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As the wife of Noel Gallagher, Sara MacDonald has been at the heart of the triumphs, turbulences and Twitter wars of Oasis. Now, she has her own story to tell, says Vassi Chamberlain
PHOTOGRAPHS BY TUNG WALSH. STYLING BY KATE PHELAN
“Let’s meet for cocktails at the Chiltern Firehouse,” Sara MacDonald suggests over email. “I’m going to need them.” I arrive to find the former PR and London scene fixture sitting on a banquette in the Ladder Shed bar, nursing a tequila, soda and lime. She makes for an alluring sight, with sheer hold-up stockings just visible under a black Reformation dress, and her brown hair tousled around her shoulders.
MacDonald, who is married to the musician Noel Gallagher, has long been a glamorous but enigmatic presence, living the seemingly blissful existence of a rockstar’s wife. The reality, though, is a little different. Private, funny and articulate, her character and principles couldn’t be more at odds with the wild excesses of her husband’s erstwhile Primrose Hill set. As the couple’s friends note, MacDonald has given her husband the gift of a life beyond the unending chaos of his band, Oasis. It’s telling that the first time Noel met his father-in-law, MacDonald Senior said, “I want you to promise me that you are going to take care of my daughter.” To which Gallagher replied: “To be honest, mate, I was rather hoping she’d be looking after me.”
It is an undoubtedly charmed life, yet it has its challenges. Particularly in light of the comments Noel’s brother Liam Gallagher has made about Sara on Twitter, going so far as to blame her for the lack of an Oasis reunion. Though she’s not easily cowed, she tells me she’s nervous; this is the first time she’s agreed to talk about her life. Had it not been for the recent escalation of Liam’s war of attrition, it’s unlikely she would be meeting me now.
“I want you to stress that these are my opinions,” Sara says in her Scottish burr, as she tries to make sense of the toxic Gallagher history that she feels plagues her husband, and now her family, too. “I think Noel was singled out and bullied by his father. It’s happening again. It’s a lonely, unpleasant place for Noel to be.”
Sara, 48, and Noel, 52, married nine years ago, but theirs is a love story of 20 years standing. It began in Ibiza’s notorious Space nightclub in the summer of 2000, when the “total house-head”, then working in music PR, was approached by the Oasis star. He asked her if she wouldn’t mind holding his cigarettes and beer while he went to the bathroom, they got talking and later shared a taxi into town. When Noel asked for her number, Sara wrote it down on a card. “I remember keeping it like it was a religious f**king artefact,” he tells me at their Hampshire home a few weeks later. Sara left the island the next day and by the time she landed, he’d called. Gallagher has never been shy of saying it was love at first sight.
Back in London, he sent her a book of Japanese poems. MacDonald told him she had no intention of dating a married man, but when his relationship with first wife Meg Mathews ended soon after, she relented. They had their first date at The Lanesborough hotel. Sara’s mother warned her early on she was going to find it hard being with someone famous. “She said, and she was right, ‘You’re going to struggle not being the first person people look at when you walk into a room.’ People would physically push past me to get to him. Slowly, you start to get over it,” she says, with a shrug.
Sara and Noel at Glastonbury in 2003
In 2005, with Noel’s brother Liam and his then-wife Nicole Appleton
The pair met in the middle of Noel’s Oasis career. Formed in Manchester in 1991, the band’s anthemic tracks defined a generation, and their success was outrageous. When they played Knebworth in 1996, 2.5 million people applied for tickets, the highest demand for any UK show in history, and they have have sold tens of millions of records globally. Fans were devastated when the split was announced in August 2009, with Noel writing: “It is with some sadness and great relief… I quit Oasis tonight. People will write and say what they like, but I simply could not go on working with Liam a day longer.”
At first, MacDonald liked her brother-in-law. But when she and Noel split briefly, two years into their relationship, Liam turned on her. “He rang me 11 times in one night. It was ‘f**king bitch’ this, ‘f**king bitch’ that.” She remembers when a hotel-room fight erupted between the brothers. “They were rolling around like geckos. Noel’s shirt was in ribbons. We left, but then I realised I’d left my bag in there. Noel knocked on the door and it was hurled down the corridor. It just became untenable, exhausting.”
Born and bred in Edinburgh, MacDonald’s upbringing was in stark contrast to her husband’s turbulent Mancunian one. Her father was a PE teacher, while her mother taught French at the same school. She spent her summers on a croft on the Isle of Skye with her sister and cousins, and her best friends are still the five boys she met in her youth. “I’ve always had a real sense of clan,” she says, “and I believe I am more ‘Highland’ than anything else.” Her father once told her: “Always remember you are a MacDonald.”
“I’ve always had a real sense of clan. I am more ‘Highland’ than anything else”
At 18, she left Edinburgh for Bournemouth University, where she studied for a degree in PR, and landed her first job working in fashion for Lynne Franks. After that she moved into music, her boyfriend at the time being a promoter for Mixmag. She flourished, eventually joining Orange’s press department looking after its music endorsements. Then she met her future husband.
Two decades on, their life now largely revolves around their children – Donovan, 12, and Sonny, nine. MacDonald clearly relishes them. Her worry over her relationship with Liam is not for herself, but her sons. “Donovan’s new school friends can’t understand why he’s never met his uncle and he has started googling things. I’ve said, ‘You have to stop. You are going to read horrible things about us.’ I don’t want my boys to think that’s a normal relationship between brothers.” She also wants to protect her stepdaughter Anaïs, 20. “She had a relationship with Liam growing up… and for your uncle to refer to you publicly as ‘his f**king kid’ [as he did recently in a Twitter spat], I think to myself, how much longer before he goes for Sonny or Donovan?” While she won’t comment on her uncle, Anaïs tells me that, after Noel and her mother, Mathews, she considers Sara a third parent. “Children from divorced parents often have a negative view of marriage,” she says, “but I’ve witnessed two people who love each other and are best friends, they are so close. It makes me want what they have.”
A few weeks later, I drive through the electric gates of MacDonald’s 18th-century Hampshire home, the setting for Vogue’s shoot. Sara is waiting on the steps, dressed in black velvet Saint Laurent slim-fit flares, poloneck and heels. “Well, hello!” she says, before leading me into an immaculate, sunlit kitchen. Their sons run in and out; they politely shake my hand and say: “Nice to meet you.”
Sara and Noel with Noel’s daughter, Anaïs
Sara with the couple’s sons, Donovan and Sonny
The family lives between London and Hampshire, a decision influenced by the boys being at local schools. “Noel is always noodling on his guitar, writing music. He never wants to move back to London,” she says, hinting she’s not quite ready to make the psychological leap herself yet. She’s in town once or twice a week, catching up with friends. Then there are holidays with Bono and his family, and parties with Madonna’s manager Guy Oseary, his wife Michelle Alves and model Helena Christensen. The majority of her time is spent running family life. Considering Gallagher is often on tour for weeks at a time, there’s a lot she has to manage on her own. “Put it this way,” says close friend Laura Bailey, “she’s not blighted by unfocused busyness – she’s an underrated talent.”
We settle down in what Noel calls the “feminine space” – a drawing room where the walls are covered in photographs. She seems happier since our last meeting, having recently completed the Three Peaks Challenge, raising more than £20,000 for the Alexandra Wylie Tower Foundation, which benefits disadvantaged children. She has also engaged law firm Schillings, who have put the media “on notice” of her concerns that Liam is conducting a campaign of harassment against her and requesting that any defamatory tweets not be reprinted. A particularly vicious recent thread drove her to finally seek advice. “I can’t believe it took me so long,” she says. She will later show me a file, 6in thick, of evidence from social media. “I want to make clear that Oasis is not my story. It’s their story, Noel and Liam’s.”
Sara wears jacket, £1,800. Trousers, £650. Both Celine by Hedi Slimane. Blouse, from a selection, Alexander McQueen. Jewellery, Sara’s own
She walks down the corridor, and I hear her shout: “Noely, it’s your turn!” The musician walks in and takes his wife’s place on the sofa. He’s wearing a baby-blue sweatshirt and navy trousers, but it’s his spotless Saint Laurent white trainers that I notice first. Gallagher is very well-groomed, his trademark Britpop haircut flecked with silver. Those grey-blue eyes glint with amusement.
I hear Sara is the boss round here, I begin. “Oh, yes,” he laughs. “You know, Sonny turned to me the other day and said: ‘If it weren’t for Mum, we wouldn’t be alive.’ Children just have that way of saying things straight, don’t they?”
His wife, he says, is his best friend, the only person he wants by his side, the only person who truly makes him laugh. Noel chuckles to himself. “Her bark is much worse than her bite, but her bark can be f**king brutal.”
Gallagher, it turns out, encouraged his wife to finally speak out about Liam. I ask him if he ever considered reconciling with his brother, to protect her? He pauses. “I’ve often thought, ‘Let’s just do a gig.’ But I realised I would only be doing it to shut this f**king idiot up.” He pauses again, then fires back with a typical Gallagher-brother retort. “The only other thing I could come up with was burning his house down or smashing his car in… but that’s not going to solve anything, is it?”
MacDonald marches back in, eyebrows raised. “So, how did that go then?” she asks, laughing. He’s utterly potty about you, I say. “The thing is, we always look out for each other, we have each other’s back,” she replies.
It’s easy to make assumptions about MacDonald, to pigeonhole her according to who her husband is or the surface glamour of their life. But, of course, it brings its issues, too. A sense of isolation, a lack of privacy, a need to protect loved ones from the endless judgment of outsiders, or the unshakable need to be on one’s guard. I suspect that with her strong stewardship, and innate sense of family, those factors have been to a large extent attenuated.
As I leave, I ask her if, now that the boys are at school, she might consider another professional chapter? “I have these journals,” she starts, leading me back to the front door. “I’ve been writing them for years, and I am thinking of writing a novel.” I very much hope she does.