Getting High (33 page)

Despite his absence, McGee insisted on being involved in Oasis, even if it was at a distance. Therefore, he was totally supportive of the band's decision to scrap the Mono Valley sessions, replace Dave Batchelor with Mark Coyle and go to the Sawmills Studio in Cornwall to re-record the album.

The decision was taken back in London. After Mono Valley, the band had gone to the Olympic Studios in Barnes, London, to mix the album. This was the studio where The Rolling Stones and The Small Faces had produced some of their best work. But it quickly became apparent that it was a fruitless exercise. The only track to survive these sessions was ‘Slide Away', one of Noel's finest compositions, bolstered by one of Liam's most stirring vocal performances, apparently recorded in just one take. They also spent wasted time in Eden Studios, Chiswick, opposite Noel's flat. With Coyley now producing and with a new engineer, Anjali Dutt, on board, the band decamped to the Sawmills studios in Cornwall. This time, Oasis were recorded live and the sessions went quickly and smoothly.

But when it came to mixing the album in Chiswick, again they ran into problems: the tapes still didn't sound right. The sound Oasis were after still eluded them. As they now had a string of dates corning up, it was left to Marcus to sort out.

‘What came out of the Sawmills in recording terms was good,' he states, ‘but when it came to the mixing stage, it wasn't happening.'

‘I think Mark and Anjali were too close to the tapes to mix them, which is quite often the case. The person that records it can't mix it, they're too involved with what went on the tape in the first place. And that's where Owen Morris came in.

‘I knew Owen wasn't just an engineer,' Marcus continues, ‘although he wasn't a producer at the time. I knew him well enough to know that he isn't someone who just pushes the buttons but that he's got ideas and the guts to suggest them. Plus he's very good at dealing with musicians.'

It was an astute choice. One of Owen's all-time heroes is the producer Phil Spector, the man who created the Wall Of Sound. Spector' s emphasis on volume and his penchant for having as many instruments as possible playing, was to play a massive influence on Owen's work. And now here come Oasis desperate to achieve a huge sound. The chemistry could not have been bettered.

Owen was also a huge admirer of the producer, Tony Visconti, who had worked with David Bowie in the early 1970s, the start of Bowie's golden years as the most influential musician in Britain. Noel wasn't really
au fait
with Spector but he loved Bowie's work from 1972, starting with the
Hunky Dory
album through to 1975 and the
Young Americans
LP.

In this period, Bowie also wrote one of Noel's favourite songs, ‘All The Young Dudes', which he then gave to Mott The Hoople. Owen loved that record as well. He remembered it well from his youth.

Owen Morris was born in Caernafon, North Wales, but had spent his childhood near the town of Port Talbot in South Wales. He dropped out of school during his A-levels and found a job working in a Cambridge studio called Spaceward. It was there that he had met Marcus when he was managing The Bible.

Owen stayed there for nearly three years and then went to work on a Stranglers album that never saw the light of day. After that discouraging experience he asked Marcus to manage him. He was tired of engineering and he very much wanted to move into producing.

Through Marcus, he engineered the first Electronic album, the project started by Johnny Marr and Bernard Sumner from New Order. But after two years of working with Marr, Owen, frustrated at not being able to move into the producer's chair, ditched Marcus as a manager. A year later he had a huge falling out with Marr.

Owen had seen Oasis play at the Boardwalk in November 1992, and so when he heard they were signed to Creation and about to enter the studio he applied and was turned down for the producer's job.

Now Marcus, who he had retained friendly relations with, was on the line asking him to come in and mix Oasis. Naturally, he accepted. Marcus then sent him the Sawmills tapes and Owen realised he had a job on his hands.

‘I just thought, fucking hell, they've made a real fuck-up here and I guessed at that stage that Noel was completely fucked off. Marcus was like, you can do what you want with it, literally, whatever you want.'

Owen's first move was to book two days in the Loco studio in Wales to pre-record Liam's vocals on ‘Rock ‘n' Roll Star' and ‘Columbia'.

It was here that he first met Liam. ‘Liam's version of events,' Owen states, ‘is that he came in and said to me, “You're Phil Spector,” and I said to him, “You're John Lennon.” I don't know if that's true, but I do remember Noel shouting at Liam, “You are not fucking John Lennon and he is not Phil fucking Spector, now just shut the fuck up and get on with it.”

‘Those two mixes,' Morris admits, ‘are total Spector and Visconti rip-offs. I just got out the Phil Spector tape-delays and used Tony Visconti harmonising tricks, and they're like total hats-off to those two.'

According to Morris, one of the problems was Noel's prolific nature. He had been allowed to put too much into the songs, filling up his compositions with numerous different guitar parts.

‘But there was no cohesive thought to it,' Owen says, ‘So I remember when I mixed “Rock ‘n' Roll Star” I dumped about half the guitars, arranged them differently and then put a Phil Spector-style tambourine on the snare drums.

‘Then I thought, Noel is going to freak out now because I've just wiped about half of his guitars off.'

He called Noel into the studio and nervously played him the mix. After intently listening, Noel turned to the sweating producer and said, ‘I like that tambourine.'

A relieved Morris then repeated this method with ‘Columbia', stripping it down and again eliciting a casual but positive response from Noel.

‘Very, very strange having so little feedback apart from, “Yeah, it's good,”' notes Morris.

Noel's nonchalant attitude disguised his shyness, but also he knew that to go overboard with congratulations leads to complacency. The best compliment he could give Owen was to ask him to finish the album. In reality, everyone was, in Marcus's words, ‘ecstatic' about his mixes. At last, the sound that Noel had heard raging in his head all these years was coming to fruition.

Over the May bank holiday weekend, Owen entered Matrix Studios in Fulham, London, and mixed
Definitely Maybe
. He worked incredibly fast, mixing a song a day, which is an impressive pace to maintain in anyone's books. He was helped no end by Marcus, who would come to the studio every day laden with bottles of the producer's favourite red wines and various constructive comments.

The only mix that was met with any disapproval was Owen's first mix of ‘Live Forever', where Owen had wiped off Noel's guitar solo.

‘You're fucking joking,' the songwriter cried when he heard it, ‘I spent months working that fucker out.'

As
Definitely Maybe
came together Oasis travelled up to Scotland to play a Sony Records convention at the Gleneagles Golf club.

On arriving, Noel went to the bar and asked for some drinks. After being told to put his money away as everything was free, he said to the barmaid, ‘Well, if that's the case what's the most expensive drink you've got?'

The barmaid turned around and said, ‘Those bottles of brandy which are a grand apiece.'

‘Right,' Noel said, ‘I'll have half a pint of that and one of these big cigars, please.'

Meanwhile, Liam was upstairs complaining that his room was too big. It was a foretaste of what was to come.

The next day the band got up early, but the conference was running behind schedule, so they put Noel, Liam and Marcus into a hospitality suite.

Mistake. The trio sat in a room with a waitress and ordered drink after drink. Then Noel had an idea. He phoned up press officer Johnny Hopkins and told him that Bonehead had broken into the lodge of the legendary racing driver, Jackie Stewart, stolen an air rifle and was now out on the golf course shooting at trees.

‘It's true,' the songwriter insisted, ‘I'm watching him right now.'

Hopkins duly reported this information to the press, and
Melody Maker
ran with it the next week, under the headline ‘Oasis Gun Drama', thus further adding to the growing Oasis mythology.

Eventually the band were called for a soundcheck. But by now, they were smashed out of their heads. In fact, Noel had to lean against his amps just to keep his balance.

Even so, that didn't prevent them from producing a magnificent version of ‘I Am The Walrus', which they later placed, after it had appeared on a limited white-label edition, on the B-side of ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol'. The applause at the end is sampled from another artist's live album. The night ended at eight in the morning with Marcus roaming down the corridors singing Welsh songs and eventually having to be helped on to the plane home by Noel.

In February, Oasis were given their first foreign date, the Paradiso Club in Amsterdam. They never made it. The band, with Coyley and Jason in tow, boarded a coach in Manchester at midday and quickly consumed two bottles of Jack Daniels. Then they stopped off to get another bottle before finally boarding the ferry.

Once on board, they headed straight for the bar. They also located the duty' free shop where they started stealing bottles of champagne which they then openly consumed back in the bar.

The upshot of all this drunken mayhem was that the security guards were called and the band decided it was best to split for their bedrooms.

As Guigsy and Liam drunkenly walked down a corridor, trying to locate their room, Guigsy heard a noise, turned and saw a guard coming out of a side door about to use his truncheon on the unsuspecting Liam. Without any hesitation, Guigsy punched the guy. From nowhere, eight guards suddenly appeared and piled into him. Liam, then made a bolt for the stairs.

Guigsy was hauled downstairs, roughed up and thrown into the brig. About five minutes later he heard loud noises coming from the corridor and sure enough, here's Liam shouting that the guards have thrown him down three flights of stairs and if he's going into a cell they better not have any sexual desires for him.

The boys were incarcerated for the next twenty-four hours, left, locked up, without food or drink, dehydrating like crazy. One of the guards, a big mean-looking man, even drew a chalk line in Liam's cell and told the singer to lie down with his nose resting on it. If he moved over the line, he promised to attack Liam with his truncheon. Liam lay on the ground for three hours before the guard finally gave up watching him. Meanwhile, a guard entered Bonehead and McCarroll's room and confiscated their passports. They would not be let into the country.

As the bassist and singer languished in the cells, the boat docked in Holland and Noel and the rest of the Oasis crew disembarked only to find out hours later that all four band members were now heading back to England.

The gig was cancelled and Marcus was informed of the incident. He then called a band meeting at which Liam defended himself by saying that it was proper rock ‘n' roll behaviour.

‘No,' Marcus vehemently said, ‘playing to 300 people in Amsterdam is proper rock ‘n' roll behaviour, not getting arrested so no one can hear your music.'

Noel was furious too, and had been the first to give Guigsy and Liam an angry lecture. Even Bonehead was upset by their behaviour. For two weeks they were blanked by the rest of the band, and the guard that Guigsy had hit was paid £1,000 not to press charges.

In March, Oasis made their first national TV appearance. Karen Williams at Anglo Plugging had secured them a booking on Channel Four's
The Word
to promote their first single ‘Supersonic', a full month before its release.

McGee had actually argued for ‘Bring It On Down' to be Oasis's first shot at the single chart, but Noel had firmly resisted the idea. As his contract gave him artistic freedom, McGee backed down.

For their TV debut, late on a Friday night, Noel wore a red shirt and no shades. Liam sported a flight jacket, Bonehead a green cord jacket and Guigsy a burgundy jumper. Presenter Mark Lamarr introduced the band and Oasis ditched the song's intro and went straight into the first verse.

They didn't smile or really acknowledge the cameras, although during the third verse Liam whipped out his own Hi 8 camcorder and started filming the audience. At the end of the song, he said, ‘Cheers, goodnight,' and sauntered off the stage as Noel bent down by his amps to extract a few seconds of feedback.

‘Woops, bit of feedback there,' said a smiling Terry Christian who, two years later, would co-author a book about the Gallagher family with Noel's and Liam's older brother Paul.

This TV appearance went some way towards capturing the band's prowess as a live act, and served to whet everyone's appetite. It was patiently clear that Oasis had something that placed them well above their contemporaries. The sound, the look, the attitude, it intrigued and excited onlookers.

With that in mind, Oasis again took to the road, this time with Whiteout, who had just signed to Silvertone Records, The Stone Roses' old record label. The idea was that both bands would headline every other night. They started in Bedford on 23 March. Oasis played first, and the next day they all travelled up to London to play the 100 Club where Oasis now headlined the gig.

Ted Kessler wrote in the
NME
of their performance: ‘At times tonight Oasis assumed the mantle of Best Live Band in the country with joyous arrogant Mancunian confidence. They may never be this good again...'

The tour moved on to the Forum in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, this was 26 March, and then the Oxford Polytechnic where Oasis stole a television out of their hotel so that they could watch Manchester United play Aston Villa while at the gig. Villa won and Coyley kicked the television to pieces in disgust.