http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6937414/noel-gallagher-oasis
Noel Gallagher's first official solo
record won't be released in America until November, but there's already a
party for it in August. It's described as a "listening party," so
that's what I expect it to be: six or seven people sitting in an
otherwise quiet room, listening to an album titled
Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds.
For those who care about the music of Oasis, anticipation for this
record is greater than for anything Oasis has done in the past 10 years.
This is not only because Noel was the principal songwriter for the
band, although that's certainly part of it; equally significant is the
fact that the finest moments in Oasis' two-decade trajectory have
generally occurred when Noel was singing: "Don't Look Back in Anger,"
the chorus on "Acquiesce," their live cover of Neil Young's "Hey Hey My
My (Into the Black)," and a 1996 episode of
MTV Unplugged (when
Noel sang everything while his brother drank beer in the balcony).
Oasis completists are interested in Liam Gallagher's new project, Beady
Eye, the way Smiths fans were interested in Electronic, but Noel's
material is what matters. The potential is real. Considering the
circumstances of the Oasis split, it seems entirely possible that Noel
might make a memorable album purely out of spite.
The so-called listening party is not what I anticipate. It's not six
or seven people, but 60 or 70. It's held in the penthouse of the
Mondrian luxury hotel and sponsored by (or is perhaps just uncommonly
supportive of) UV vodka. The walls are white, the couches are white, the
light is white. Everything is white (except the audience, which is
maybe 4 percent Asian). There are at least two guys who look and talk
like Adam Scott's character from
Step Brothers. At 7:35 p.m.,
Mercury Records president David Massey picks up a microphone and
explains how most people in the 1990s incorrectly assumed Oasis would
"just flame out in a drug haze." This is an odd compliment, particularly
since that's precisely what many casual fans believe must have
happened. After his speech, we get to hear six tracks off
High Flying Birds.
No one even pretends to listen. The partygoers talk the whole time and
stand in line for free vodka. I'm told that Noel is allegedly coming to
this party later, but I don't stay long enough to find out. As I ride
the elevator down from the 26th floor, I find myself hoping he never
shows up at all, mostly because I suspect he'd really hate it.
The next day, I'm scheduled to meet
Gallagher at a similar hotel in a different sector of Manhattan. He is
43 minutes late for our 45-minute interview, so I sit and listen to a
pair of publicists discussing a third hotel that's 2,462 miles away.
It's the Friday before New York will be hit by Hurricane Irene,
presenting the Gallagher camp with a strange problem: Noel is now flying
to Los Angeles a day early, but he can't get into his room because the
King of Tonga (George Tupou V) has supposedly booked an entire floor of
the Sunset Tower Hotel. The King of Tonga rocks harder than anyone you
know. I have a brief conversation with one of the publicists about a
lawsuit Liam recently filed (and then reportedly dropped) against Noel:
During a July 6 press conference, Noel claimed Liam had missed a 2009
festival date because of a hangover. Liam saw this as an attack on his
professionalism and legally charged Noel with slander, which is a little
like Kanye West charging Rickey Henderson with overconfidence. Noel
publicly apologized and the problem seemed to evaporate, although Liam
continues to insist otherwise.
It will likely drag on indefinitely. Ever since Oasis were propelled
into existence, Noel and Liam have seemed like boyish versions of Andy
Capp who despise each other equally — but this recent schism feels
different. It's less fun, somehow. There will undoubtedly be a day in
the distant future when Oasis reunites, because just about every group
eventually does. But it won't be because these guys suddenly stopped
disliking each other.
When I finally meet Gallagher (he'd been having a long lunch with his
wife), he seems tired. He looks healthy but grouchy. My suspicion is
that he's probably spent his morning talking to other people like me,
most of whom have either asked him leading questions about Liam or tried
to goad him into insulting other bands at random (as this is something
he does not mind doing). He slouches on a couch while we navigate 10
minutes of small talk. We chat about the weather and about why he finally married his girlfriend
after dating for 11 years. For no clear reason, he's wearing a garish
class ring from a high school in Louisiana, purchased in a Japanese
pawnshop 21 years ago. He briefly imagines the backstory of the ring: "I
reckon the previous owner was a G.I. who was stationed in Tokyo and
pawned this ring for prostitutes." I momentarily get the sense this is
never going to become a real interview. But I start to ask a few
questions and Gallagher starts answering them. And everything he says is
hilarious. I don't even know if this can be properly reflected in a
profile, because it's not so much what he says as it is the way he says
it; Gallagher just has a naturally comedic, endlessly profane delivery
that seems unbound by the parameters of normal conversation. He doesn't
even have to try. It just happens. I suppose this might all be
premeditated, but that's not how it seems. Gallagher's dialogue is like
his music: The straightforward virtuosity is a by-product of its
apparent effortlessness.
"I've never understood musicians who don't enjoy doing promotional
interviews," he says. "I just can't believe it. I always think, 'Your
life must have been so brilliant before you were in a band.' Because my
life was shit, and this is great. Even after all these years, at 44
years of age, whenever the label asks if I want to go to New York to do
promos, I always say
yes immediately. And the label is always
like, 'Are you sure? It's going to require a lot of interviews?' And
I'm like — I don't give a fuck. You're gonna fucking fly me first class
to New York and put me in this amazing hotel? And my wife can go fucking
shopping four hours a day? What is not to like about that? I fucking
love doing press conferences. I don't want to suggest it's all a joke,
but come on — the president holds fucking press conferences. Why am I
here? Why not enjoy it? I've never felt like I had anything important to
say. I can tell a few jokes and we can talk irreverently about fame and
success and sport and bullshit and all the crazy people you meet. But I
have nothing to say."
This is not accurate.
When you like a band, you want to hear about the good times. When you love a band, you want to hear about the bad times.
I want to hear about
Be Here Now.
"At the time, I was taking a lot of fucking drugs, so I didn't give a
fuck," Gallagher says. "We were taking all the cocaine we could
possibly find. But it wasn't like a seedy situation. We were at work. We
weren't passed out on the floor with a bottle of Jack Daniel's. We were
partying while we were working. And when that record was finished, I
took it back to my house and listened to it when there wasn't a party
happening and I wasn't out of my mind on cocaine. And my reaction was:
'This is fucking long.'
I didn't realize how long it was. It's a long fucking record. And then
I looked at the artwork, and it had all the song titles with all the
times for each track, and none of them seemed to be under six minutes.
So then I was like, 'Fucking hell. What's going on there?' But you know,
those were just the songs I wrote, and we recorded them to the best of
our abilities. When we had recorded
(What's the Story) Morning Glory?,
nobody from the label bothered us, and we hatched the Golden Egg. So
the label was like, 'Don't bother those guys. They're geniuses. Just let
them do what they want.' The producer was really just the recording
engineer. There was nobody around to say, 'These songs are too long.' It
was a good wake-up call, to be honest. I really wonder what would have
happened if
Be Here Now had sold like
Morning Glory.
What would we have done the next time? Just imagine if that album had
sold 30 million copies. I probably would have grown a mustache and
started wearing a fucking cape."
Because of how the music industry has evolved (read: collapsed), there will never be a situation like 1997's
Be Here Now
again. There are no more situations in which a rock album that's
impossible to hear in advance is collectively anticipated by the
monoculture. But that's how it was before the release of
Be Here Now.
At the time, Oasis were in a weirdly unassailable position: They were
of simultaneous interest to the critical community, the tabloid press,
and the populace at large. They were the first post-grunge band to be
massive in every context. But the 71-minute
Be Here Now failed,
even though it supposedly sold 8 million copies in six months. Its
earliest reviews were mostly positive, but the actual reception was
disappointing (and the sales proved top-heavy). It's sometimes viewed as
the record that killed Britpop. And people turned on Oasis when this
happened. The bloated, bass-empty, blow-stretched songs validated
critics who'd claimed their early work was overrated, and the absence of
a ubiquitous single (such as 1995's "Wonderwall") eroded their position
in the culture. From a public-opinion standpoint, they never truly
recovered.
"At the end of the cycle of
Morning Glory, I was hailed as
the greatest songwriter since Lennon and McCartney," Gallagher recalls.
"Now, I know that I'm not, and I knew I wasn't then. But the perception
of everybody since that period has been, 'What the fuck happened to this
guy? Wasn't he supposed to be the next fucking Beatles?' I never said
that I was the greatest thing since Lennon and McCartney … well,
actually, I'm lying. I probably did say that once or twice in
interviews. But regardless, look at it this way: Let's say my career had
gone backwards. Let say this new solo album had been my debut, and it
was my
last two records that sold 20 million copies instead of
the first two records. Had this been the case, all the other albums
leading up to those last two would be considered a fucking journey. They
would be perceived as albums that represent the road to greatness. But
just because it started off great doesn't make those other albums any
less of a journey. I'll use an American football analogy since we're in
America: Let's say you're behind with two minutes to go and you come
back to tie the game. It almost feels like you've won. Right? But let's
say you've been ahead the whole game and you allow the opponent to tie
things up in the final two minutes. Then it feels like you've lost. But
the fact of the matter is it's still a fucking tie. The only difference
is perception. And the fact of the matter is that Oasis sold 55 million
records. If people think we were never good after the '90s, that's
irrelevant."
The premise of Oasis' career happening in reverse is an interesting
thought experiment and not altogether incorrect (had this inverted
sequence actually transpired, it's easy to imagine the kind of person
who'd argue that "Supersonic" sucks and that the real Oasis music can
only be found on the likes of
Heathen Chemistry). But it ignores a key element of artistic endeavor: motivation. The album that followed
Be Here Now was the lowest artistic point in the group's career — and that was due to everything that preceded it.
"We should have never made
Standing on the Shoulder of Giants,"
Gallagher says of the 2000 release, an album whose worst moments
sometimes sound like an attempt at satirizing the Beatles. "I'd come to
the end. At the time, I had no reason or desire to make music. I had no
drive. We'd sold all these fucking records and there just seemed to be
no point. Liam, to his credit, was the one who was like, 'We're going to
make a record, we're going into the studio next month, and you better
have some fucking songs written.' We should have gone to wherever it is
the Rolling Stones disappear to, wherever the fuck that is. Rent a boat
and sail around the Bahamas or whatever. But I went ahead and did it,
even though I had no inspiration and couldn't find inspiration anywhere.
I just wrote songs for the sake of making an album. We needed a reason
to go on a tour. But at the time, I wasn't thinking like that. We all
thought the song 'Go Let It Out' was good. I was off [street] drugs,
but to get off those I had to go on prescription drugs, which is fucking
worse because they come from a doctor. It's just uppers and downers
that replace the cocaine and booze. But after that, Gem [Archer] and Andy [Bell]
joined the band, and we started to split up the songwriting duties
because they wanted to write songs, too. I'd slowed down as a writer and
didn't feel like I could keep writing 20 songs every two years."
Gallagher makes a lot of reference to
perception
(both his own and other people's), so I try to reframe our
conversation: I tell him that I want to run through various points of
his life and have him try to recall how other people viewed him and how
he viewed himself. He is totally willing to do this, but we never get
past 1991.
"I was living in the center of Manchester, so I was always in clubs
and at shows and kind of living on the periphery of the music business,"
he says. "The people at the center of the music scene would have seen
me as an outsider. The people who were further outside than me, though,
would have thought I was some kind of insider. But I just believed I was
at where I would always be. It never occurred to me to be in a band or
write songs, even though I played guitar. I'd always thought I might be
in the music business, because I loved collecting records and reading
about records and all of that.
But just being in a road crew,
I thought, 'This is fucking great.' I was making $700 a week to plug in
some other guy's guitar. I loved it. I never felt like I needed to be
onstage. I liked being behind the fucking amplifiers. I had no
ambitions. I got to travel the world — drugs, women. Nobody knew who I
was after I left town. I didn't have to be anywhere or do anything. But
then Liam said, `You should join my band,
because you know how to write songs.' So I went down there on a few
Sundays to jam, and it was the first time I'd ever heard other people
play my songs. It was amazing to have that happen. And there was another
pivotal moment about two years in,
before we'd done anything or anyone knew us: I wrote the song
'Columbia.' And the next song I wrote immediately after that was 'Up in
the Sky.' And then right after that, I wrote 'Live Forever.' All of this
happened in a row, very easily. And I just thought, 'These songs are
fucking great.' Especially 'Live Forever.' I remember thinking, 'I know
enough about music to know that this is a good song.' So I took it to
the band and we played it, and I instantly knew that I had written a
bona fide classic song, even though nobody knew who the fuck we were. So
that's when I started to take things quite seriously."
It's hard to tell exactly what "quite seriously" means in this
context, since Gallagher is so adamant about not taking himself
seriously under any circumstances whatsoever. Is his work on
High Flying Birds
more "serious" than his work with Oasis? That depends on what you
thought of him before. It's very much in line with the music he's always
made — the first single ("The Death of You and Me") has the most
satisfying hook he's composed in many years, and the track "If I Had a
Gun" would fit comfortably on any Oasis release after
Definitely Maybe.
All the lyrics are oblique and there are only two guitar solos on the
entire album. Gallagher also has a companion LP coming out in 2012 that
he made with the British electronic duo the Amorphous Androgynous,
better known in some circles as the Future Sound of London; it still
doesn't have a title, but it's an elongated '70s psychedelic record
Gallagher compares to
Dark Side of the Moon. How well these
albums will perform is uncertain, mostly because gauging the success of
modern records has become so difficult to calculate. But I suppose true
success is never easy to quantify. It's not the same as fame, which
Gallagher understands completely. He is not the type of artist who longs
for success while hating the baggage of celebrity. In fact, he feels the opposite. He sees success as a much more complicated predicament.
"Fame is something that is bestowed upon you
because of
success. Success is something you have to chase," he explains. "And once
you've had success, you have to keep having it in order not to be a
failure. In business, you can have one massive success that earns $50
million overnight, and that's it. You're successful. End of story. But
in the music business, you have to keep on doing it. You have to
constantly chase success. The fame you just
get. I enjoy being
famous, because I don't have to do anything. I can just turn up at nice
restaurants and people are like, 'Oh, it's Noel fucking Gallagher.
Brilliant. Sit down.' But success can ruin people, because you have to
chase it, and that can drive you insane. You can get obsessed with the
idea of a formula, and you start wondering, 'Why did I sell 20 fucking
million albums in less than two years during the '90s, but now I can't
sell 20 million albums over the span of 10 years after the turn of the
century?' And it's not like I sit around thinking about that, but it's
always there. And when you start
really chasing success, you start to make mistakes, and that's when things spin out of fucking control."
As he says this, I suspect that he's talking about the real reason he
can no longer work with his brother. Here again, the issue is not
reality, but perception. The two brothers were able to maintain a
working relationship for roughly 20 years, through periods of feast and
phases of famine. Yet the perception during that whole time never
changed: Noel was always the talented one and Liam was merely the
charismatic singer. When they were younger, that perception was
tolerable. But now that Liam is 39 — and now that it's so clear that
this perception will always be the defining image of what Oasis was — he
simply could not accept the conditions of the contract.
"I think that's what it was," Gallagher says. "He'd never admit that,
though. In the beginning, when I was writing all the songs and he was
partying until the break of dawn, he didn't give a shit. D'you know what
I mean? He was fine with it. But when
he started to write
songs … you know, this is really more of a question for Liam than it is
for me, although you'd never get a straight answer from him. In my
experience, you never see an older brother
jealous of a younger brother. Maybe he did get cast in the role of the
performing fucking monkey by the press, and maybe I got cast as the man
behind the curtain. Maybe he wanted to be the Wizard of Oz instead of
the monkey. Maybe if I'd been a little more tolerant of his behavior
things would be different. But at some point he had to take
responsibility for the fucking words he was saying. I have a circle of
friends, and he kept saying things that were upsetting to these people.
And for years I ignored it, because I thought the band was more
important. But at some point, I just decided I'd had enough of this. And
when things got violent, I left. There is no point in being in a
fucking violent rock band.
That's nonsense. We've always had a different view of the band: I
thought the most important part were the songs, and he though the most
important part was the chaos."
As one might expect, Noel also tries to downplay the degree of
antipathy the two brothers share, since this type of breakup is more
complicated than a typical, nonfamilial implosion. Certain issues
between them might still stem from when they shared a bedroom as
truculent teenagers. Sometimes, Noel seems amused by their fighting (I
can tell he's still kind of proud that one of their 1995 arguments was
recorded in the studio and released as a bootleg single in the U.K.).
But sometimes he seems angry in a manner that's impossible to fake.
There was a period when people assumed the animosity in Oasis might have
been a marketing ploy, and perhaps — for a time — it was. But it's not
anymore. Their dislike is at least as genuine as their music.
"We never hung out together outside of the band, ever," he says.
"Now, of course, at some point I'm going to have to sit in a fucking
room with Liam again. Hopefully time will heal some of these wounds. But
if you're asking me if it's going to be this Christmas — not a fucking
chance."
As our interview draws to a close, I
notice that Gallagher is sniffling and coughing, so I ask if he's
getting sick. At first he says yes, but then he gets up for a cup of
coffee and says, "To tell you the fucking truth, I'm kind of hungover."
It turns out he did show up at the album release party the night before,
just before it ended. It turns out he hated it a little less than I
suspected.
"In England, we don't go for that kind of stuff," he says. "You just
put the record out and people buy it or they don't. Over here, things
are a little more corporate. You have to go to parties like that. I find
it always helps to get drunk beforehand — not too drunk, but just a
little. D'you know what I mean? You have to shake a lot of hands. I have
no idea who those people were. My wife was like, 'How can you stand
doing this?' But it wasn't that bad, except that now I'm hungover."
This, it seems, is why Noel is different than Liam (and always will
be). Liam denies his hangovers and sues people for joking about them;
Noel confesses his hangovers and will shake hands with anyone. And when
you've been in a band that's been drunk for 20 years, that difference
tells you everything you need to know.
Chuck Klosterman is the author of six books. His novel The Visible Man will be released in October.
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