Noel Gallagher met David Bowie once – and can’t remember it. But he does remember Oasis’ first record deal and what he thought of Blur’s Damon Albarn (he’s since changed his mind about that).
I left school at 15 and my outlook on life was the same as it is now. I’ve never been the kind of person that thinks negative thoughts about myself. If my upbringing taught me anything, it was resilience. I got that from my mum. She also gave me the notion that no-one’s gonna give you anything. The only way you’re going to get what you want is through hard work. Unless you become a master criminal, of course. But I was very lucky in my short-lived life of petty crime – I got caught very early on and I was like, fuck this. This isn’t for me.
To this day my mum personifies the word resilience. Her bark was fucking ferocious. Her bite was non-existent. She had very, very bad language. That’s where I learned to swear, from my mum. We weren’t always having the best time, but I never really worried about the future because we come from such a big Irish family, there’s always someone who’ll look after you. My mum had 10 siblings. They all married. They all had at least three kids. So you’re never going to fall through the cracks.
When I was a teenager I romanticised everything. Top of the Pops, football, going to gigs, records, girls, everything. I didn’t know it at the time but I was already laying the groundwork for what I would become – an artist, a romantic.
The first music I was ever exposed to was Irish folk music. It didn’t strike me then, but what is interesting about Irish music is they can be singing about the saddest things, rebellion and oppression, but they’re the most uplifting singalong songs you’ll ever hear. They can make the most miserable subjects sound amazing and almost spiritual. I loved that.
Man City was a big part of my life growing up. We didn’t go to see Man City because they were going to win anything, we went because they were our local team. I could see the floodlights of Maine Road from my house. When we were growing up, going to the football was one of only about three or four exciting things that you could do in your life. There was going to a football match, watching Top of the Pops, playing football in the park and getting pissed on cider. That was it. Football was a massive, massive thing and it still is for me. When you hear 40,000 people singing in a stadium for the first time, it is staggering. Singing is good for the soul. It releases endorphins in the brain, you get high from singing. It’s why people sing at church. Football stadiums are the working man’s cathedrals. And if your actual family life is becoming a bit fractured, you do take solace from the family on the terraces.
I had no intention of joining [Oasis] but fate took over. I was part of the road crew for the Inspiral Carpets at the time, just back from Germany and going off to somewhere else. I had my own thing and it was amazing. It was only when Liam asked me to go and jam with the band, and I had nothing better to do, that I went along. For that initial month, I hadn’t really joined them, but I was jamming, playing their songs. And then one day Liam [Gallagher, brother and Oasis frontman] just said, you write songs, play us one of yours. So I played them some tune I’d written and I said, right, you play it like this, and you do this, and you do that. It was only when other people joined in on my music and Liam started singing that the light bulb went off. And it was like, wow, actually, this could be really fucking good. It was not a massive eureka moment, but it wasn’t indifference either.
I remember the exact moment we were signed [by Alan McGee in Glasgow’s King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut in 1993]. I can even remember what Alan McGee was wearing. We would do this version of [The Beatles’] ‘I Am the Walrus’ and we could never work out how to end it. So Liam would walk offstage first. And then I would put my guitar onto some kind of ongoing delay pedal and I would walk offstage after him. Then we’d go out front and watch the band, and take the piss and see what they’d come up with to end it. That night I was stood at the mixing desk and Alan McGee walked up and he said, what’s your band called? And I said, Oasis. And he said, have you got a record deal? And I said, no. And he said, do you want one? And I went, who with, and he said Creation. And I was like, yeah, okay. And that was it, the night that changed everybody’s lives.
You never knew what mood Liam was going to turn up in and I found the whole thing really fucking stressful. My overriding feeling was this is just so fucking unnecessary. This is the dream that we’ve all lived for, and you’re still moaning about some shit that went on 18 hours ago. It’s just nonsense. You know what I mean? It’s all down to insecurity and fear on his behalf. Singers are the kings of blaming shit on everybody else. I had the anchor of the work, I was writing the songs, so I was directing it. I knew what I was doing. I often wondered what it would feel like if I was in a band and I had no control over the direction of it because the guy who wrote all the songs was so fucking good. There would be no point in getting involved. So no wonder he went off the rails. But you can balance that by saying, well, Oasis wouldn’t be fucking anything if they hadn’t asked me to join them.
I might step in to press pause on my younger self a few times, and say, hang on a minute. Can we just go back a couple of months and fucking fix this? I used to say mad shit all the time. When you’re in the midst of drugs shit, and you’re thinking the next knock on the door is going to be the police, and everything you say is being wilfully misinterpreted by the press, and you’ve got journalists lying around outside your house and it’s affecting your family’s lives, you do wish you could go back in time and unsay or undo things. Now? Everyone’s come out the other side of it and it’s all part of the story.
What would my younger self think of me working with Damon Albarn? [Gallagher sang backing vocals on Gorillaz’ ‘We Got the Power’ in 2017 and has appeared with the band several times on stage.] It would depend entirely on what side of the bed I got out of that day. If you caught me on a good day I’d be like, yeah, I could see that happening. On a bad day, I’d fucking knife myself in the bollocks.
When you get to your mid-fifties you do come to some kind of crossroads in your life. It’s not uncommon for people who have been in long-term relationships to go their separate ways in their fifties. I know a lot of people in the same boat as me and Sara [Noel and Sara MacDonald split in 2023 after 22 years together]. Particularly after the pandemic. The midlife crisis thing is true for men and women. But I’m certainly not getting nostalgic for the past, no way. Things are fucking great in the present. Man City are great, my life is great. I’m happy and healthy.
Music of all forms is so fucking middle class now. Because working-class kids can’t afford to buy musical instruments or rehearse or do any of the things we could do. And we were poor. That’s why music now is shit, because youth culture, 99 times out of 100, comes from the working classes. That’s why so many kids now are loving Oasis. Because we were the real deal. A big part of me is really flattered and honoured that Oasis are so popular now. But part of me is a little bit sad that no-one came to take our place.
If I could go back to re-live any time in my life, it would be hard to choose between two. One would be my 50th birthday party. It was a three-day affair, so obviously my recollections are a bit hazy on it. The other time would be the night I went to see David Bowie and Morrissey at Wembley Arena in the 90s. I was high and pissed. Then before Bowie came on, somebody came up to me and said, “Would you like to come and meet David?” And I have no recollection of it whatsoever. I remember walking in and he was putting on make-up in a mirror and that’s it. If I could go back, I would appreciate it so much more. I’d tell him what he meant to me growing up, and how much he means to me now, and I’d tell him, I’m gonna rip you off to fuck when you’re dead, you know.
If I could have one final conversation with anyone in my life maybe I’d talk to my ex-father-in-law, who passed away. I didn’t really get a chance to say goodbye. I’d like to tell him what a great man I thought he was. And I’d also like to talk to my old granny, my dad’s mum. I’d like just to say, you’ll never fucking guess what happened to me and the other fella.
By Jane Graham @janeannie
First published in Ed#689, courtesy of The Big Issue UK
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