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.

Clockwise from left: On the road with Inspiral Carpets, 1992; Noel and Liam visit Strawberry Fields in New York’s Central Park; with Kate Moss in 1998

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.

“I’ve only seriously tried to kill Liam once.
I think that’s a pretty good record. In fact,
I deserve some sort of commendation.”

blankly at each other. And then we go down to the pub. With Liam, I wouldn’t know where to start.

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.

Liam is finally pulling his weight in the song-
writing 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

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 cunt on magic mushrooms was my inspiration for them lyrics. I don’t want people to think it’s art, though.

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?

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.

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