“When you’re with your parents, you feel safe,” he says. “But when they’re taking your Uncle Paddy out of the car, and then you go off into a room and the sniffer dogs come out and they’d have mirrors underneath the car? I didn’t really realise then what they were searching for. But they were searching for explosives.

“I was too young to understand. I was just young enough to hear it on the news but just young enough not to completely understand it. Obviously, I know more about it now than I did then – like the Birmingham Six and all that.”

We’re meeting in Dublin’s InterContinental hotel to talk about the former Oasis star’s new record with his current band, High Flying Birds, evocatively called Council Skies. Gallagher is relaxed in a combat jacket and jeans, full of good humour and in typically talkative mode, reflecting on his childhood growing up in an Irish family in the Manchester suburb of Burnage.

“We didn’t know any English people. My whole entire life was Irish,” he recalls. His mother, Peggy Sweeney, had grown up in Mayo and worked as a dinner lady at a local school in Manchester. There were 11 in her family, says Gallagher, and they all lived within a two-mile radius of each other.

His father Thomas was a labourer, originally from Duleek in Co Meath, and when he couldn’t find work on the building sites, he worked as a DJ in the Irish social clubs.

“So we didn’t really know any English families. There was a few on the street where we lived but we kept always within the Irish community. But I do remember my ma – she would only buy Kerrygold butter,” he laughs.

“The Irish community in Manchester circled the wagons, because the Irish community was demonised. I felt that at the time. But I would only have been six, seven, eight when it [the IRA bombing campaign of mainland Britain] was going on in 1974 and 1975. I was born in 1967.”

​Noel Thomas David Gallagher was born in 1967, on May 29 – and he’s a Gemini. That could all change, however, if a recent conversation with a friend is anything to go by.

‘You can change your f**king gender. Why can’t you change your star sign?’

“We were talking about this whole woke thing one night,” he says. “I said to her that I wanted to change my star sign.”

“What would you want to do that for?” she asked. “I’m bored of being Gemini,” he said.

“You can’t do that,” she said.

“You can change your f**king gender,” he said. “Why can’t you change your star sign?”

“Well,” she said, “because then you’d have to change your birthday.”

“Why can’t you change that?” he said, refusing to give up. “You can change anything now, but you can’t change your star sign.”

He got a new song out of the conversation, ‘Pretty Boy’, which, he adds, is “not specifically about the gender thing”.

“But it’s like girls are boys now and boys are girls and everything in between. I don’t have an opinion on it. It’s just an observation of it really. I don’t know why I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about it.”

More than that, Gallagher thinks, to paraphrase his old adversaries Blur, modern life is rubbish. “Oh, yeah,” he laughs. “It’s awful. Wokeism is just dreadful.”

Is it difficult to have a conversation sometimes?

“You’ve got to be careful what you say in interviews, but no.”

You are officially un-cancellable, I say.

“I’m not on the internet. I wouldn’t go out of my way to antagonise anybody but that whole ‘them-they’ thing – I’m like ‘f**k off!’

He pauses, before returning to the theme. “Seriously, f**k off!”

“Each to their own and all that, but one’s allowed to make observations about it,” he says. “I’m glad I came along before the internet and YouTube and mobile phones. It’s a minefield now.”

Being a teenager today is difficult, he says. “Teenagers’ lives are based on telephones and things that they see on the internet. They should be reminded that it’s not real. It’s not real life. It’s people provoking a reaction from them.

“Imagine being a young teenage guy now – or a young teenage girl now – and growing up in that thing where ‘likes’ are currency? Kids are walking on eggshells about who they are, anyway, at this weird time in their lives, and they don’t know what to say – and other kids can weaponise that against other children.

“I’ll tell you who I feel sorry for in this thing, young guys. They are growing up in a world and they haven’t a clue what it’s all about, how to be young men. And I don’t mean ‘men’ in the sense of lads. It is just a very difficult time for young boys.”

​Gallagher’s observations about modern life might be astute, but any discussion of his personal life – including the very public dissolution of his relationship with his younger brother (Noel quit Oasis in August 2009 after a physical row with Liam as the band were about to go on stage play at the Rock en Seine Festival in Paris) and his recent marriage break-up with Sara MacDonald, with whom he has two teenage sons, are not up for discussion. We’re here to talk about the music.

But in some senses, Gallagher – like his heroes Lennon and McCartney before him – has poured some of his private pain into his music anyway. Council Skies is a masterclass in self-reflection.

“The whole thing was written in lock-down and it was a very reflective time – not just for me, for everybody,” he says. “Artists were probably the people who navigated that the best, because you can articulate it in some way. Although none of the songs are about lockdown, because what the f**k can you write about?” he laughs. “There’s nothing happening.”

“But because there was nothing to look forward to , I was reflecting on how... obviously, I had a lot of personal stuff going on and it was a time to sit and reflect and think: ‘How did we get here?’”

Did he come to any conclusions? Long pause. I don’t mean conclusions about your personal life, I clarify. I meant about stuff like life mortality, ageing.

“Yeah, I know. Age – Jesus, it’s such a f**king ball-ache,” he says. “Did I come to any conclusions? Maybe I reiterated things to myself that I already knew – that you should live in the moment. You’ve got to hang in there.”

He has always done that, ever since at 15 he was expelled from school for throwing a bag of flour over a teacher, or at 17 watching his mother leave his father.

“It’s been a funny few years,” he says, meaning presumably the end of his marriage to MacDonald as well perhaps as the pandemic and his ongoing public slanging match with his younger brother – in 2017, Noel called Liam “a village idiot”; a year later, Liam compared MacDonald to Putin.

“It’s not unique to me,” he says. “A lot of my circle of friends have experienced the same thing because we’re all at a similar age. It’s not uncommon for people to get to this age... they call it a mid-life crisis for men. Not that I’m having a mid-life crisis. I don’t know what they call it for women but it’s a similar kind of thing,” he says.

“I don’t know, you’ve just got to ride it out. That’s the way I’m looking at it. Things will get better.”

All Gallagher’s greatest songs – from ‘Champagne Supernova’ to ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ to ‘Little by Little’– focus on the universal truths of life and the things that happen to us along the way.

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“We all fall in and out of love,” he says. “We all hate and we all love. We all get sad and we all get broken hearted.” He explains that although his new song ‘Dead to the World’ is “very personal, people will listen to it and go: ‘I’ve been there.’

“It comes from a place of truth – and within. If I sat down and tried to write a song about what I’ve been going through in the last few years it’d be shit. But because I just let it come, I got it and that was it.”

​Council Skies features Gallagher’s greatest song since his heyday in you-know-who (another subject that is off-bounds for this interview). Unapologetically a stadium anthem, ‘Easy Now’ will stand up to anything he’s ever written.

“It is one of my best songs, a great song. Fans are going to freak out when I play it live,” he says of the song with Lennon-esque lines like “Soon your future will appear/There’s nothing left for you to fear” and “I’ll wait for you I swear/Your destination comes without a fare”.

“When I’m writing – and I write songs that sound, for want of a better word ‘Oasisy’ – I usually get as far as the chorus and go ‘it’s just a shit version of ‘Supersonic’, I can’t be arsed’, and I’ll just bin it off.

“But with that particular song I got to the chorus and I was like: ‘Oh, hello – this is as good as ‘Little by Little’. This has got the same shape as ‘The Masterplan’. ‘Easy Now’ is a song about strangers passing and you never know their name. Roger Waters had the same theme for Dark Side of the Moon. My mate, a guitar engineer played on it. I said to him: ‘Make it sound like ‘Comfortably Numb’ by Pink Floyd.’”

He wrote several of the songs on Oasis’s first album, 1994’s Definitely Maybe (which went on to sell almost nine million copies) sitting in a hut in a Manchester building site after his foot had been damaged by the cap from a gas pipe and he was given the “cushy” job of handing out bolts.

He wrote the rest of the songs in a one-bedroom council flat with no carpet in Manchester city centre. A multimillionaire now – Oasis’s second album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? sold 22 million copies worldwide – with well-carpeted houses in London and Ibiza, he says he knows when a great song is happening.

“I have thousands of hours of experience of writing.”

‘You’d be sat playing pool, eating crisps, and drinking red lemonade’
I ask him about the muse. “Here’s a funny thing though,” he smiles. “Springtime is when I tend to write most of my songs. I never tend to write in the winter or the summer. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I was born in May.”

His childhood was simple – certainly far simpler than the youth of kids now. Memories of his summer breaks in Ireland are fond.

“Where my mum is from – out in the west – is very, very rural. Great when you’re a small child and you’re around animals and when they’re cutting turf. It was all farms and fishing. They were great times.

“When I go down to Mayo it’s still the same, it’s still the country. My mum comes from a big family, seven sisters, and in the six weeks of school holidays everyone used to go back to my gran’s house, which she wasn’t too pleased about, and they all had at least three kids each.

“So there was always a load of kids at her house. There was never less than eight kids of our age. It was just like a big holiday camp, really. It was great. You’d be in the pub most nights – not drinking, because everyone went to the pub. You’d be sat playing pool, eating crisps, and drinking red lemonade.”

At the height of Oasis’s fame, Gallagher famously attended a controversial Downing Street party as a guest of new prime minister Tony Blair in 1997. Blair told him he’d stayed up all night when Labour won their landslide victory in the general election earlier that year. Gallagher asked him how he’d managed to stay awake. Blair told Gallagher (who at that time was known for his enthusiastic use of Class A drugs): “Probably not by the same means as you did.”

At that time, they were both icons of Cool Britannia, one the leader of the biggest rock band in the world, the other, at 43, the youngest prime minister since Lord Liverpool in 1812. The intervening years haven’t been kind to Blair. How does Gallagher feel about the former Labour leader now? Does he think he is a war criminal?

“No,” he says, without hesitation. “I do not. I wish he’d stand again. I’d vote for him. He was the only one that ever spoke any sense to me. Not me personally, but politically. Everything now has gone back to the extremes. He seemed to dance on the fine line of uniting everyone politically and therefore united the country.

“I know it was a difficult time when it was the 1990s and the internet had just been invented and the economy went through the roof. But still, it was some dance that he did.

“Even during the pandemic he was the only one who spoke any sense about the vaccination when he said: ‘If it’s young people are spreading, let’s vaccinate them first. Don’t lock them all up if they’re at a party. Vaccinate them all.’ So, I don’t think he’s a war criminal. You know as well as I do that Britain is always going to stand with America through thick and thin. If America says jump, Britain says: ‘How high?’”

He knows his history; one of his most treasured possessions is apparently a boxset of The World at WarTV series. When one commentator described Bob Geldof’s 2005 Live8 concerts in London, Paris, Berlin and Rome, among other venues, to raise awareness of issues in Africa, as “the greatest thing that’s ever been organised in Europe”, Gallagher was quick to point out: “Er – D-Day?”

​A few years ago he had dinner in Ibiza with Bruce Springsteen. They decided on a wind-up: to send a mutual friend a selfie to ruin his day.

When Bono – for it was he – received the picture, “within 10 seconds”, according to Gallagher, the U2 singer sent back a needy text from his home in Èze in the South of France to say: “Where are you guys? How long would it take for a chopper to get there?” To which Noel replied: “No, we’re in a different country!”

Did Gallagher use his time with Springsteen to look for songwriting advice?

“I don’t really know enough about his music, really, to get into it with him. Bono, on the other hand – he sends me demos all the time and vice versa. I sent him a few things when I was writing this album. He was the first person to say: ‘You’re on the way. You’re going there. And you should go there.’ I knew what he meant by that. He was saying to me: ‘Say it.’

“What I’ve learned from meeting people like Springsteen and McCartney is they’re just normal guys like you who don’t really know what they’re doing. But they’re challenging something or other.

“Honestly, bar John Lennon and Bob Dylan and Bob Marley, I think I’ve met everyone else. They’re all just chipping away, tripping to write a f**king tune. The great thing about Get Back [the eight-hour 2021 documentary by Peter Jackson on the making of The Beatles’ 1970 album Let It Be] when it came out was: all these people who’ve never written a song and don’t know what it’s like could see.

“They think you sit down and go, ‘OK, I’m now going to write ‘Hey Jude’. And of course it’s not like that. It’s good to see Paul McCartney just hammering away at an idea of ‘Get Back’. He knows he’s got it but he doesn’t know what it is.”

In September 2021, he was with McCartney for his daughter Stella’s 50th birthday party at Cliveden House in Berkshire.

“We played a few Beatles’ songs together. It was f**king far-out. It was a lovely summer night. The moon was a perfect crescent. He said to me: ‘Noelo’ – he calls me Noelo – ‘look at the moon. Look at the shape of the moon. Do you know that’s where the French got the term croissant from?’ I was thinking that’s not true. I said: ‘Is it?’ He said: ‘I don’t know. It’s a Macca truth.’”

Did Noelo tell McCartney that he thought the second side of Abbey Road – as the Oasis star once said in an old interview – was “complete nonsense”?

“No!” he laughs.

Or that ‘Piggies’ from The Beatles’ White Albumin 1968 (again, as he once said) was “absolute crap”? “No! I wouldn’t! If he asked me, I’d say it’s not my favourite. But I wouldn’t offer an opinion like that.”

​Apropos of opinions, solicited or otherwise, in 2007, Noel said of U2: “Play ‘One’, shut the f**k up about Africa!”

“I never said that. That was some journalist who completely took that out of context. I remember going to see Massive Attack, U2... I went to four gigs in a month. And they were all politically motivated gigs. I remember thinking: ‘F**king hell! Can’t these people just play the f**king tunes? Who gives a shit what’s on the news. I can watch the news at home. I don’t have to come here and then see Sky News on the f**king massive screen. Just play the f**king music.’”

He didn’t say that to Bono about U2’s heavily political Zoo TV tour?

“No, no, no...” he laughs.

What does he talk to Bono about, then? Does he have a list of things not to say to upset him?

“We just talk shit. Literally talk shit. It’s mostly he’ll play me stuff that Edge’s working on, blah, blah, blah. Bono’s a very silly man.”

I ask for an example. “My... well, my now ex-missus... she was quite friendly with Larry. And all the girls love Larry, right? It was on Sara’s birthday and this box arrived in the kitchen. It had on the front a card that said: ‘To Sarah, from Larry Mullen Jr.’

“She was out at the time and I called her and said: ‘You’ve got a birthday present from Larry Mullen Jr.’ She said: ‘How do you know it’s from Larry?’ I said: ‘Because it’s got a card on the front that says from f**king Larry Mullen Jr.’ She went: ‘Oh my God! Open it and see what’s in it.’”

“I opened it and it had another card inside it that said: ‘Only joking. It’s from Bono.’ It was a pillow with a pillowcase on it – with a picture of Bono. That’s why Bono’s a very silly man.”

​Noel Gallagher is less silly than self-deprecating. He finds it amusing that people think he’s taller than he is. He’s 5ft 9in. “It disappoints them when they meet me and they go: ‘Oh, you’re a bit of a short-arse, aren’t you?’ Unfortunately I am, yes.”

What else do people get most wrong about him?

“I have a way of talking in interviews and I’m not like that in life. When people meet me I’m not like my public persona.”

By which he means that he’s “a bit of a gobshite, I suppose.”

“It’s not something I ever worry about, by the way. When you tell it like it is, people can’t handle that these days. I’ll articulate it for you. I don’t suffer fools gladly. That comes across if you’re reading the internet. But to my friends who know me and love me – you know, I don’t care about anyone else.”

He looks healthy. He has said that he stopped using cocaine in 1998 after he tumbled out of bed in the afternoon after a heavy party the night before – and his “whole world just fell in, I just had a freak out”.

If partying no longer keeps him up at night, what does? Global warming?

“Global warming?” he laughs. “It’s like jazz. It’s too complicated an issue. People in England who live on a bit of rock in the grand scheme of things – and you drive around and a sign says: ‘You are now entering a low-emission zone.’ I’m like, ‘Really?’”

Naturally, it’s not Manchester’s premier rock star behind the wheel of a car roaring through the area.

“I don’t drive. I’m part of the solution, mate, not the problem. I’ve never taken a driving lesson. It’s never interested me. I’ve got a chauffeur,” he laughs. “Of course.”

It isn’t the brown and cream Rolls-Royce that he arrived in to that divisive 1997 reception at Downing Street – having only signed off the dole four years earlier.

“No, I finally sold that Rolls-Royce,” he says. “I’m slumming it in a Range Rover.”

‘Council Skies’ is released on June 2. Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds play Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin on August 27. noelgallagher.com