He may not be Oasis' frontman -- that'd be his little brother Liam -- but Noel Gallagher has never been afraid to shoot off his mouth. "Ten years ago we told everyone with a mic we were the greatest thing ever," he says. "Now we just quietly believe it."
By Michael Odell


A beaming Noel Gallagher strolls across the floor of a North London photo studio enthusing about a new and exciting phase of his life, looking lean and reasonably healthy in every­bloke casualwear: blue checked shirt, jeans, and desert boots. It's not just that he has a seventh Oasis album, Dig Out Your Soul, ready for release or that he has spent a morning playing with his one­year­old son, Donovan, whom he describes as "an absolute diamond." It's the fact that he has started sleepwalking.

"Last night I got into bed with me missus and woke up on the middle floor of the house on the couch," he says. "Amazing! I'm 41 and I'm starting this whole new nocturnal adventure." He and his girlfriend, Sara Macdonald, were out drinking beer and tequila with British comedian Russell Brand until the early hours -- Gallagher doesn't remember anything after climbing into a rickshaw in London's Soho district and being cheered through the streets. "Maybe that counts as a drunken stupor," he muses. "Is that the same as sleepwalking?"

Dig Out Your Soul sounds like you ordered in the ingredients, and all the labels on the jars read ROCK or MORE ROCK.

I'm glad you said that. Yes, we wanted a rock'n'roll album...with grooves. Making records should be fun. I remember seeing Radiohead on the cover of a magazine in the U.K. when In Rainbows came out, and it said, RADIOHEAD: THE PAIN. And I thought, "Won't you fucking give it a rest, you bunch of moaning children?" The pain? Of making an album? I don't buy it. If you're not having a laugh, then don't do it.

Surely the whole process wasn't all fun.

Well, no, there was a problem on day one. I had seven songs I was putting forward. They weren't pop songs; they were bluesy. We had a meeting and I said, "Let's concentrate more on bass and guitars and have more keyboards and get some remixes done." Liam immediately had a tantrum in the studio and was dancing round saying, "No one told me we were making a fucking dance album! I'm not having this shit. We're a rock band." One day he saw some crew unloading keyboards into the studio and went mad: "What are those fucking keyboards doing in here? That's too many keyboards for a rock'n'roll band." How long has Liam been doing this? He has an irrational fear of keyboards. But this is the man who thought we had gone too dance when I wrote "Wonderwall" because the drums didn't go boom-boom bap, boom-boom-bap. Liam is very institutionalized by being in Oasis. He's been doing it for so long. Me, [guitarist] Gem [Archer], and [bassist] Andy [Bell] were helping him arrange his song "I'm Outta Time" and tried to ease him away from the clichés. But in the end, he can't resist them.

Liam told me he hates "Wonderwall." It's the one song he literally hates singing.

That's interesting, because he would never say that to me. Well, I hate him singing it, too. Liam doesn't sound like he did ten years ago. Your voice and your body change. We've never got it right. It's too slow or too fast. I think Ryan Adams is the only person who ever got that song right. I'd love to do the Ryan Adams version, but in front of 60,000 Oasis fans that wouldn't be possible.

Liam is finally pulling his weight in the songwriting department, isn't he? He wrote three for the new album.

Yeah, he's a good songwriter. I think he regrets not starting earlier. For years I've said, "If you're so convinced you're John Lennon, then prove it."

Why don't you ever write together?

We don't see each other very often. And I like writing on my own. Me and Paul Weller first said, "Let's write a song together," in 1993, but it took 15 years for it to happen. [Gallagher and Weller cowrote "Echoes Round the Sun" for Weller's latest album, 22 Dreams.] A few times [Weller and I] made an appointment to meet at so-and-so studio at 11, and it's painful. We sit there looking blankly at each other. And then we go down to the pub. With Liam, I wouldn't know where to start.

You quit drugs in the late '90s. "Bag It Up" sounds quite psychedelic. Are you back on mood-altering substances?

No, "Bag It Up" is my little artistic statement. Not in the Coldplay sense. In fact, it's an anti-artistic statement. I spend a lot of time with Serge Pizzorno from Kasabian getting fucking pissed, and he sent me a CD of stuff he was listening to. There was a track by the Pretty Things called "Baron Saturday." I became obsessed by that pounding rhythm, and I decided to write about acid trips I used to have. Running around being a mad vagina on magic mushrooms was my inspiration for them lyrics. I don't want people to think it's art, though.

What do you mean?

Well, Coldplay and Radiohead -- they're artists, aren't they? Damon Albarn, he's an artist. They make art. That's what I keep getting told, anyway. I do like those bands, but they're all posh boys who went to art school. [Oasis] come off a council estate [public housing]. It comes out of here. [Thumps his heart with a clenched fist] "Bag It Up" is anti-that. It's a mongrel.

Your old rival Albarn has done Blur, an album in Mali, the virtual band Gorillaz, the Good, the Bad & the Queen, and now a Chinese opera. Does a part of you think, "I wish I'd taken more risks"?

The only thing I've got left to try to do is a solo album with a narrative running through it. Something like Greendale, by Neil Young. That would be as near art as I get. But even if I wanted to, how would I go about writing an opera?

Well, you already have the passionate central relationship, the tragic fallings-out

I don't think two blokes having the same fucking argument for 16 years over and over is the stuff of opera. Oasis: The Opera would be very short. The fat lady would refuse to sing it. But I say this with no irony: It must be very nice to be able to turn your hand to anything. I'm not that driven. To go from Britpop and write a Chinese opera about a monkey, hats off to the guy. I couldn't do it. And it got good reviews, although how you assess whether a Chinese opera about a monkey is any good is beyond me. But in my own defense, Damon isn't actually in Blur, Gorillaz, or the Good, the Bad & the Queen, is he? He's got time on his hands. That's when an opera comes to you.

You said you wanted the new Oasis album to have grooves. And yet you came out and said Jay-Z headlining Glastonbury was "wrong."

Well, I never said those words. You need verbatim quotes here. I've been doing interviews with American magazines, and the way it's played itself out is that I said Jay-Z had no right to play Glastonbury, which is a crock of horseshit. I got off a plane and someone asked me about the fact that Glastonbury hadn't sold out for the first time in years, and if it was because of Jay-Z. I innocently mused that that was probably right. From there it grew into this crap that I was standing on an orange crate at Speakers' Corner saying, "Gather round, brothers and sisters. Have you heard what's happening at Glastonbury this year?"

But still, you sounded reactionary and old-fashioned

I have a certain turn of phrase. So if I say, "Chicken sandwiches in McDonald's are just plain fucking wrong," it doesn't mean I'm attacking all chickens or all sandwiches. I've hung out with Jay-Z in Tokyo. I've seen his show. It's not my bag, but it's all right. We have a mutual friend in Chris Martin. So I am a guy who doesn't like hip-hop -- shock, horror. I don't dislike rappers or hip-hop or people who like it. I went to the Def Jam tour in Manchester in the '80s when rap was inspirational. Public Enemy were awesome. But it's all about status and bling now, and it doesn't say anything to me.

Do you think hip-hop fans could get anything out of Oasis?

Yeah. In England the white working class are feared, and our music is working-class expression. We have a lot in common with hip-hop. Apart from people pumping shotgun pellets into each other.