Getting High (16 page)

But Noel didn't want to go down to the pub. He wanted to go to the gig. Noel loved gigs. You could get into places like the Boardwalk or the Hacienda cheaply, the drinks were very reasonable and you could see two or three bands in one night. Even if they were shit, you could still have a good laugh and maybe, just maybe, pull a woman.

‘It was one of the great things about The Smiths' gigs,' Noel recalls. ‘You'd go there and it would be full of blonde women. I'd say to my mates, “You should come down, the place is full of women.” But, of course, they'd never come.'

On 29 May 1988 Noel was standing upstairs in the International Two waiting to see The Stone Roses. He had a spoonful of speed up his nose and a huge packet of it lying in his pocket. He knew full well that the next day he would have to be up early, working for Kennedy's, laying pipes for British Gas, and all with the hangover from hell. But you know what? He didn't give a fuck. Tonight he was out to party.

Anyway, Noel reasoned, someone like Tommy Coyle, the old geezer who worked with him, would help him through the downer with his biting humour alone.

Tommy acted like a dad to Noel. He would often take Noel aside and say in all seriousness, ‘Now listen, son, take my advice. Don't marry a woman, marry a man. A man you can go to the pub with, you can go to football with, you can pull birds with, you can even go down to the bookies and spunk all your money away and still you won't have any arguments. I really wish I'd married a bloke.'

Just the other day one of the gang had announced they were now a born-again Christian. Quick as a flash Tommy looked up and said, ‘How did you manage to climb back inside your mum's fanny then?'

But work was tomorrow. Tonight was now. Noel strolled over to the toilets, went inside and locked himself into a cubicle. He racked out a huge line of speed and, taking a crumpled £5 note, snorted it up his nose. Then he strolled back into the crowd and within two minutes he felt invincible.

The Stone Roses appeared on-stage. Fucking great band, Noel thought to himself. And, for a second, he tried to imagine what it would be like to stand up there in front of all these people, playing music. It must be incredible, he decided. And one day it'll be me there.

Then he noticed, to the left of him, a kid with a tape recorder, sneakily recording the gig. He didn't recognise the kid but they had in fact met before.

Graham Lambert was now a guitarist, but a year ago he had DJed at the Boardwalk at a Jack Rubies gig.

Noel had been in the crowd that night and he had cheekily gone up to the booth to ask Graham if he had a spare copy of The Pastels' single he had just played. Graham had taken the piss right out of him for that.

Noel looked at the kid again and then decided to approach him. The speed had kicked in nicely now. All of Noel's shyness had disappeared. Fuck it. Noel went over to Graham, asked him what he was doing.

Instantly Graham panicked, thinking that Noel worked for the band or the club, but Noel explained he didn't and would it be possible to get a copy of the tape when it was done?

Relieved that he hadn't been caught, the lads got talking about music. Noel told him he had just bought an Inspiral Carpets' record called ‘Planecrash'.

Graham smiled at this news. ‘I'm the guitarist,' he said.

By the end of the night they had swopped numbers and they stayed in touch. But, more importantly, this gig laid the seeds for what was to come. Liam was downstairs absolutely riveted by The Stone Roses and their singer, Ian Brown. Mark Coyle and Phil Smith were there working for the Roses. It would be as important a gig for Oasis as Spike Island, The Stone Roses' 1989 gig, would be for heralding the arrival of the 1990s British pop movement.

Noel, meanwhile, was getting very serious about his songwriting. Peggy remembers cleaning his room once and making the mistake of tidying up all the scraps of paper he had been writing lyrics on and then, when Noel saw what she had done he went mad, and she said, ‘Well, if you kept your room tidy then I wouldn't have to go in there,' and Noel shouted back at her, and it was all such a palaver.

But Noel kept on writing lyrics, putting together chords. He even replied to an advert in the
Manchester Evening News
. It read ‘Musician wanted for co-songwriting, must be into The Smiths.'

‘That's me, Noel thought, and he got on the phone and, without telling a soul, went to meet this guy who was about the same age. Noel put down on tape what he thinks were about four of his songs. But this guy was a right student, as so many Smiths' fans were, so Noel never returned. But he had committed his first songs to tape. It was something.

Noel spent a lot of his time going to see local groups, such as The Happy Mondays or the Roses, and of course, he was always present at most Manchester City games. Then, one day, while talking to Graham, Noel discovered that the Inspirals had just sacked their lead singer, Stephen Holt. Noel saw his chance.

‘I'll audition for you,' he offered. Graham thought it a great idea. If it worked out he would have a good mate in the band.

On 21 December 1988, with Christmas approaching, Noel told Peggy he was going to audition for a band.

‘It's funny,' Peggy says, ‘but as he was leaving the house I thought to myself, “This is really what Noel wants to do”.'

Noel arrived at the Mill Studio in South Street, Ashton-under-Lyne. He was slightly nervous but, of course, like his brother, he never betrayed a fraction of what was inside of him.

He stood in front of a microphone and sang an Inspirals' song, ‘Butterfly', and then a version of The Rolling Stones' ‘Gimme Shelter'.

When he was finished he came home to find that a plane flying over Lockerbie in Scotland had exploded in mid-air. The news was shocking, but the verdict from the band on his vocal performance was disappointing.

‘We felt his voice just wasn't strong enough,' Graham says. Noel agrees. ‘I was shouting my bollocks off,' he recalls. ‘I couldn't sing then, so I didn't get the job.'

If Noel was disappointed by the outcome he certainly never showed it. He had learnt not to express himself in front of others, feeling it was a sign of weakness to do so. He worked after all with a tough gang of pipe-layers for whom displays of emotion reflected badly on your masculinity. Girls cry, boys don't.

Around the April of 1989 Noel broke his foot. He was at work when a heavy pipe crashed down on him. He was taken to hospital and put in plaster. The worst part of the injury for Noel was being immobile. It meant he would have to stay at home day after day. Noel hated being bored. It really was the worst thing. All his life he would struggle to evade boredom. One day he phoned Graham and told him of his plight.

‘I remember him calling us up on the mobile phone,' Graham says, ‘and he said, “You know, I wouldn't mind roadie-ing for you”, because he now needed a job.'

Given his physical condition, Noel may well have been joking. He would after all be a ‘one-legged' roadie. But Graham was keen to help his friend out who was so obviously bored out of his mind.

So in May 1989 Noel travelled with The Inspiral Carpets to their gig at the Duchess of York pub in Leeds, a venue that would later play host to a very famous incident in the Oasis story.

‘Noel was on crutches,' Graham recalls, ‘and I remember we had to help him up this fire escape.'

When the leg healed, Noel jacked in his job with Kennedy's (he had been moved to the storehouse where Liam would later work) and was taken on as a guitar roadie by the Inspirals. Not long after, the band employed another roadie called Jeff Scallon, and Noel was then made responsible for the band's guitars, keyboards and drums.

Soon after starting his roadie career Noel had learnt how all three instruments operated, quickly learning how to play drums and understand a keyboard. In footballing terms, he became an all-rounder.

There was also a sound-monitor man working for the band by the name of Mark Coyle. Mark and Noel shared many similarities. Like Noel, whatever Coyle chose to do, he did so with an all-or-nothing attitude. He too was Irish Catholic.

At the age of fourteen, Mark's ambition was to produce and engineer. He played guitar with a Manchester group called The Wild Strawberries in the early 1980s and later on worked as a sound engineer for The Stone Roses. Between their gigs he was employed by the Inspirals, where he and Noel quickly developed a major friendship that lasts to this day.

‘Music and football is what brought us together,' Noel explains. ‘He was really into The Beatles and he's also a full-on United fan, the dick. We had loads of arguments about City and United. Still do to this day. He's also a brilliant guitarist. He never plays in front of anyone now but let me tell you, he's top.'

Coyle could also play drums. Many times the two of them would arrive at venues, set up the equipment and then, either before or after the band soundchecked, Noel would get on guitar, Coyle on drums, and they would run through Noel's songs. Unbeknown to them, they were both preparing for what was to come.

If Coyley (as he is known) was Noel's closest male friend, then, apart from Peggy, the woman closest to him at this point was Louise Jones. Noel had seen her around in various clubs, mainly the Hacienda, and they had eventually got chatting.

Noel was still living at home, and Peggy, who got on well with Louise, remembers her corning round most nights to the house and sitting with Noel in his bedroom.

Soon, they decided to live together. Louise was manager at a Benetton shop in town and she had put her name down for a flat in India House, a large building situated in the city-centre.

Meanwhile, a friend of hers was moving out, so Louise and Noel took the apartment, effectively squatting. A year later, Louise's initial application came through and they moved upstairs to a larger flat.

But by now Manchester had found itself a new name: Madchester.

In late 1987, London DJs such as Paul Oakenfold, Nicky Holloway and Danny Rampling were about to change the course of club culture. It needed a shot in the arm. Dance music, at this time, was neatly divided. Rap over there, house over here. Many of London's clubs were elitist also. You had to dress a certain way to gain entry.

By travelling to Ibiza and witnessing an across-the-board musical policy that appealed to many, these DJs returned to London and started playing in a similar style. For instance, at Paul Oakenfold' slate-night club in South London, he would play U2 and other rock sounds as well as house music. The introduction of Ecstasy pills into this scene then provoked the biggest youth movement since punk.

Ecstasy pills, first used in 1912 by German psychologists to help their emotionally-stunted patients express themselves, were at this time incredibly powerful.

Within twenty minutes of taking them users had lost all their inhibitions and felt an enormous well-being towards themselves and others. Suddenly white kids who rarely danced were leaping on to tables to gyrate the night away.

Clubs such as Schoom, the Trip and Spectrum were witnessing amazing scenes of public abandonment as a new culture quickly took shape. Nineteen eighty-eight was officially christened the Summer of Love.

The Hacienda in Manchester had been playing house music on a regular basis, well before London took note, although the clothes and the drugs were absent from the scene. It took, as Sarah Champion noted in her book
And God Created Manchester
, Shaun Ryder and Bez from The Happy Mondays travelling down to London, checking out the clubs and then returning home with the formula, for Manchester to emulate the whole scene.

Once it did, the town went crazy. It certainly had needed an injection of pure excitement. Economically, Manchester was still in serious decline. Manufacturing jobs had all but disappeared, unemployment was staggeringly high and a black-market economy based around stolen goods and drugs was about the only service industry showing any kind of growth.

Gangs, such as the Quality Street Gang, who had once ruled and operated Manchester in the same way as the Krays had in London, had lost their power, taken over by a breed of new young drug dealers who mainly congregated in Manchester's Moss Side area.

This new breed of drug dealers were young (both Mark Coyle and Guigsy have witnessed or been threatened by eleven-year olds holding small automatic pistols), unprincipled, fearless and determined.

They soon took over Manchester's house scene and made a killing selling Ecstasy for enormous profits. Later on, they would flood Manchester with heroin and cocaine.

Noel initially resisted the house scene. His love was guitar music. He couldn't dance and he wasn't particularly conversant in any kind of black music. It was only when he moved down to London that he would be exposed to the likes of Lee Dorsey, Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye et al.

At his first visit to a Hacienda house night, Noel watched the crowd with a real detachment. He didn't understand the music, didn't understand why everyone was going mental on the dance floor. The next time he went, he took an Ecstasy pill and suddenly everything made sense.

This was easily the most powerful drug he had ever taken. As with his previous excursions with mushrooms or glue, the drug killed his guilt and shyness. But Ecstasy also attacked his anger. It made him far more open to people, less fearful or cynical about them.

Soon, he was dancing to the beat, albeit at the back of the club. By contrast, Liam hated the scene. All these kids dancing strangely with their bulging eyes and declarations of friendship (‘you're my best mate, you are') sickened him.

But Noel was unstoppable. He went to raves such as Live The Dream and Joy. He would travel down to London to attend sessions at the Spectrum club and he would see people such as Alan McGee or Jeff Barrett, The Happy Mondays press officer there.

Noel even put aside his guitar for a while as he totally immersed himself in house's primal beat and its anthemic choruses which, when heard while on Ecstasy, made you feel as though you were really fulfilling heaven's promise of love eternal. (Another facet of this music was the large productions most of these records displayed. One of Noel's favourite tracks from this period was ‘The 900 Number' by Mark The 45 King, a blistering mix of hip-hop beats and a wailing saxophone.)