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Post by lalaland on Oct 7, 2017 19:50:26 GMT -5
Noel Gallagher: turning 50, terrorists and Liam
He’s back. And he’s angry. About Manchester. About pop music. And, most of all, about his brother. By Jonathan Dean
Being here now: Noel Gallagher returns with a new album Being here now: Noel Gallagher returns with a new album PHOTOGRAPHED FOR CULTURE BY PAL HANSEN The Sunday Times, October 8 2017, 12:01am Share Save Noel Gallagher turned 50 in May. Did he care? “It’s significant, as you know you’re not going to get another 50,” he says. You could. “I won’t.” Instead, he celebrated in some style. “I had a rather large party that went into a third day, but there were no midgets.”
It’s not his only story about hedonistic sessions lasting half a week, with the best starting at Bono’s house, where the Irish taoiseach gave “an amazing speech, about what I’ve no idea”, before ending in Paris, via a jet, where a battered Gallagher, struggling to order room service, turned on his television to see the U2 singer speaking about Africa with President Macron.
Another has him, drunk again, with Ray Davies at an awards show, trying to work out how it took eight people to write an Emeli Sandé song. “The funniest thing?” Gallagher says, beaming, baffled. “Emeli Sandé wasn’t even one of them!”
You can’t, at 50, claim to be the same person you were at 25, when you lived in Levenshulme At lunchtime in an expensive London restaurant, he sits as still in conversation as he stands on stage, the eye to younger brother Liam’s storm in Oasis — the band who sold more than 70m records before splitting in 2009, and have been a national obsession for 25 years. Last year, Liam claimed Noel had changed since becoming famous. Noel doesn’t disagree.
“You can’t, at 50, claim to be the same person you were at 25,” he barks, “when you lived above a shop in Levenshulme and all you had in life was magic mushrooms in the park. You can’t then sit in Maida Vale talking about the Irish prime minister and claim it hasn’t changed you.”
The brothers remain at odds, which can’t be easy for their mother, Peggy. “Let’s not get too Jeremy Kyle about this,” Gallagher says sharply. “But my mum kind of lost two children to the music industry. She didn’t see me in my late twenties or thirties, as I was around the world, and when you come back, even though you’re not a different person, they treat you differently.”
QUIZ Noel Gallagher quiz He’s been known to throw zingers at pretty much anyone who crosses his path. Who is he talking about in these quotes? Take the quiz Of course, the other family member touched on in last year’s revelatory documentary Supersonic is their abusive dad, Tommy. Many songwriters might have been tempted to use that material — not Noel. “People don’t want to hear that,” he says. “I might go into it if I write a book.” He wants his music to be open to interpretation and, if a song is too personal, it narrows the universality. “Then I’m listening to someone pour his heart out and I’m, like, ‘Good for you. Tell me something about me.’”
He’s back, then — the Gallagher with all the best tunes, both in and out of Oasis. When their band collapsed in insults and thrown objects, Noel struck out on his own to release two platinum-selling records with his High Flying Birds band. His third album, produced by the dance guru David Holmes, is called Who Built the Moon? and it doesn’t sound like anything he has done before.
A first listen to the album reveals that something entirely unexpected and fresh is going on with his sound. There are nods to Primal Scream, Doves and Chemical Brothers. His wife, Sara MacDonald, who is “not into guitar music”, was the real test. “If I’m making music,” he explains, “she’ll say, ‘That’s nice.’ But I was playing something new when she burst in to say, ‘It’s amazing!’ I went, ‘Now we’re on to something.’”
‘Everything pre-international terrorism was a bit flowery to me’ Noel Gallagher‘Everything pre-international terrorism was a bit flowery to me’ Noel Gallagher PHOTOGRAPHED FOR CULTURE AT LOFT STUDIOS, LONDON. GROOMING: SIMON MAYNARD AT TERRI MANDUCA FOR MATHEW DAVID SALONS, MAYFAIR The opening track, Fort Knox, was written imagining that Kanye West was about to put a rap over it, while It’s a Beautiful World has a bit of French in which a woman says something that translates as: “Rest in peace/It’s only the end of the world.” That’s unusually existential for Gallagher. He smiles. The thing is, nobody in the studio spoke French, and they didn’t think to ask what had been said until the lyric sheets were printed. “But then France is a pretty volatile place at the minute,” he reasons — which is when things get heavy.
“There was a track we didn’t finish that was drawn out of the Paris attacks,” he explains. “And the Nice ones. We were working on it around Brexit, too, and not that I give a shit about that, but, symbolically, we abandoned the French at the time they were under attack. I felt bad for the French.”
That unfinished song sounds as if it is the closest Gallagher is going to come to a political statement. “There was a bit on the news after the attacks, about something we put up in space, and it was so fantastic, what humankind had done. The very next day in the news, some shithead who used to work in Lidl was throwing gay men off a roof in Raqqa, and it’s, like, ‘You scumbag.’ The rest of us are discovering the cosmos and you medieval f*****s are throwing gay people. And he used to work in Lidl? In Bury? F****** c***. It’s all going to come out in that song.”
This is about as “tortured artist” as he has ever been. “Well, everything pre-international terrorism was a bit flowery to me,” he replies. “And what annoys me most is you see the mayor [of London] saying, ‘We will not be cowed.’” Gallagher says there’s nothing wrong with being afraid. “I get on the Tube. My eldest [Anaïs, with Meg Mathews] is 17. She uses the Tube. My boys [Donovan and Sonny, with MacDonald] are growing up in London and use public transport. I’m frightened.
“Are you going to walk into an attack and die? Or survive with half an arm? Are your kids going to walk into it on a night out? I’m not buying Khan and his ‘London will stand firm’. I live in the centre and it concerns the f*** out of me.”
Our kids: Oasis in an early line-up: from left, Paul ‘Bonehead’ Arthurs, Tony McCarroll, Liam Gallagher and Noel Gallagher Our kids: Oasis in an early line-up: from left, Paul ‘Bonehead’ Arthurs, Tony McCarroll, Liam Gallagher and Noel Gallagher IAN DICKSON/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK And, of course, it’s not just London. Back in June, Gallagher was a no-show at the sprawling, emotionally charged concert put on by Ariana Grande in the wake of the terrorist attack on her Manchester Arena gig. He is Mancunian. Liam performed. Why didn’t Noel?
“I didn’t get asked,” he says bluntly. A pin of his home town’s symbol, a worker bee — in City blue — sits on his jacket. Did what was said bother him? “It’s just noise,” he shrugs. “Ill-informed f***wits.” He talks about the moment on St Ann’s Square when a mourning crowd sang Oasis’s Don’t Look Back in Anger. That evening, he fixed it so the track’s profits went to the council. The mayor knew, but the gesture was meant to be quiet.
“Until,” Gallagher says, “Mr Angry bombarded the internet with his hate.” Mr Angry is, of course, Liam. To defend himself, Noel made the news about his donation public. “So I’m getting calls saying, ‘Surely you want to do an interview?’ No. People died. This is not about me or some other idiot. A woman’s just woken up from a coma to find her daughter’s dead. Have some respect.”
Then, last month, Gallagher headlined the reopening of Manchester Arena, where a suicide bomber killed 22 people. “It was a strange night,” he recalls. “Because you live for moments when everyone is arms in the air with a song you’ve written, but you’re wishing this moment was never taking place, that Don’t Look Back in Anger was still about this woman of a certain age, toasting her life passing by, rather than being an anthem of defiance.”
I mention Liam again, who tweeted that people shouldn’t buy into Noel’s obvious emotion on stage, that it was a “PR stunt”. A tribute had been turned into a story about squabbling brothers. “For the second time,” Gallagher interrupts. “He needs to see a psychiatrist. I don’t say that as a joke. Because young Mancunians, young music fans, were slaughtered, and he, twice, takes it somewhere to be about him. He needs to see somebody.”
Noel onstage at the reopening of Manchester Arena after the terrorist attack Noel onstage at the reopening of Manchester Arena after the terrorist attack SHIRLAINE FORREST It was also a bit much for Liam to call anything a PR stunt when he took the opportunity of a BBC broadcast of the Manchester tribute show to play his new single, Wall of Glass. “Well,” Noel says calmly, “my instinct, were I young, high and drunk, would be to go on a rant. But I’m dignified now.” (Since we met, Liam has claimed his “PR stunt” tweets were a hack, but they remain undeleted.) There’s a song about their relationship on Liam’s new album. “There were a few on his last two as well,” Noel snaps. “You’d think he’d write songs about his divvy ex-wife, having just been divorced from her, know what I mean?”
We’re a long way from Digsy’s Dinner — the song about lasagne on Oasis’s debut album, Definitely Maybe. Grenfell Tower comes up, too (“You could smell it from our house”), which leads to budget cuts for public services: “What decade are we living in?” Gallagher hasn’t voted in years, and while this government, he says, may lead to more desperate pop from the disenfranchised, as happened under Thatcher, he isn’t holding his breath.
“The charts are still dominated by transatlantic pseudo-American bullshit,” he says. “Put a rap in and pop chorus on it. Email it to someone in Mogadishu to put some maracas over it. Make loads of money.”
So, yes, he’s fretful, angry and disillusioned, but for the most part Who Built the Moon? is a joy — the antidote to a world that so worries Gallagher. The record is packed with huge choruses and generic sentiments, which is fortunate, because his least favourite subject is what songs mean. Pop for him should be a feeling, which is far from how it is today, when one line leads to book-length blogs.
“I grew up in the golden age of pop, late 1970s, early 1980s,” Gallagher says. “Nobody talked about lyrics. You listened. You danced. It affected your life. Who cares what it’s about?” When did that change? “Around Britpop, when everybody wanted to be considered ‘an artist’. When Travis and Coldplay came and it was all introverted, why-does-it- always-rain-on-me? It’s not just raining on you. It’s raining on everyone. I’d rather write a song about the umbrella, not the f****** rain.
“Look at everybody’s first Britpop album,” he continues. “Oasis’s. Blur’s. Pulp’s. Raging joy.” But wasn’t the angst that came after that a reaction to the excesses? “I suppose it did get darker when drugs took over, yeah. And then you end up with the Libertines — lads with no teeth and their grandads’ hats.”
When is the Oasis reunion happening? He laughs loudly. “Would you do it?” he barks rhetorically. “You might for $200m. But let’s say you didn’t need $200m?” He genuinely seems to need that band like a fly in a pint, and, besides, he has his own family to worry about now — a lot.
“I get asked, ‘What about the fans?’ All I’ve got to do is direct you to [Liam’s] Twitter. What you’re seeing there is what it’s always been like — now it’s just out in public.”
Who Built the Moon? is out on Nov 24
@jonathandean_
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