I've spent some time going through old articles in the Guardian/Observer archive to check if they always had such a strong anti-Noel bias (pretty much a yes btw, though the most ludicrous anti-Noel articles were all written around the Noel vs Jay-Z/"I'm not having Hip Hop at Glasto" time).

But I also found this one from October 2008(www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/oct/29/oasis-new-album?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487) , where he talks about the next Oasis album that he had already written and demoed.
Back in 08 this must have been a pretty pointless article (especially considering how often Noel changes his mind and how latter day Oasis albums never quite turned out as they were orginally planned) but in retrospect this really interesting:


"It's vastly different from what [Dig Out Your Soul] is," he told Billboard. "They all seem to be based around the same four or five chords," recalling "mid-era Kinks" tunes like Dead End Street and Harry Rag.

"There's stuff about soldiers and religious people and rock stars and travellers. They seem to be all songs about people, but not people I know. And they all seem to have a narrative - it's kind of like a story which follows on from song to song."

Gallagher compared the album's thematic unity to Neil Young's Greendale concept album. "But modern," he said


I mean it's obvious that he had just finished writing SB&JF here, but in general this sounds like a pretty accurate description of NGHFB to me. Even down to the 'travellers' that would later appear in the videos.
It seems as if Noel had the whole album already finished in his head at the beginning of the DOYS tour!

So does this mean he was planning an Oasis album completely written by himself?
Or was he already planning this album as his side-project for the '5 years off' that he started talking about at the end of the tour?
And do we know which of the songs that ended up being on HFB were definitely written after Oct 2008?