Recently, we were lucky enough to spend an hour in the company of Noel Gallagher - who is, without doubt, the funniest man in music.
As he's also a noted crisp fan, we brought him a present of Tayto Snax, which we like to think endeared us to him. [He surprisingly - for a man with two Irish parents - had never seen them before, FYI].
The second Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds album 'Chasing Yesterday' is out this Friday, and plays Dublin's 3Arena next Wednesday, March 4th.
Over the next few days, we'll bring you our interview with Noel in three parts. Today, he speaks about the press's obsession with an Oasis reunion, the scrapped Amorphous Androgynous collaboration and more.
Tomorrow and Friday, we'll have more stories about Morrissey, Russell Brand and Johnny Marr, his Mayo mammy's take on the charts and more - so remember to check back!
When you released your first album, there were plenty of questions about Oasis reunions and Beady Eye, etc. Now that you've established yourself as a solo musician, have you gotten less of that?
Well, I have [moved on]. I've gotta say that the journalistic world – particularly in fuckin' Britain – is sadly lacking at the moment. It's all they fucking wanna talk about. It's not so bad in Europe or Japan or America, for instance, but in England, they'll go 'So, you've got a new album out? That's great, I really liked it. Anyway, so when are Oasis getting back together?.' I've moved on from that, yeah yeah. I mean, I moved on the day that I left the band. But the journalistic world is sadly lacking at the minute – present company excluded.
There certainly seems to be an obsession about the recent 20th anniversaries of 'Definitely Maybe' and '(What's the Story) Morning Glory'.
Yeah. Well, it's part of the English psyche, nostalgia. It all stems from the empire; people were always harking back to the days of the empire, before the First World War – then after the First World War, the Second World War was harking back to that. It's always fucking something. Funnily enough, I will say that the youth of today don't really give two fucks about that. My daughter is 15, and she's not really interested in any nostalgia. She doesn't even know what it means. It tends to be people of my age that are obsessed with it. It's understandable, y'know what I mean – I'm not one for trailblazing into the future. I guess if I wasn't making records it would be a valid point, but I'm making records and about to go out on tour, so I think it's very psychedelic to ask you a question about a band you were in seven years ago, or whatever.
Does it get tiring, constantly having to prove yourself in that way?
It doesn't bother me in the slightest. I don't think about it. I don't overthink what I do now, and far less what I did back then. If I hadn't written all the songs from 1993 onwards, maybe I'd have a different perspective on it. But I can play those songs anytime I want; I wrote them, they're my songs. Or I can not play them - it's my decision. And in the digital age anyway, it doesn't really matter what I say. I'm only one voice. The fuckin' Internet's out there, it's got a billion people out there, all with an opinion; they're all music critics. They're all fashion critics. They're all art critics; some of the greatest fucking lyricists that ever lived are on the Internet. You could get bogged down, but I really don't think about it at all. I just don't give a fuck. I've already started my next record, so that's the next five years sorted. If I ever get to a point where I've finished a tour and I've got nothing left, maybe then I would look back – but I don't see that point ever coming. I just don't see it.
When did you realise that you wanted to do another High Flying Birds record?
I enjoyed the last tour so much, and the way it had started from very small beginnings to arenas and headlining festivals, and shit like that: I thought, 'I'll do another one'. The band I put together, I got on great with. I don't know what's gonna happen in the future, which is the great thing about not being in a band. I've always got shitloads of songs anyway, but I'm kind of at the beginning of a project which is quite different. So I don't know what'll happen; I'm more concerned about how shit these new songs sound in rehearsal at the minute, so I don't really think that far in front.
You've spoken in the past about being a bit of a reluctant frontman – has that changed over the last few years?
D'you know what, I was reluctant until maybe coming off stage that first night in Dublin. I was reluctant going on, thinking 'How on earth is this gonna work?'. But coming off stage that night, I thought 'I don't give a fuck – it's all about the songs'. As it got bigger, I had to kind of take one step back and rethink. I gotta say, when I did my first arena, which was in Manchester – and it's a big fucking arena, 17,000 people – I felt very small on that stage that night. And I felt… I just felt like I shouldn't have been there. But the great thing is that my songs should have been there; they're arena songs. And really, nobody gives a shit about me. And I've said it so often in interviews that I think I may have brainwashed everybody. I still say it to this day – I meet people in the street who say 'Bought our tickets for the O2, coming to see you!'. I say 'Don't come to see me, there's nothing to see. If you're coming to have a good night and listen to the music, that's great – but there's nothing going on.' (laughs). If you wanna see a grumpy old man on stage, enjoy.
What happened with the album you recorded with Amorphous Androgynous? Wasn't that supposed to be released the year after the first HFB record?
It just wasn't good enough. They will argue with me until they’re blue in the face that it was, but as I fuckin' paid for it and it had my name on the front, it wasn't good enough. This is how I see it: if I'm starting off with that High Flying Birds album being so well received, and set the fucking bar so high, I'm fucking damned if I'm putting out anything that's not at least as good. It wasn't good enough. And that wasn't anybody else's fault; I listened to it, and listened to it, and listened to it, and I just thought 'No.' I shelved it. I made a tour film of that tour that I did – I had a film crew and everything, all around South America – and when it got back and it was edited, it just wasn't good enough. It's nobody else's fault. I'm just in a situation now where what I say goes, and I was looking at it and thinking 'It's gotta be brilliant. Everything has got to be great.' All the songs have gotta be as good as what's gone before them, or there's no point.
Do you generally impose pretty high standards on yourself?
I do and I don't. Some days I do, and y'know what… a song like The Mexican, that's on the new record, that's a nothing song. It's a great riff and very little else. It wasn't even going to go on the album until I'm kind of listening to it in its order, and I got to the end and there's a run of Dying of the Light, The Right Stuff, While the Song Remains the Same. It got too heavy after that point; they were really kind of deep songs. I thought 'It needs something throwaway here, just to lighten the mood a little bit.' So on that day, I said 'Fuck it, just get that – that's a throwaway song, like Roll With It – it doesn't mean a great deal.' But on the whole, yeah, I do have high standards. But I do have days where you just need to put something that's a little bit shit in there, to get you from one place to another. It's an artistic thing. There are no rules set in stone about being artistic anyway, and if there are, you're an idiot. You've always gotta be able to change your mind at one point.
Did any songs from that Amorphous Androgynous collaboration make it on to 'Chasing Yesterday'? You did a release for Record Store Day, didn't you?
Oh yeah, Shoot a Hole Into the Sun. That was amazing and it was the one good thing that came out of that record. On this record, The Right Stuff was born out of that project – but what's on the album is completely different. If I played you what was done by Amorphous Androgynous, you'd barely recognise it. We were doing a completely different track that's never come out, which right at the end had those three chords as an outro thing. I didn't think anything of it and went back to the studio the next day, and they'd looped those three chords and I played drums and put a bit of a beat on it. I wrote a song around that. When it came to this album, I thought that the idea was good, but the execution wasn't very good – so I re-recorded it, got a saxophone player. [It was] the same with The Mexican, which came out of another tune which I started played the riff of. It had a bit of a vibe.