Noel Gallagher: "Reunion with my brother Liam? We won't reunite. Maneskins? Never heard of them"
Council Skies is the fourth album by the eldest Gallagher. "It's the start of a new cycle."
by Andrea Laffranchi
"So far the one with the High Flying Birds has been a solo project. This is the first album that the band plays and is involved in the studio. It's the start of a new cycle." This is the way Noel Gallagher presents Council Skies, the fourth album of his career without his brother Liam, a new step in the post-Oasis.
There are rumors that for the 30th anniversary of «Definitely Maybe», your debut, and after years of remote insults, in 2024 there will be a reunion...
«In the Sony archives we found some tapes dating back to those sessions. We thought they were lost, but they were just mislabeled. They are amazing... There are some wonderful versions of those songs, some in acoustic version, but there won't be a tour, we won't come back to play them together".
Did you think of retracing those years and your life with a theatrical show or an autobiography like Bono or Springsteen?
"Bono's show is great. I was there with my son Donovan who is 16 and when Bono started dancing on the table he said 'is he off his head?'. It takes time to write a book, a couple of years at least. If I ever did that, I wouldn't want to have a ghost writer and in that time frame I'd rather write another record."
Easy Now, one of the new singles, brings back to the sound of Oasis. The whole album looks at rock, abandoning the self-defined psychedelic "cosmic pop" experiments of the previous one.
"That record was not played in the studio with all the musicians together, it was born as a collage. These songs, on the other hand, were all born on the acoustic guitar. I would like to take them all on tour, even if I will have to choose only a few because many songs from the past cannot be missing and I don't want to become like Springsteen who plays for 4 hours in a row."
On the record you host guitar legend Johnny Marr again, the former Smiths member.
"Who doesn't need to have Johnny on a record? I have his phone number and I told him that if he still doesn't answer, I'll keep calling him. In the studio he is always enthusiastic, but he never tries to dominate, he is always respectful of the songs he intervenes on."
Do you know Måneskin?
"Eurovision is a super stuff... They're the ones with the guy who got high live, right?».
In fact, the leader Damiano has denied...
"I don't have their music in my mind, really."
Do you remember when you wrote "Live Forever"?
"We were nobody. I was in a flat in Manchester on a Tuesday afternoon. I took it to band rehearsals and Bonehead said 'you didn't write that.' I realised that it would be a classic and that things would never be the same again for us."
The atmospheres of the record are often dark. On the album cover, a black and white shot, there are the instruments for a concert placed on a rotunda. There is not a living soul, did you want to evoke the lockdown?
"I don't like having faces on the covers. The idea of the instruments comes from the back cover of Pink Floyd's Ummagumma. I wrote all the songs during the months of the pandemic, but that's not the subject of the lyrics. Which instead I would define reflective, a word I would use to describe the whole disc. And as far as the dark soul is concerned, I believe that things that happened in my private life also influenced (he split from his wife Sara MacDonald after 22 years, ed), but even in the most melancholic songs there is always hope."
You are a symbol of Brit rock: will you play at King Charles's coronation ceremony?
"They didn't ask me and I wouldn't do it anyway. Many refused to participate. My generation doesn't care about the royal family. We loved the queen who was already there when we were children, but the rest is stuff for American tourists."
(Corriere della Sera, 22 April 2023)