All the stories have a semblance of truth? Hmm. There was one chapter in the band’s recent history that remains murky. The American saga which started on August 26, 1996, with Liam walking out of Heathrow Airport 15 minutes before his band were due to take off for a long and important tour of the States, and ended with Noel leaving Liam and the rest of the band in North Carolina on September 11. It was the cover story for days in all the tabloids and one of the main items on all the evening television news programmes. To many, it was apparent that Oasis were splitting up.
What really happened in North Carolina and, first, at Heathrow Airport, when Liam left to buy a house?
“I’ll tell you the exact story, right. He looked me in the eyes in the British Airways departure lounge and says, ‘I’ve got nowhere to live, I’ve got to get somewhere to live.’ And I was that gobsmacked that I said, ‘Do one then.’ I didn’t actually think he would! He went, ‘Right, see you in a bit’, I said, ‘Right, see you in a bit’, fully expecting him to come back in five minutes’ time. And he didn’t. The cunt. He fucked off! When we got to America everyone was asking me where Liam was and I said, ‘You’re not going to believe this, he didn’t come. Right, we’ve just had three months off for the sole purpose of buying somewhere to live and he’s just decided right now, NOW, that he needs to find somewhere to live.’ We all laughed about it in the end because only he could do something like that, but it was out of order for the kids and that.”
And what happened when you left that tour?
“Well, I don’t know where those stories came from that said it was an insult to play to 9,000 people in the middle of Texas or somewhere. Most bands don’t play to 9,000 in London, let alone Texas. It was a lot of things. We were sick of playing that set, we were due to come straight off that tour, go straight into the studio, record a new album and go straight back out again. It’s all right working to a point where you know you’re going to have two or three weeks off, but there didn’t seem to be any light at the end of the tunnel. And because we’re always on the verge of imploding anyway, we toured …Morning Glory? in just over 12 months all around the world, while bands like U2 take two years to do the same thing. But everything was squashed into a year so people could get their money’s worth before we split up. It was ludicrous. Everybody was complaining, and not just the band but the crew as well, and I just said, ‘Why don’t we go home?’
“They were like, ‘We can’t go home because of this and because of that’, and I said, ‘There’s nothing stopping anyone from getting on a plane and going home.’ Our Kid suddenly gets an attack of the morals and says we can’t go home, it ain’t right. I said, ‘You can shut up, you never came in the first place, you cunt.’ Then they said they couldn’t go home because of the press, and I said, ‘I’ll show you how easy it is to go home.’ I went to my room, phoned for a taxi and went to the airport and came home. That was it. There was no argument – well, there might have been a bit of one, but not as bad as all that, it wasn’t…”
Splitting up?
“Well, I said if nobody wants to do it then I don’t give a shit. It’s hard work and that, well, playing the guitar isn’t, but the constant touring is. I said, ‘If nobody wants to do it then just say so. We’ll pack it in. It’s no big deal.’ Everybody was moaning, but because I’m in charge I just said, ‘I’m off.’ Then we came back to London and I said, ‘Do we want to carry on? Because if we want to carry on it means going into the studio for six months, doing a record and going out on the road again for two years.’ Then somebody came up with the bright idea of not touring, and I said, ‘I’m up for that but there isn’t much point in doing a record again if we aren’t going to tour it. We were playing live three years before we got a record deal so that’s what the band is about. It’s all or nothing. We either pack it in or we go for it full-on.’ I think that as soon as we started making the record we just said, ‘What are we moaning about, it’s a fucking top laugh.’”
Do things ever feel out of control, like you’re the head of Nike or Coca-Cola or something?
“Yeah, yeah. In the early days, even up until Glastonbury, the first one, until then I’d always made the decisions. But we came back from being out of the country and it’s, like, who booked all these gigs? Who organised this other stuff? So instead of looking after the band, your mates, I started going on this rollercoaster. And on top of that I had to go and write a fucking album, too. Everything goes out of your hands, but it has to be done. But, in the end, on that last American tour we only pulled four dates. So what?”
There’s a cough and shuffle at the dressing room door. It’s one of Noel’s massive security guards with his fags and a fresh Hooch. For today’s interview, photos and promotional trip to Paris, Noel and Liam have three security guards each.
Is your personal safety that much at risk, and do you worry about it?
“No. Someone tried to break into my house the other night, actually. They’d tried to force the back door open. But if you worry about that then you start living in a great big fortress in the country.”
The Sun says you’ve just bought one!
“Well, yeah, I have. I’ve got fuck all else to spend my money on! But I don’t worry about my safety. I go to more gigs than all the A&R men in Creation put together. It doesn’t stop me going out, otherwise I’d just become a hermit sitting in me house all day wondering who’s at the door. You can’t live like that. If Mark Chapman is walking up the street, he’s walking up the street. There’s fuck all you can do about it.”
Are those heavies with you all the time?
“They are when we’re doing stuff for Oasis. We’re going to Paris this afternoon so they’ve got to come there, just to make sure nobody goes missing. Like I’ve been prone to do, like the time I was in Paris with NME! That was a good night that! Throwing buckets of iced water and champagne at each other in that club, how bizarre was that? I remember waking up that morning on a cold floor and opening one eye and not knowing where I was! I didn’t know where I was, what hotel I was meant to be staying in. I had no money, no passport, nothing. I thought, ‘Fuck it. I’m lost. This is top, this, I could do a Reginald Perrin and disappear. Get some onions and start selling them. Top mystery!’
“I reckon that’s what Richey’s done. He’s just lost his passport around some bird’s house, man, in Scotland somewhere. Lost his phone book. But those geezers are there to make sure we’re no more than an hour-and-a-half late ever, and to stop us really knocking the shit out of each other. But when I’m going out I don’t phone them up and say, ‘Do you want to come and see a band with us?’
“We’ve sacked loads of security guards just for being cunts to the fans. For every nine that come and shake your hand, there’s always an idiot who’s drunk, but he doesn’t mean any harm, he’s not going to chin you. I can deal with that, anyway, I come from Manchester. But before you know it some cunt has got him in a headlock and has thrown him out of the door. You just end up looking like a cunt. It’s more for the management’s peace of mind because Marcus knows we’ll get home in one piece. Or maybe two, but there’s someone to carry the other half. I can still go shopping without them.”
But you’re in The Sun when you do.
“But it’s usually about my wife’s shopping habits. There’s no way to deal with it. I still don’t know how big pop stars are supposed to act. I can only be me.”
Do you get insecure that, with all this other stuff going on around you, your muse might desert you?
“I’ll probably be all right for the next couple of years. I’ve got about another 25, 30 ideas for songs recorded. But there was a point just after …Morning Glory? when I didn’t have anything. I’d lost the will to write. There was too much else to think about, like the touring and all that shit. I didn’t write one song for six to eight months. I was thinking, ‘Maybe that’s it.’ But it didn’t really bother me that much. I’d written ‘Champagne Supernova’, ‘Wonderwall’, ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ and ‘Live Forever’, so if I never write another song, then that’ll do. The trick is when songs aren’t coming then don’t do anything. I imagine people write for the sake of it and that’s why groups make shit albums, and we’re lucky in that if we don’t want to work, we don’t have to.
“There isn’t one day that goes by when we don’t feel lucky because there are bands that have to work, because if they don’t then the record company’ll drop ’em. We do deserve the success because of the songs we’ve written and the gigs that we’ve done. But when I write I’m doing it for the right reasons, I can release all that baggage. I’m not doing it for money or to be the best and biggest band in the world or bravado or to do the biggest gigs, we’ve done all that. We’re doing it because we want to.”
In the past you’ve said that “All Around The World” is the best song ever written. Now it’s finally going to be released on Be Here Now, do you still think it is?
“It’s funny. ‘All Around The World’ is about five years old and it’s the cheesiest, corniest lyrics in the world. Worse than ‘Whatever’! I was listening to it the other day and it’s like me being super, ninja optimistic. The Prozac must have been really kicking in when I was writing that! But we’d just signed a record deal when I wrote it, so I was feeling pretty good about the world then. I wouldn’t say it’s the best song ever written any more, although it’s certainly the longest. It’s a good song, could be the best, but it’s not for me to say. I don’t have to big-up my records any more. I can’t understand how bands can put into words what their album sounds like anyway. People know what they’re going to get when they put an Oasis album on now.”
Um, what’s the new album like, Noel?
“Ha! It’s a lot louder than …Morning Glory?, a lot more dense. It hasn’t got a fucking ‘Digsy’s Dinner’ or a fucking ‘She’s Electric’ or a ‘Roll With It’. Or has it? No. Actually, I still stand by ‘Roll With It’ because it was what it was: a no-nonsense rock’n’roll song. I still stand by it because we still play it to this day, and Blur don’t play ‘Country House’ – work that one out. But it’s a cross between the two albums. The first album was a party album and the second was a staying at home album. And it’s between the two, but a lot louder. I’m always going to write in a certain… well, no…
“Do you remember when I was saying years ago that it was going to be three albums, that’s it? Well, I’d like to make a box just to put these three albums in. This is the end of the first stage. After this there has got to be a complete and utter overhaul of the sound. I’m definitely going to approach the next album in a completely different frame of mind. This record ain’t going to surprise many people, although I would have liked to have heard the thud of people’s jaws when they heard ‘D’You Know What I Mean?’. But that’s how I want to take the band.
“The more you work with other musicians and people, the more that you learn. Maybe it’d be a case of giving the songs to someone else to mix, someone who isn’t remotely connected with the band. I’ve got a studio in the house and I’m working more on loops and samples and that, and that’s one way I definitely want to take it. But you know, once you’ve had a few lagers it’s a case of, ‘Oh that’ll do’!”
Did doing stuff with Goldie change your way of thinking?
“Have you ever met him?”
No.
“He’s off his tits, that cunt. Lunatic. People think I talk fast – you can have an hour’s conversation with him in 15 minutes. Which is funny because you can have 15 minutes’ conversation with John Squire over about five hours. ‘How you doing, John?’ ‘Yeah, I’m…’ ‘I’ll just put the kettle on while you think that one over, eh John?’ But Goldie… the reason I put some guitars on that track with him was, well, he lives on the same street as us for a start, so I can’t avoid the bastard.
“He was going, ‘Put some guitars on this track.’ And I don’t fucking get jungle music, it goes right over my head. So we get down the studio and there’s me, knobhead, in the studio, ‘What key is it in?’ ‘What what?!’ ‘What key is it in?’ ‘What’s a key?’ ‘Well, is it in G flat?’ ‘You fucking what, mate?!’ I’m there with my little guitar going [back to Dave Rock], ‘Well, I’m a musician, man, all these machines are just crass, I can’t work in an environment like this! I need a key!’ Well, it’s in G minor if anybody wants to know, so I had to work around that.
“I wanted to do it because it would either fail miserably or be great, and it falls somewhere between the two. It’s called ‘Temper, Temper’ and it’s the most disgustingly dirty jungle track I’ve ever heard. When people in bands bandy about the word ‘genius’, they mean a genius is someone who sits there with an acoustic guitar strumming songs. I’ll tell you what, man, Goldie is a genius. Whatever’s going on in his head is some fucked-up shit, but he’s really good at what he does. The Chemical Brothers, Liam from The Prodigy, the Beastie Boys – to me, that’s genius. Beck isn’t, because Beck is just country and western with breakbeats, but you don’t have to be like Bob Dylan to be a genius.
“Working with The Chemical Brothers and meeting people in the dance field has opened my eyes to loads of different ways of working. We limit ourselves because of… rock’n’roll. If you can’t produce it live then it isn’t worth doing it? Fuck that shit! If you can’t produce it live then find a way of doing it. Push yourself. That’s the way it’s going to go with us, with a bit of luck.”
Wow. That’s killed Noelrock and severed the dadrock alliance, then. What’s Uncle Weller going to think of all this machines-good, real-rock-boring talk?
“People have this concept that me and Paul Weller sit in smoke-filled rooms in the back of a pub going on about Small Faces albums. When we’re together we’re that incoherently pissed we just go, ‘Hhhhernnmmghmmph! Facking carnts!’ We hardly ever talk to each other, it’s just drunken babble nonsense. When we’ve been up for about two days together he always goes [slips casually into excellent Weller impersonation], ‘Fucking don’t know how you do it.’ So I have to go, ‘But you’re still here. That’s how you do it, you mad cunt.’
“I’ll tell you a story about him. We went up to Bath where he was doing his last album and he was trying to convince me how mad for it he was, even though he’s getting on a bit. He was going, ‘I’m fucking mad for it, me.’ I said, ‘I know you are, now chill.’ He’s going, ‘I know you’re mad for it,
but I’m fucking mad for it, me.’ ‘I understand what you’re saying Paul, chill.’ ‘I’m fucking mad for it,’ he says, takes his shirt off and throws his shirt into this big open fire! He’s jumping around topless shouting ‘I’m fucking mad for it, me!’ I’m, like [mimes putting his arms around a frail old man]. ‘C’mon, Paul, bed now. I’m just taking Paul to bed now.’ I left him in the garden with no top on and a big bottle of wine in his hand shouting, ‘Wellah! Wellah! Wellah!’ at the top of his voice. I had to lean out of my bedroom at eight in the morning and shout, ‘SHUT UP! GO TO BED, OLD MAN!’ Sad, man.
“People have this concept of when pop stars are hanging out together they’re touching some deep base, but it’s just overpaid idiots getting pissed telling each other stupid stories, some of which are excruciatingly boring and some of which are funny. It freaks me mam out because she’s a bit of an old hippy and she’s going, ‘Oh, I used to watch you watching Bono on Top Of The Pops.’ And now she can say, ‘I was watching you, watching Bono, watching you, watching the camera, watching me, watching you’! Fucking hell! It’s, like, ‘Don’t ever get into smoking pot, Mam.’”