I’ll go, ‘oh this is a shit version of Slide Away’. In the case of Easy Now, I got to the chorus and thought, ‘oh hang this sounds as good as Little By Little’. It’s got the same shape as the Masterplan. If I can nail the recording, this is going to be f**king great’.” Ideally, he would have written an entire album of that calibre. But it doesn’t work that way.
“I wouldn’t mind doing 12 songs like that,” he says. “Unfortunately, if you’re a kid and you’re on YouTube you think it’s easy. To write one of them is the hardest thing in the world, far less to write 12. Particularly if it’s not where you’re at. When I was 23 and I was writing those Oasis songs, that’s where I was at. That’s what was in me. I can stumble across it from time to time. I’d fucking love to write 12 songs like 'Easy Now'. I’d love it to, but it’s not going to happen.”
He wrote the LP during the pandemic. It was a difficult time: in January, Gallagher and his wife of 12 years, Sara McDonald, announced they were divorcing.
“It was written in lockdown,” he says, his voice dropping. “I guess it is very reflective. That particular time, if you remember, it was like ‘f**king hell’. No one had ever lived through a pandemic. There was no road map as to how to get out of it. It is quite a reflective time for me personally. There’s always hope in my songs: I’ll always dig it out somewhere But then there are tracks like [stark break-up ballad] 'Dead to the World' – you just got to let that out.”
Council Skies is, in part, a rumination by Gallagher on his childhood in Manchester. He grew up on a housing estate in the hard-knock suburb of Burnage, where the Gallaghers were part of a large Irish community. It was an up-and-down upbringing – but his memories of growing up in Manchester were warm. He mentions Clint Mansell of the early 1990s band Inspiral Carpets, for whom Gallagher worked as a roadie (which is how he met the Frank and Walters – touring mates of Inspiral Carpets).
“Me and Clint were reminiscing about the old days the other week. Some of the things we went through were funny. It was all leading somewhere. Clint will always say, ‘We always knew’ [that Gallagher would become a star].”
He shakes his head. "Nobody knew. He reminded me, ‘You were writing songs then; you would play songs on the guitar’. They weren’t very good. It was always leading somewhere. I enjoyed that time.”
He’s glad he is no longer a scrappy striver with a headful of dreams. But now and then, Gallagher craves the anonymity he used to have. “There are times you are waiting for some fool to take some photograph of you – I wish I was anonymous today. It’s nice to talk about the past but I wouldn’t like to go back there. I much prefer the house where I live now.”
Council Estates isn’t a valentine to Burnage, however – or to Gallagher’s childhood, which was marked by the violence of his father.
“It’s rough as f**k where I come from. There you go, that’s just how it is. By the same token, my childhood wasn’t great. I don’t live off the back of that either. I’m from where I’m from and the memories I put in a song would be the good bits. The funny people that I know. Manchester made me who I am in the sense that it gave me drive and ambition. At least half a dozen the greatest bands are from up the street, which is gives you some kind of benchmark.”
The new album features guitar from Johnny Marr of The Smiths. Marr is also from an Irish household and has described “Manchester-Irish” as a specific thing – not Irish, but not entirely English. Noel agrees.
“We’ve got so much in common it’s a f**king joke. We were born two bus-stops away from each other. Our parents are Irish. We both support Man City. There is a lot in common. Which is why we get on so well: when he comes to my studio, 'Johnny Marr' isn’t coming… Johnny’s coming.”
Gallagher recalls watching The Smiths on Top of the Pops as a teenager and being drawn to the mercurial Marr rather than the flamboyant Morrissey (another Manchester artist with Irish parents).
“I was learning to play guitar at the time. There was something about the way that he looked. Morrissey, although quite shy, the words that he said were in your face. He was very in your face about architecture and celibacy. Johnny was the guy on the side – a bit cooler, I thought.”
Oasis couldn’t happen today, he feels. They wouldn’t have the right look. It is unthinkable that the music industry would allow these outsiders from the wrong side of the tracks to become the biggest force in music.
“No one has ever come along to take our place. We were the last of that kind of thing. Bands that came after us - great bands, Arctic Monkeys, Kasabian... there’s a lot of style involved. If Oasis had come along now, I guarantee someone would take Liam and me aside and say, ‘Do we need the bald guy [ie rhythm guitarist Paul ‘Bonehead’ Arthurs]... what about the bassist? He doesn’t sing much, does he?' You couldn’t get away with songs like 'Married with Children' [the chorus inspired by Gallagher’s then-girlfriend telling him “Your music’s shite]. So those things are best left crystallised in the past.”
- Council Skies by Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds is released June 2
Lifting you up is the main aim of music for me. That’s the main music I listen to. I’m not a fan of Radiohead and that kind of thing. Anything that make me feel good about myself is what I’m into.
"I never really sit down to write 'albums'. That’s the kind of thing Roger Waters does. That’s not me. I will always write song by song. But because these songs were written in a specific time frame, to do have the same mood."
"It’s not for me. The song and the book, I know it all tied in with that for Bono. Some of it is really f***ing good actually. When you see him sing those old song, he does reinterpret them with the melody. I’m not the singer – it’s not something I’ve ever thought of doing. It doesn’t seem that far-fetched that they they did that kind of thing. If I did it? I don’t know…"
"Because I’m a solo songwriter, I earn enough that I don’t need to be ramping it up with the ticket prices. It’s cheaper to see me this time than it was last time. People are broke. I’m thankful they come at all."
