Liam is full of s**t… he doesn’t want a reunion and is being ingenuine to Oasis fans, says Noel Gallagher
AS Noel Gallagher gets ready to release a new High Flying Birds album, he has revealed how writing his new record helped him get through the pain of his divorce.
“Divorce is a long, drawn-out process, so it affects the mood of the album, for sure,” he says.
The 56-year-old former Oasis star and his wife Sara, 51, announced in January they are divorcing after 22 years together.
Tomorrow, Noel releases his fourth solo album, Council Skies, and in an exclusive chat he says: “The record goes up and down and for every kind of moody melancholy, there is an uplifting counterbalance after it.
“When you’re an artist you write about what you know, and I don’t really have much to say about life in general, as I don’t really give a f* about most things I see on the news.
“So when things happen in your life that you can articulate, I tend to jump on them, and it makes for better art and it helps you come to terms with it.”
Noel wrote the album during the pandemic, and he says: “My life had come to a bit of a crossroads, and I was just kind of reflecting on that.
“I was writing and there wasn’t any kind of future to speak of because no one knew when we were going to get out of it.
“I’d sit around all day, waiting to get p***ed at like, f**ing five o’clock. Everybody’s life had come to a bit of a standstill.”
Publicist Sara’s strained relationship with brother-in-law Liam was a factor in the band’s 2009 split.
But straight-talking Noel can’t see a reunion on the horizon.
Call me
He tells me: “I’m busy for the next year and a half with my album but anyway, Liam is full of s**t.
“He knows as well as I do that he doesn’t want it either. What he does like doing is making me look a c**t.
“He’s being ingenuine (sic) to his beloved Oasis fans who put him where he is today. “Go fing call me then. I’ve said it to him, ‘Call me directly or indirectly. Get your people to call. You don’t even have to speak to me’
“But unless he’s called during this interview, my phone is still silent,” adds Noel, looking at his phone.
“And I’ll tell you why. Because if he calls and I say, ‘Let’s do it’, then he’s got to stand in the same room as me, right? And then it’s on him.
“And he doesn’t want that. He won’t stand in the same room as me because then he’s got to pull it off, and he can’t pull it off. And you can quote me on all of that.”
His good friend Damon Albarn, of Britpop “rivals” Blur, has placed a bet that Oasis will reform following Blur, who play Wembley Stadium next month.
But Noel says with a laugh: “So he’s put money on it. But he’s got enough money to waste.”
Last year Liam and Noel were urged to patch up their relationship as an 80th birthday present to their mum Peggy.
But Noel is having none of it, and says: “I get strangers coming up to me, saying, ‘Be nice to your mum and get back together for her’.
“It’s got nothing to do with my mum. I’m 56, not 17. She has never mentioned anything to me about it.
“She knows not to get involved. I wouldn’t say to my mum, ‘It’s time you and Dad got back together’.”
Noel reveals he always sees his mum when he returns to watch his beloved Manchester City play.
He says: “We have to pass her house to get into town, and sit around for an hour listening to tales of what the neighbours and my cousins are up to — cousins who I’ve never even met.
“But she’s great. She’s just had her eyes fixed. She said she never realised how dirty the house was until she had her eyes fixed.”
Will Peggy be joining Noel when he starts his UK tour next month?
He says: “My mum has never seen me play a show. She says to me, ‘Do you want me to come or not? I’ll only cry’. So I say, ‘It’s fine, stay at home’, though I’ve told her the security guards will make a fuss of her.”
On the topic of Man City, Noel recently posed for a picture with City’s Norwegian star striker Erling Haaland in his underpants.
“He’s a fing dude. I adore him,” says Noel. “He looks enormous but when he’s walking around in his undies, he’s skinny as f***.
“And he’s funny — he’s got a big daft grin. And he’s got the best Mancunian accent ever.
He says, ‘All right, our kid?’ when I see him. He’s got a bit of a swagger about him.
“He’s a superstar. I said to my mate that we need to get an extra-extra-large pair of underpants with Haaland on them for the terraces.”
The album cover for Council Skies pays homage to Manchester and important places from Noel’s youth.
The main image shows the grassy circle that marks the centre spot of Manchester City’s old stadium, Maine Road, which was demolished in 2003 and is now a housing estate.
The grass area is named Gibson’s Green in honour of the team’s late groundsman Stan Gibson, and the cover shot features band equipment, including a smiley-face drum kit.
Noel says: “We’ve got all the significant landmarks there — Sifters Records, Burnage Community Centre, where we used to go sniffing glue, Longsight Market, as I was born in Longsight, and the Manchester Apollo where I went to see The Damned, my first gig.
People have said the album is about my childhood but you wouldn’t want to write songs about my fing childhood and growing up.
“You don’t want to go there (Noel suffered abuse at the hands of his violent alcoholic father Tommy).
“I don’t remember having any specific dreams. Growing up on a council estate in the Seventies and Eighties under Thatcherism wasn’t anything glamorous, more like a science fiction film. The song Council Skies is kind of about trying to find beauty on a council estate.
“Leaving school at 15, if you’d tell me I’d be going to 10 Downing Street I’d think you were f***ing mental.
“I didn’t have any ambitions but when the Inspiral Carpets asked me to be their roadie I was travelling the world and getting paid. I had been to Japan, South America and Australia.
“I thought being road crew was my destiny, but it was only the start. Then Liam asked me to join the band and the rest is history, as they say.”
I’m chatting to Noel — dad to Anais, 23, with first wife Meg Mathews, and sons Donovan, 15, and 12-year-old Sonny with Sara — at his North London Lone Star studio, where he recorded and mixed the new record.
He says: “To get a place like this in central London is really fing rare. And the main thing is to try and stop it being a fing hangout place for all your mates.
Ridiculous nonsense
“They’ll say, ‘It’s only around the corner, we’ll come and see you’, and I’m like, ‘I fing don’t think so, I’m going to bed, mate. It’s fing five o’clock in the morning’.
“When I was younger I would have had hundreds of parties here. But my kids have been down a couple of times.
“Anais has got some funny footage of us all jamming in here.
“Donovan fancies himself on the mic and Sonny was on the drums but they all fancy themselves as rappers. Kids in the Nineties would have fancied themselves as guitarists but today it’s all rappers.”
Noel worries about his kids and the pressures of social media.
He says: “I just look at my lads growing up and think, ‘I hope you can navigate through this’, because the rules of society that they are growing up in is fing brutal.
“I sympathise with them. I put my arm around them sometimes and I think, ‘The poor f***ing fers’. I really do.
“I feel it’s tough for young lads on loads of levels, as they don’t know how they’re supposed to act.
“All we had to worry about was going out, Top Of The Pops, who was putting out a new single and could you get a ticket for this f***ing gig. I genuinely feel bad for this generation. It’s amazing they know whether they are coming or going some of the time.
“What with social media, the trolling thing and then there is wokeism and all that fing ridiculous nonsense with that. Everything is cosmetic, for show, for Instagram and everybody’s life is amazing.
“I’m not on social media, not for any specific reason. There are not enough hours in the day to be who I am and far less to share my life with other people — f* that.
“I sound like a fing grumpy old man, but I am a grumpy old man. The internet has ruined everything. It’s taken away the magic of finding music and things. Anais is different as she was a bit grown up before the internet got mad. But my two lads were born into the madness.
“When we’re out at dinner and they’ll show me some stuff on their phones, I’ll say, ‘You know it’s not real. People are bulls**tting’. “And they’re like, ‘No, Dad, no’. I feel bad for them in a way that they don’t have to go find things, it comes to them and they accept it.”
Yesterday Rishi Sunak announced a ban on fruit and sweet-flavoured vapes aimed at teens.
And ex-smoker Noel says: “When I see young kids vaping, that is the most dreadful f***ing thing.
“It’s the scourge of this generation. There’s a real problem with it. I don’t smoke and it’s f***ing amazing. I accidentally gave up a few years ago after The Q Awards.
“The Q Awards was a big one which started at 11 o’clock in the morning and finished at 11 o’clock the next morning. I could never smoke with a hangover, it would give me a f***ing stroke.
“I remember my hangover was so vicious and so bad, it lasted about a week. I didn’t feel right, what is going on? I was going mad.
“A few weeks later Sara says to me, ‘Have you given up smoking?’ I was like, ‘I haven’t thought of it at all’. And I’ve never had a cigarette since.
“And I’ve been so lucky with my voice. I think because I didn’t start singing until I was older it still sounds quite young.
“If I’d been singing for 30 years it might sound a bit fractured now. But because I’ve only been singing for the last ten years, it’s great.”
