New Mojo magazine article about Oasis; LONG, BUT GREAT READ!
Mojo magazine May 2005
Oasis
Once and Future Kings Five years of rucking and rebuilding have left Oasis bloodied but unbowed, casting a rueful eye over their past yet brandishing a new album to compare with their best. Did they lose faith? Did they heck. “The dream is alive!” they tell Danny Eccleston. Through the window of a fishbowl meeting space in the offices of Oasis’s management company, we watch Liam Gallagher telling a story. Despite the 100% sound-proofing, you can tell it’s a good one by the way he leaps from one side of the room to another, mugging and gesticulating, an actor playing one part, then another, a punk rock cover version of Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove.
Suddenly he stops, claps eyes on your writer, crashes Hulk-style through the office door and, wreathed in a fug of Stella Artois, dumps himself on a sofa. He’s a vision in suede-head muttonchops (today linked by a garrigue of stubble – an omen feared by seasoned Liam-watchers) and slightly wonky, extravagantly graded green Chanel sunglasses.
“Big night last night,” he chirrups. “Haven’t changed me clothes.”
Meet the “new” Liam Gallagher: sensitive songwriter and attentive father of two- of Lennon, 5, and Gene, 3. In the flesh, he is a supermassive presence, prone to explosions, capable of bending the rules of logic to his will. An hour’s interview will expose MOJO to dramatic re-readings of history (“The Germans or whoever it was blew our fucking country up! We’d be eating sausages and an air raid would go off! Amazing!”), much admiring self-analysis (“I mean it more than Elvis! I fucking whip Elvis’s arse!”), and plenty of aggressive positivity (“It’s a good world, man! Be happy and shaddapa your face!”). Like a prolonged blast from a psychedelic hairdryer, it can leave the victim feeling unsteady. Bandmate Gem Archer calls it “being Gallaghered”.
The greatest rock’n’roll singer of his generation is here to duscuss, in a roundabout way, the 6th Oasis album, titled in traditionally clanging fashion, Don’t Believe the Truth, and released at the end of this month. A genial record with a lively band sound that’s finally made sense of recent line-up changes, it’s the culmination of 3 years of panic, dead ends, and defections which have called on every ounce of Liam Gallagher’s superhuman belief in his own powers and the continuing relevance of his band. So here it is, and here he is – the composer of 3 songs on the album (LLAB, TMOS, GGTIA), and as proud of himself as you might imagine. This songwriting business is a piece of piss, obviously.
“I’m loving life at the moment,” he says. “I’m swamped in the beauty of being alive. I get up in the morning and take my kid to school. I meet the parents who live in the supposedly real world, and I stand proud in the schoolyard with my kid. I’m just as good as you! You might have your 9-5 job. Mine’s a bit flaky. A bit weird. But I’m as good as the next man.”
What’s the hardest thing about being a dad?
”Being a dad innit? It’s beautiful. I’m not sure if it’s hard. (Thinks) I don’t know if I’m ‘A Dad’, though. We had sex and a child was born. Does that make me ‘A Dad’?”
Many would say so, yes.
“Anyone who thinks they’re ‘A Dad’ is a fucking knob. They’ll fall flat on their face with their big old, (pompous voice) ‘I’m…A…Dad.’ I’m just a bloke who’s got a kid and I try my best.”
Has songwriting put you in touch with things you didn’t have access to before?
“Peace of mind, man. Peace of mind. You know, all I ever wanted was to be in a band, shag birds, get pissed and be a fucking lout. But y’see (conspiratorially) I’m made of better things than that. I think every lad wants to go out and drink, take drugs or whatever. And if that makes me look like a bit of a fucking monkey sometimes then fine. But a point comes in your life when you have to fucking grow up. You have to say, I’ve done that, and I was the best at that.”
And the songwriting?
”It makes me feel a bit better, and it gets that frustration out of me. People say, ‘You’re angry.’ Well, I don’t know if I’m angry. I think I’m more frustrated than I am unhappy or angry.”
What frustrates you?
”I dunno. That’s the million fucking dollar question. I’m just a fucking human being who’s frustrated about why we’re here, where’re we going. But I’ve took time out to sit and think, What is it all about? Instead of running around, going RAAAAAAAAARGH! I take time out to wonder what makes us do what we do. Call me weird. I don’t smoke pot. I don’t take mind-bending drugs. I just drink lager and have a cigarette and talk a load of crap.”
This is philosophy Liam-Style. If you were to boil it down into a slim self-help volume for the US airport market it would be called, “I’m OK, I’m OK.” But if it’s a singular worldview, it has, after all, been a singular life – from a Burnage childhood addicted to Weetabix (“Nine a day. Three in the morning. Three when I came in from school. Three before bed”) to Knebworth and Patsy Kensit and beyond, to 15 million copies sold of (WTS)MG? and 19,763 tickets for Madison Square Garden – the keynote of their forthcoming US summer tour – sold out in an hour this February.
Along the way, some wisdom, or rather knowledge, has been accrued (“Did you know Elvis wiped his arse on goose’s necks?”). And through it all there’s been big brother Noel, the “serious” one chained to the Tasmanian Devil. GGTIA, the best of Liam’s new songs, is a meditation of sorts on this brotherly bond, but whether Noel would say it’s adequate recompense for the bother – say, Liam’s failure to get on a plane in August ’96, when an American breakthrough beckoned – is a moot point.
“It’s biblical innit,” explains Liam. “Cain and Abel… It’s me and our kid. Or me and you. Two people who are the opposite, who become one.”
Are you holding an olive branch out to Noel?
”It’s nice to put a band aid on it for a bit, knowwhatimean? I love him, I adore him, more than anyone else in the fuckin’ whole wide world. But we also don’t speaek that much. We don’t have to speak. But that song is basically for him. It’s like, Shut the fuck up. Give respect and you’ll get respect back. Life, brothers and sisters, that’s what we all want isn’t it, respect?”
Or love…
“But love is the same kind of thing. If you love someone you respect someone, you respect someone, you love someone. It all comes in the same… sandwich.”
The Oasis story has often been described as a soap opera, one no programmer could afford to run before the 9pm watershed. It’s as if the last-ditch defiance of their best music – the roiling stew of bludgeoning guitars and razor vocals – springs directly from the brothers’ permanent disharmony. A simple chronology reads like a police rapsheet. September 29, 1994: Noel walks away from LA showcase gig at the Whisky, appalled by the band’s methedrine-induced uselessness. May, 1195, Rockfield Studio: Noel hits his brother with a cricket bat and takes an unplanned 3 week holiday from the recording of (WTS)MG? September 11, 1996: Noel flies home from Charlotte, NC as a rucking derails another attempt to impress America. May 20, 2000: backstage at a cancelled Barcelona show, fisticuffs conclude a difference of opinion over the relative merits of Noel and Liam’s wives. Result: Noel abandons the tour, making it clear Liam has crossed a line that should never be crossed.
On the one hand it’s become par for the course. On another, there’s something brutalizing about the litany of grief. You wonder, have they ever been convinced that there was no way back?
”Me and him are brothers and we’ll never be over. That’s the beauty of the band. If we were mates then we’d be out on our arse before now, but we’re in t his forever. In a sense it was never over. But [LA, 1994] was a dark time. What with our ‘new found fame’ and all that nonsense, and I thought maybe this was it. But in the back of my mind, there was always a way back. Me and ‘im will go on forever, and beyond… beyond this time. It’ll go on forever and ever and ever.”
At last, a statement of fraternal harmony to measure against the black eyes and human cricket. Liam leans back, pondering his conciliatory words, when his eyes alight on an enormous poster of his brother’s face looming off the wall. Suddenly it occurs to him what’s come between them all these years.
“I don’t like him,” he declares. “He’s a fucking smug cunt. And he don’t like me because I’m a happy-go-lucky kind of guy. I embarrass him because I don’t take things quite as serious as he does.”
And it was all going so well.
Noel Gallagher wants to tell us a story. (“You’ll like this one,” he says.) It dates from mid-2004 when, with recording for DBTT underway for months and the finish line still far beyond the horizon, he received a visitation from a twitchy representative of his American record label, Epic.
“We go to a posh restaurant,” recounts Noel. “He’s kind of asking, ‘Why can we not get this record done?’ And I’m telling him how it doesn’t sound right, and how I’m going to write more songs, and he says, ‘You know who you sound like? Right now, just sitting there? Just talking about your grievances and worries about the record? Do you know who you sound like?’ Well, I’m scrolling through the Sony acts thinking, Is he going to say Dylan? I’ll go as low as Bruce Springsteen… Anyway, I go, Who? He says, ‘Anastasia!’
“It didn’t compute for a minute. Again I went, Who?, and there it was again, ‘Anastasia.’ So I poured another glass of wine, necked it in one, looked at him and said, I’ve got to fucking go now, ‘cos I’ve just broken out in a rash. As I was looking at him, I thought, You will never see my face again, and I will never lay eyes on you. Whoever you fucking are, and whatever your fucking name is, this is where if finished for me and you. I walk off, down Knightsbridge, collar up, pissing down with fucking rain. Just when it can’t get worse, a black cab pulls up and goes, ‘All right Liam!’”
Sunk into an armchair at his PR’s West London offices, Noel slaps his head and chuckles. The Peter Ustinov of Britpop has peeled off another classic anecdote and slapped it down with a customary “get on that.” Classily duded in a brown Paul Smith suit jacket and brown Lacoste polo shirt, he’d pass for one of rock’s elder statesmen if it weren’t for the eyes: searching, suspicious, still hungry.
Since what Noel describes as the “black mess” of SOTSOG – their 2000 album more destabilized than he let on by the departure of Oasis founder members Paul ‘Bonehead’ Arthurs and Paul ‘Guigs’ McGuigan – and despite periodic outbursts of bullish, thumbs-aloft PR, Oasis have been grinding through a slow, painful process of reconstruction, a laborious escape from the wilderness. Step 1, 2002’s HC album, was a staging post in the integration of Andy Bell (formerly of Ride & Hurricane #1) and Gem Archer (of Whirlpool and Heavy Stereo fame) and was deemed a qualified success, but the first act of the latest chapter augured ill, when, in January 2004, drummer Alan White received his P45. The band’s backbone since the recording sessions for (WTS)MG? and once Liam’s inseparable drinking buddy (“They were like the fucking Kray twins,” recalls Noel), White had missed his last band meeting.
“He just didn’t seem to be into it,” shrugs the elder Gallagher. “Turn up, pick up the money, do one. And you know, this isn’t a youth club. We are the biggest band that ever was. This is a big fucking deal.”
Recording commenced in early ’04, at Cornwall’s Sawmills studios, the venue for Oasis’s fiery debut, Definitely Maybe. At the controls – despite Oasis’s antipathy to producers – were dark dance DJ types, Richard Fearless and Tim Holmes, collectively Death In Vegas, tight with Liam since their heavy psych collaboration, Scorpio Rising, was a single in 2003.
“We worked out that we’d be starting recording 10 years to the day of us starting to record Definitely Maybe,” Noel says. “We thought, That’s it, the stars could not be more aligned! We had this romantic memory of Sawmills being fucking huge. But you always think the first recording studio you go into is amazing. We kind of walked in and go… It’s fucking cold in here…
“After about two weeks it became apparent we didn’t have the songs – only half an album really. it was really difficult to have the meeting with Richard and say, We’re not taking it any further. Liam was like, ‘You’re making me look like a cunt!’ Because Richard was his mate. But it was too fucking soon. That was the lowest point.”
Eventually, after seven months of honing and tickling, Oasis were taking their songs over the Atlantic to Capitol Studios in LA, with a stowaway in the shape of Zak Starkey, Who drummer and genetic Beatle. Despite the band’s antipathy to 6’4” American producers with beards, they were linking up with Dave Sardy, a producer/engineer with an incongruous track record in spiky contemporary hard rock, from Marilyn Manson to Hot Hot Heat. Noel was apprehensive (“If it goes tits up here, that’s it!”), yet Sardy had a much better take on Oasis than anyone could have hoped.
“Plus, he kind of explained a few things to me about my songwriting that I’d forgotten about.”
Like what?
”He said, ‘The thing about your songs is, why write another verse when three choruses will do?’ I was going (taken aback) That’s correct, man. Who listens to verses anyway? Verses are shit. He was also better at massaging Liam’s ego, getting the right performance. Every time I say to Liam, You might want to try and back off on that, the words he hears in his head are, ‘Your two sons are lesbian Nazis.’”
There is much that is reassuringly familiar about DBTT (ag! that title!). For a start, the traditionally flagrant homage of the Noel-sung MF (The Velvet Underground’s I’m Waiting For The Man, with a soupcon of Like A Rolling Stone). But there is also a pleasant surprise. Liam Gallagher, so strident on oasis records since BHN, has throttled down and there’s a soulfulness in his delivery that harks back to his best ever vocals, to Wonderwall and CS. Can he really be mellowing?
”There comes a point, I think, for him, where he’s going to have to make a decision,” sighs Noel. “All anyone remembers about the last tour was him getting his fucking teeth smashed in. A year and half on the road all boiled down to one brawl in a hotel foyer. That’s what it’s remembered for. He’s going to have to make a decision in the future. Do you want your fucking lairy-man to overshadow you, the songwriter?
”None of our arguments or fights have been about art,” he explains. “It’s always been about Liam being a fucking idiot really. It annoys him that I get annoyed that he’s not a very good drunk. He can go from melancholy to real aggressive violence very, very fucking quickly. There is no grey area of having a laugh… it gets dark. Arguments about the music are fucking great, because it makes the goal you’re trying to achieve better. But when it gets to stuff like, ‘You’re a cunt… you’re a cunt… you’re a miserable cunt…’, Well you’re an idiot. That kind of thing is cataclysmic.”
Was the row in Barcelona in 2000 – when you flew back and left them to tour alone – a turning point, looking back? Did their persistence mean they grew in stature to you?
”Not really. the whole thing about Barcelona was based around a real fucking snidey insult that he said to me in the dressing room, which I still haven’t forgiven him for and never fucking will do, and he knows that, and it’s never been the same since. As for them subsequently carrying on and getting on the road and doing it… listen, it was fucking dogshit. I admire them for getting bottled off in places that are quite calm, like Norway. I admire them because they saved the band a shitload of money. But they didn’t grow in stature, because I’ve always held them in high esteem. As band members, they’re the best people ever to be in a band with. Liam’s incredible to be in a band with. As a person, he’s not my fucking cup of tea… at all. Half the time, he needs fucking throwing in the Thames. He needs taking down to the Southbank, I’ll get his arms and the rest of England get his legs and we’ll throw him in the Thames. Because he can’t swim.”
He says GGTIA is about you and him…
“Oh is it? Is that what he said? For 6 months, I thought that song was GGTI A-b-l-e. I’m very fucking confused as to what it means, but if he’s writing songs about me then great. It’s fucking better than writing songs about the missus.”
Alan McGee has a theory that Liam’s attitude stems from never having struggled, never having failed. Not like you – toiling at the gas board, dreaming the impossible dream…
“Liam never had a job. He went straight from living at me mam’s to living with Patsy Kensit. I need say no more than that, surely? He was 20 when he was on television. He’s got less of a grasp on reality than The Beatles’ kids.”
Has his faith in himself ever been shaken?
”It’s hard to say, because he hardly ever does interviews. And although I’ve got an angle on him, being his older brother, it would be nice to read someone else’s opinion of him for a change. I kind of think that anyone who’s got that much fucking lip and that much front is well insecure. We were at this awards ceremony and our table was kind of in the middle of the room, so everybody that won had to circumnavigate our table. So a lot of these people tap me on the shoulder and say hi. And out of the corner if your ear you hear… ‘Fucking cunt… fucking cunt.’ I think he gets himself into a shamanic mantra of the word ‘cunt’. That’s his mantra: ‘He’s a cunt and they’re shit.’ Back in the day when we were all on the gear and that, I was like that myself. But it gets to the point where you mellow. You realize that some people are, actually, all right.”
So much of Liam’s anger is leveled at rivals or challengers?
”He’s not into people getting 9 out of 10 for album reviews, let’s put it like that.”
But isn’t that attitude part of what keeps Oasis hungry – this entity that won’t accept decline?
”Liam is more vocal about it, but I wouldn’t like people to think that anyone else sits around with a pair of slippers on, smoking a cigar, going, (posh voice) ‘Isn’t longevity marvelous! Aren’t we great! It’s 12 years you know!’ Liam deals with his rock stardom in the way he always has, which is larruping photographers and generally being Liam. But I’m just as hungry. I’m like the wizard behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz.”
What would persuade you to pack in Oasis?
”What, altogether? I’d never pack it in. I can’t leave Oasis. I am Oasis. It’d be like Pete Townshend leaving The Who and Roger carrying on. I can never leave. I am the fucking band.”
Outside Hackney’s Round Chapel, two days later, the early evening rituals of the East London high street are being observed. Buses scrape past buses, horns parping. Feral schoolkids in customized uniforms scream obscenities while half-mauled doner kebabs spill onto the pavement. Inside, the racket of Oasis’s Lyla shakes the still-consecrated space, the band plugged in and playing along in their best stone-faced, we-are-Rock fashion, while around them tranny divas and film company runners in feathered masks gyrate under a vivid red and yellow canopy.
It’s the Lyla video shoot, directed by a quiet man in a tea-cosy hat called Tim Qualtrough. In it’s head it’s Fellini’s Satyricon via The Rolling Stones. In reality, it’s Gerry Cottle’s Circus on a budget.
“Where are the midgets?” grumbles Noel Gallagher in a tea break. “I demand midgets!”
Wiseacres might suggest that, if it’s midgets he’s after, Noel needn’t look much further than the music scene in 2005 where, for all the promise immanent in the hip new wave of post-Franz bands, proper rock stars remain at a premium. Musicians as diverse as Coldplay’s Chris Martin and Babyshambles’ Pete Doherty revere the Gallaghers for their improbable ‘90’s crusade to reinject rock’n’roll into the music mainstream, but there’s also a pinch of envy for the love and excitement the old stagers still command. One thing’s for sure: Oasis won’t be surrendering an ounce of their status without a fight.
“There’s always this thing about ‘passing the torch’,” reflects Noel. “But the torch is never passed, it’s taken away. We took it off The Stone Roses: It’s our time now, we’ll take that thank you very much, because we’re on our way to fucking Knebworth. We can’t pass it on to Pete Doherty. Pete Doherty has to fucking take it off us. Chris Martin has to take it from us. It’s not a thing about who’s sold more records… You know what it is, it’s an unwritten thing.
“For instance, Chris Martin I fucking love. Top band. Coldplay, when I first seen them, blew me away. But he’s coming back saying, ‘I haven’t met anyone that’s liked us in two years, I don’t know if we’re cool.’ That’s not the spirit. People want rock stars, that’s the one thing I learned. People don’t want someone to walk onto a stage and say ‘I’m the same as you.’ They want someone to go on stage and say, ‘You? You could never be like me, ‘cos I’m from another fucking planet!’”
So what does he think about the Franz wave – bands with no time for the Oasis brand of ‘60’s rock classicism?
”I like Take Me Out. It’s as original as indie music gets these days. But as far as this ‘80’s revival goes you have to draw the line at The Bravery. That’s fucking wrong.”
What offends you?
”The quiffs. And the mascara. The name. I never liked Duran Duran. I never liked Japan. Or John Foxx. It was shit the first time round. It’s New Romantics dressed up as punks.”
But at least it’s something different. For all your strengths, we’re not getting that from Oasis…
“Every time we put out a record, people say, ‘Well it hasn’t progressed much.’ Sometimes I think, What do you mean by that? This is what we fucking sound like. We happen to think that we sound the bollocks. We’re not ones to lead our fans a merry dance through a maze of electronics. I say to every other band, You do the experimenting – we’ll just blow the roof off everywhere we play. You can have the chin-strokers and we’ll have the people pogoing thank you very much.”
What are you hoping to get out of DBTT?
”In terms of record sales, I don’t know anymore. You can only hope that is does as well as the last one. If it does better then great. It would be nice to get some critical acclaim this time, from your fucking magazine for a start. But in real practical terms I hope that we go round the world and every gig is fantastic. Hopefully Liam’s antics won’t overshadow the whole fucking tour, but I’m living in a dream world. He’ll lose an ear, or get shot by the Triads, or kidnapped by Al Qaida. You can fucking guarantee that something will happen.”
Back at his management offices, the subject of this speculation pulls on a Benson & Hedges Special Filter and orders and ice-cold pint of Stella Artois to be ferried from the pub next door. It’s a quarter to three in the afternoon. Soon he must dash, to pick up Lennon from school and further alarm the other working-stiff parents with his beery boisterousness. Unsurprisingly, given his current chemical balance and natural ebullience, his analysis of the challenges facing “Oasis Mk VII, Phase 1” (copyright Gem) is upbeat.
“It’s like Liverpool for all them years where they conquered Europe, where they won everything. We’ve done everything a band could wish for. People can only dream of what our band’s done. But you lose a couple of members and suddenly you’re in a rebuilding process, but we’re back now.
“And I don’t mean ‘back’ to mean everyone’s gonna like this record. But we’re ready to take on what’s meant to be took on. And I don’t mean we’re gonna conquer the world, because the world’s already been conquered as far as I’m concerned. It’s conquering it in your own head.
“It’s like, we were over there (points to ashtray), now we’re over here (office stereo), but where we really wanna be next is (meaningful look, points out window) over there.” If there’s a big difference between the Liam Gallagher of 1996, when he went so spectacularly off the rails after the high of Knebworth (dribbling lager on-stage at the MTV Awards, September 5, was a bestial lowpoint) and the Liam of 2005 it’s that today there’s a glimmer of an inner life.
“This is what makes me wanna carry on in a band,” he insists, with a sincere stare. “You do these gigs, the fucking Knebworth, and you get bored of all this stuff. How much more can you do? You can entertain yourselves, and the way you entertain yourselves is by looking inside one another. Them are the goals. Because on the outside, it’s been done… but on the inside, it really hasn’t.”
One of the best songs on the new record is by Andy Bell and sung by Liam. It’s called KTDA. Isn’t that the struggle of every band who’ve reached Oasis’s level – preserving the innocence?
”It’s for Andy to say. It’s his song. I don’t have to keep the dream alive, as far as I’m concerned, man. The dream is alive. The dream is reality. The reality is the dream. But if he needs a vocal, I’ll give him one.”
Are you saying that, in spite of all this looking inside you’re doing now, you’ve never encountered an ounce of doubt?
”No. It’s life innit? You have your ups and downs. Some days you win and some days you lose. That’s what I’m made for, man – to fucking win and lose. I don’t mean to sound like a wanker, man, but that what it’s all about: winning and losing, making up, falling out, making up. Being good, being bad. You can’t be good all the time.
“But I don’t sit and dwell about it. I tell you for fucking why. I’d rather look back on my career – or whatever the fucking hell it is – in 20 years’ time and sit next to Bono and Coldplay geezer and all these other fucking lightweights and go, Well you didn’t save the world, so you can fuck off… and you – you! – you can wash your hand.
“I’ll be sitting there and I’ll know I HAD IT. And maybe you didn’t balls it up ever. You may still be fucking Sting or you may be fucking Batman, but I’ll be fucking Liam G, man. And I AM STILL HAVING IT. These fuckers don’t know what it’s like to put the fucking boots on, youknowwhatimean? I can sit next to Elvis, Lennon or whoever and I won’t feel out of place, because I am the new breed. I’m the new fucker! And I’ll sit there and go, A’right Fatty…? A’right Speccy? And I’ll tell you another thing… If you see Coldplay in there, you’ll know it’s fucking rigged.
“It’s my time, man. I’ll balls it up and I’ll win and I’ll lose. But it’s my time, it’s my time.”
And with that mystic declaration, he’s off, walking that walk after talking the talk. The dwindling afternoon will be spent cavorting with his kids – with Lennon, who’s sensitive and loves Ride A White Swan, and Gene, who’s “fucking Keith Moon, man”, a future troublemaker in the old man’s mould. Oasis, it seems, aren’t ready to pass their torch just yet. If you’re in the market for a torch you’ll have to look elsewhere, or else prise it from their cold, dead fingers.
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