Quick copy paste on my phone, sorry if it’s messy.
The invisible elves at Kenwood House, the grade I listed Robert Adam masterpiece perching on the shoulder of Hampstead Heath, have been busy. Holly branches heavy with red berries are draped over ornately carved mantelpieces. A tree hung with tasteful sparkly baubles and pine cones stands tall in the library. The Christmas shop is open. Children can book an audience with Father Christmas. I am here, however, for another living piece of English heritage.
Noel Gallagher, Manchester’s sacred and profane hit machine, is standing by a shuttered Georgian sash window in a mustardy corduroy jacket, gazing out over the heath towards the City skyline. At 52, he is still so fit you could twang him like a guitar string. The milky winter light flatters his lean, sideburned face, tanned after a month of touring Australia with U2 with his band, High Flying Birds, the group he formed after he left Oasis 10 years ago following one last backstage bust-up with his younger brother, Liam.
I last saw Noel a month ago, when we were both guests on a Scandi chat show. The host, Fredrik Skavlan, made merry with fact that we both have very special brothers. “If you had to choose,” he asked Noel, “who would you have as your brother: Liam or Boris Johnson?”
Noel sat on the sofa opposite me, pondering this Sophie’s choice, his groomed monobrow twitching as the audience dissolved into peals of expectant laughter.
“Boris is more entertaining, his use of English language is far superior … ” Noel said with a grin. “Liam is better-looking, though.”
I noted that he didn’t actually answer the question. He didn’t actually say he preferred my brother to his brother — despite everyone knowing the Gallaghers can’t stand the sight of each other, that theirs is the most toxic sibling rivalry since Kane and Abel (I don’t think Ed and David Miliband quite make the grade). In fact, only moments earlier I had heard Noel tell the appreciative Swedish audience that he could never forgive his younger brother, who, at 47, was still a baby and a pain in the backside. I pondered this in my heart.
After the show, I asked Noel for an interview. He agreed. Then, as happens, I got calls and emails from his management team threatening to pull it if I mentioned Liam.
“He has chronic fatigue with people talking about his brother,” I was told. “Fear not,” I assured them. “Possibly more than any living journalist on this planet, I feel his pain.” “We thought you would be hip to this,” came the reply.
What’s the story? Rachel Johnson and Noel Gallagher discuss delicate family dynamics
What’s the story? Rachel Johnson and Noel Gallagher discuss delicate family dynamics
So here we were, rocking around the Christmas tree in Kenwood House. Once again, Noel is a Wurlitzer of zingy one-liners, a jukebox of insults. Everything that comes out of his mouth is quotable — or it would be if every other word were not “f******”. He’s just off the plane from down under, but caught the Prince Andrew interview in Oz. “Like Brexit, it’s on every 20 seconds. They’re even more obsessed with it than we are,” he says. What was his verdict on Randy Andy’s performance? “There speaks a man who’s never had to lie his way out of trouble,” he says as the photographer snaps away. “Problem is, he’s f****** shit at it.”
Photos over, we head to his house, a magnificent stucco-fronted residence in Little Venice, north London (similar six-bedroom properties are yours for about £8.5m). He lives here — and in a new place in Hampshire he moved into this autumn — with his wife, Sara MacDonald, a publicist, and their two boys, Sonny, 9, and Donovan, 12, who go to Bedales, the liberal private school. Gallagher also has a daughter about whom he talks a lot — Anaïs, 19, by his former wife, Meg Mathews. He moved here three years ago. It’s only a couple of miles from Supernova Heights, the notorious party pad he owned during the Britpop years, when he was a commander of the up-all-night Primrose Hill set.
The current London gaff feels almost as big as Kenwood House, but instead of priceless Rembrandts and enfilades of classical rococo libraries, we are in the world of rock-star cool. Guitars are strewn on super-sized sofas, mirrored walls reflect artworks depicting the Beatles and black-and-white photographs of Bowie. Two life-size ceramic cheetahs guard a fireplace.
“Sara did it all,” he says, as we make tea in the downstairs kitchen and take it up to the double-aspect sitting room. “I’m useless at everything except the music system, the telly and playing the guitar.”
We sprawl on a leopardskin sofa the size of Canada underneath a framed photograph of a used spliff and dead match, and a vintage film poster. The title of the film is Cannabis. It looks like the ultimate crash pad, but Noel doesn’t party with Kate Moss and the rest of the chemical generation of slebs any more. He got rid of the drunks, the fake friends, the hangers-on, but he still knows how to have a good time. He mentions Paul Weller and Bono as mates, and says he is hitting Nobu later with the actor Matt Smith. And he still drinks — though not this afternoon.
“The thing is, I’m a f****** good drunk,” he says, as we mainline PG Tips and chocolate digestives. “I’m so happy when I’m drinking. The black cloud never comes down. Sara’s like that too. As we both say, ‘Drink goes in and fun comes out.’ ”
Talk turns to our Christmas plans and it seems that Noel and I have something else in common. We don’t really like Christmas, but we try to recreate for our own children the Christmases we never had. I tell him about Johnson family Christmases: the time when I was tiny and my father sent my scary uncle Pete to deliver the stockings to the foot of our beds at dead of night and I woke to find him instead of Father Christmas looming over me. Or the year after my parents’ divorce when my mother forgot to order the turkey and my brothers had to go to a halal butcher on Portobello Road on Christmas Eve and came back with a small capon. Even though we come from very different backgrounds, he nods in recognition.
“I just remember it being a lot of sadness,” he says. “The endless dark nights, the sadness. When my parents split up at last it was a relief. When my mam walked out I was, like, thank God for that. I just remember tension, I wanted it all to be over.”
He too gets the fear of Christmases past as the festive season approaches. “The family gatherings — I mean, the nearest thing I’ve ever seen to real Christmas is the Royle family, where it’s a bit shit. Tray on my lap, that’s my idea of a real-life Christmas.
“Christmas Day’s the longest day, longer than D-Day — and more stressful,” he continues. “You’re sitting there exhausted, thinking, ‘And it’s only 11 o’clock.’”
Then all of a sudden he gets a bit soppy.
“The significant thing in our family, this family here,” he says, referring to Sara and the kids, “is that Donovan was conceived on Christmas Day.”
How does he know? “We were trying for a child and, you know, we tried on Christmas Day,” he explains. “And when we worked out backwards from his due date we realised.”
Sara, unlike Noel, loves the whole shebang of Christmas. “She’s Scottish and believes in the perfect Christmas because those are the ones she had. And Sara has the present-buying gene. I’ll get in and find stacks of boxes. She buys presents for the whole of London. She’s probably got you one,” he tells me. “But me, I’m a northern, working-class male.”
Are you tight? “No,” he laughs. He spends on the kids — “that’s what they’re for. I ask Sara what she wants and she says, ‘Surprise me,’” he groans. Sara, who is out having a boozy lunch with girlfriends in Notting Hill, texts Noel while we’re chatting to say she won’t be home for hours.
This year they will spend Christmas in Hampshire on his farm, where you can see “straight down the valley”. “I love it, I love it.” There’s quite a bit of land, he admits, “enough to put a football pitch in the garden for the lads” .
Will he relax? “I’m always stressing that I’m bringing everyone down to my level,” he admits. “So I’ll be all jazz hands with the kids” — he waves his hands and cracks a forced smile — “but there will still be pictures of everyone at the table at Christmas lunch in a paper hat apart from me.” He claims to have seen the Queen’s Speech “twice, maybe three times” in his life, which is more than Jeremy Corbyn can believably say.
While he describes Sara’s childhood Christmases as “like The Sound of Music”, his were “the kind you see on TV — gritty northern drama”.
The atmosphere at home in the 1970s was, he says, dysfunctional, scarred by unemployment and poverty. His kids, on the other hand, “have two loving parents, and they love their stepsister”. The way he sees it, “if you grow up in a house full of arguments, you will grow up as we became. But if you grow up in a loving environment, where people love and respect each other, you will become like that.”
He sees Peggy, his “mam”, but is long estranged from his father. He has tried buying his mam a house, but she and four of her sisters insist on living within five minutes’ walk of each other on the same council estate in Manchester where they have lived for decades. Peggy is one of seven daughters and four sons, originally from Ireland. “Family Christmases in Ireland were insane — four to a bed. My Grandma Maggie, the most foul-mouthed woman I’ve ever met, would sit and smoke and swear and drink whisky all through every meal. I’ve got at least 40 first cousins,” he says.
Brothers, eh?
As well as Liam, who is younger, he has an older brother, Paul. Is Paul the more responsible of the three? “Our Paul is very responsible, but he’s not responsible for me. He looks after Liam now.”
It’s the only time in the whole afternoon he mentions Liam by name. Is Noel still on good terms with Paul?
“Our family has never been close,” he says, staring into the fire.
Given how the politics of the past few years has divided country, party and — oh yes — family, I put it to Noel that he and Liam represent, in microcosm, the nation. Bound by blood and soil, but split by personal and political differences.
“There are similarities, and differences,” he answers. “The prime minister is the frontman for the band. There’s always tensions in the band and there’s always tensions in cabinet. Someone’s always leaking something … The difference is, in a band, in rock’n’roll, you represent yourself. In politics you represent the party and the people, and all that bullshit.”
I think what Noel is saying is you have to be true to yourself — and that’s harder in politics than it is in rock’n’roll. That seems fair.
He’s voted Labour “all my life” — but not this time.
“If somone held a gun to my head, I’d vote Green. What separates me from [Corbyn’s] Labour Party: I was not born in a communist country. I am not a communist. I am an individual. I come from a council estate and lived on £17 a week and I rose to live in a house like this because I’m an individual who has expressed individual thoughts. I am an artist. I did it for me. I’m not going to have an ideology saying I can’t have this. British people aren’t communists. It’s as simple as that.”
Party animals: meeting then prime minister Tony Blair at a music industry reception at No 10, 1997
Party animals: meeting then prime minister Tony Blair at a music industry reception at No 10, 1997
PA
It’s a far cry from the days of Cool Britannia, when Noel was wooed by Tony Blair and famously partied with him, Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson at Downing Street in 1997.
“I was told, we’re going to have this party and do you want to come,” he recalls. “Everyone around me was going, don’t have anything to do with it.” He shakes his head. “I am going to be first there and last to leave. And I loved it! I got a lot of shit for it. The cynic half of me was thinking, ‘They’re using me,’ but the romantic half was thinking, ‘This is amazing! I only signed off the dole four years ago and I’m arriving at No 10 in a Rolls-Royce my record company had bought me the previous Christmas.’”
He was disappointed he wasn’t invited back to No 10 again later to receive a knighthood.
“I bumped into Tony Blair at Claridge’s a few months ago,” he suddenly says (gotta love how Noel rolls), “and I said to Tony, ‘I bet you’re glad you’re out of politics now,’ and Tony said, ‘In fact, I’m not. I wish I was f****** back in it because it’s f*****.’” Which may be Noel paraphrasing.
The world has indeed changed. Asked recently in an interview about gender fluidity, Noel defined his gender as “Mancunian”. How “woke” is he? “Woke?” he says. “Nah, I’m dimly dozing.”
I try to be more specific. Do you call women “girls”?
“Nah, I call women birds,” he teases me.
Does he consider himself a gentleman?
“Yes,” he says. “And I recycle. I take the Tube. I don’t drive.”
So he’s become an eco-warrior?
He shakes his head. “Even though Sydney was on fire, with all the bushfires, and it’s like the world’s on fire, I [still] thought Extinction Rebellion lost the plot when it messed with commuters. Canning Town! What were they thinking?”
He has previously said he “couldn’t be bothered” to vote in the Brexit referendum — a decision he lived to regret. “Who would be stupid enough to vote leave?” he thought before going to bed on that fateful night.
Though still a remainer, more recently he has said: “There’s only one thing worse than a fool who voted for Brexit, and that’s the rise of the c**** trying to get the vote overturned.”
I don’t think he is referring to me in particular — I campaigned for a second referendum — but this brings us neatly back to complicated families and healing.
“Reconciliation is a good thing,” Noel says. “But I don’t know one person, one single person, in my life who is living in the perfect family. Not one.”
All families are dysfunctional, is our shared conclusion. Hallelujah!
Rachel is proud and fond of her brother Boris, the prime minister, but recently admitted she has never met his girlfriend, Carrie SymondsRachel is proud and fond of her brother Boris, the prime minister, but recently admitted she has never met his girlfriend, Carrie Symonds
REX
I tell him that if he actually met Boris, I think he’d prefer him to Liam as a brother. “Boris has charisma coming out of his earholes,” he allows.
Noel himself has said that Oasis was about togetherness, the collective experience. So will he get the band back together in a bid to heal the rifts in the country, I ask, only half in jest. After all, if a band of estranged brothers can get back together for Christmas, then maybe there’s hope for the rest of Broken Britain.
He sighs.
“But I’d be doing it for other people,” he says.
Yes, and that’s why you should do it, I argue back, a Christlike act of self-sacrifice to unite a divided nation — even though he knows as well as I do that it will take more than an Oasis reunion to do that. He puts his tea down as if the conversation is closed.
“I’m afraid that wouldn’t be enough for me,” he says.
Noel Gallagher is too honest with himself to lie his way out, and too secure in his own skin to say what people want to hear. You have to admire that in a man.
The Blue Moon Rising EP by Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds is out in March. The band perform at Kenwood House on June 21; visit english-heritage.org.uk