Getting High (42 page)

‘”This country is all make-believe and we're smarter than that. What you've got is communication and it will rise above all that.” Anyway then we get in the cab and the driver starts on about UFOs.'

Now that Noel had started to talk about his feelings, Abbot felt free to start pointing out various factors. Like how America and its strange culture was all new to the other members.

‘Me and you,' he said, ‘we're old heads, but this is a band who've gone halfway around the world and they've never been out of the UK. Then they get to Los Angeles and it's Murder Mile because of the methedrine. I've seen it happen before with Primal Scream, I saw the methedrine madness around them. Look, America is bonkers but you can enjoy it.'

Later that night, they talked again, ‘about life, families, parents, school, music, the whole lot'.

Then Noel went for a shower and Abbot reached for the phone to call LA. Then he stopped himself. Enough was enough. He couldn't keep up the subterfuge.

‘Because if there's one thing about Noel,' he points out, ‘it's his absolute fucking honesty.'

When Noel re-appeared, Abbot told him he was going to call Marcus, tell him how things were. Noel said fine, and even spoke briefly with his manager to tell him he was all right. Then he handed the phone back to Abbot.

‘I said to Marcus, get all the troops on the coach and drive to Austin, Texas, 'cos we've got a studio booked and Owen Morris is due to fly in.'

The studio had been booked for the band to record B-sides for the single after ‘Whatever'.

‘That was three days away,' Abbot continues, ‘and I thought, we might be over the hump here.'

Abbot's hunch was proved correct the night he and Noel visited a casino, sat with their drinks waiting for a show to commence and then experienced the strangest thing.

‘This American woman,' Abbot recalls, ‘leant over and said to Noel, “Excuse me, but I must just say you are the spitting image of George Harrison, and my husband here, we've just got married, have a pact, it's written up, that I could be unfaithful with George Harrison, and you look just like him.”

‘I said to her, “Does that mean I've got your husband?”

Anyway, they joined us, they were probably in their late forties, and she'd seen every Beatles' concert in her hometown of Philadelphia and she had every Beatles' record and knew every song, and she was besotted by Noel. Then she asked him, “What do you do?”

‘He said,' Abbot states,' “Funnily enough, I'm in a band,” and then he caught himself, and said, “Well, I'm not sort of in it anymore,” and then he kind of pulled out and started complimenting the other side of America, the people who do appreciate, who do love music and how it affects them. Anyway, we got smashed with these people and swapped addresses, and she said, “When your band comes through Philadelphia why don't you come round, we'd love to come and see your show.” Noel said, “Yeah, I'll do that.”

‘And that was the watershed,' says Abbot, ‘because he'd really been touched by this complete stranger. I think he suddenly realised the power, how he could share his love for The Beatles and for music and that he had a thing he could do.

‘So I said to him, “I'll tell you what John Lennon would do. He'd go out on top with a final single. What you've gotta do is polish off the B-sides. So why don't we go to Austin?” He said, “I'll think about it.” Anyway, he slept on it and the next day, he went, “I've been thinking, shall we go to Austin?”'

Yes! Abbot quickly booked two flight tickets.

Funnily enough they arrived at Austin airport at exactly the same time as Owen Morris.

‘And that was pretty weird,' the producer remarks, “'cos I turned up at the airport and Tim was there with Noel. Noel was like, “How are you?” I went, “All right, funny meeting you here, where's the rest of the band?” Noel said, “Dunno, I've left the band. I want to do this session and that's it.”

‘So we arrived at this hotel and Noel went straight to his room. I went down to the bar and all the band were there. They were like, “Is he all right?” and I said, “It's all cool,” and started getting drunk with them. Then, about midnight, Noel came down and straight away it's all love and kisses, and Liam, more than anyone, is like, “Come here brother.” Guigs and Bonehead were made up and it was all hunky dory.'

The next day, Oasis were back doing what they did best, playing music.

The first track they recorded was ‘(It's Good) To Be Free', a song that pitted, to great effect, Noel's insidious guitar riffs against Bonehead's electric piano. It was then wrapped in that powerful, unremitting and now-familiar Oasis sound.

They started about midday and by ten that night they had a rough mix of it. They put the music down first, so Liam stayed at the hotel. No way was he going to sit around waiting hours to do his vocal.

‘And this session,' Owen recalls, ‘is when it really started to kick in with Tony McCarroll. Noel was in this booth by himself and he had a microphone shouting instructions to the rest of the band. Tony didn't play it right the first time, second time, third time.

‘He got it right in about six goes and Noel was really getting annoyed at him, saying things like, “If you don't get this right I'm gonna come out of here and kick your head in.” Eventually, he got the rhythm down and the rest of the band played their parts with Noel playing some amazing lead guitar. He was on this demented coke trip from the week before.

‘The next day, at about ten in the morning, we did “Talk Tonight”. Noel was still writing it but we did• it in about two hours. He just wrote it and sang it and that's one of the best recordings. Amazing feel on it, totally brilliant.

‘Then the rest of the band turned up and Noel was like, “Ha ha, we've already recorded the track without you wankers.”

‘Then we did “Half The World Away”, which has got that shuffling drumbeat on it and Noel said to Tony, “You aren't going near the drum kit on this one. Fuck off, right now.” So Noel played the drums on that.

‘Then I flew back to Britain the next day to start on The Verve album. The session was good, but very weird, very strange, that whole Tony vibe was very unpleasant.'

Both ‘Half The World Away' and ‘Talk Tonight' are major songs and beautifully realised statements. Noel started the latter in San Francisco and completed it in Austin before then writing 'Half The World Away'. For this song, Noel inverted the chords to Burt Bacharach's ‘This Guy's In Love With You', added an electric piano which echoed that song's theme, and in doing so produced an affecting ballad that would act as a poignant diary to his then emotional state: 'And when I leave this planet / You know I'd stay but I just can't stand it / And I can feel the warning signs/ Running around my head.'

The themes of escape, panic and faraway loneliness are present also in the haunting ‘Talk Tonight'. This time Noel is a thousand million miles from home, sitting on his own, although there is still the Burnage boy inside reminding him of his luck:

‘Sleeping on a plane/ You know you can't complain.'

It's a fair bet, too, that when he wrote lines such as ‘You take me walking / To where you played when you were young,' and ‘I landed, stranded / I hardly even knew your name,' Noel had the woman from the Las Vegas casino in his mind, remembering her vivid teenage Beatle stories and, just as Abbot had noted, reminding himself of his initial impetus and the healing power of music. Now, he was thanking her as best he knew how, that is, in a song.

The American tour started up again on 14 October at the Uptown Bar in Minneapolis, the night Quentin Tarantino's film,
Pulp Fiction
, opened for business. Then it was Chicago on the 15th, Detroit on the 16th and Cleveland on the 18th.

At their Canadian debut, on the 18th at Lee's Palace in Toronto, Patsy Kensit turned up to see Oasis for the first time. Her friend, Simon Halfon, a British sleeve designer who was living in the US at the time, had urged her to go and she duly attended, although it was some time before her and Liam got together.

Then it was down to the Local 186 in Allston the following night and forward then to Met' s Cafe in Providence. The next show, the 9.30 club in Washington was, Marcus says, ‘a really rough gig', and the band moved quickly out to finish the tour with two dates, one at Maxwell's in Hoboken, the birthplace of Frank Sinatra, the first American pop star to be screamed at, and then concluding at Wetlands in New York, where key Epic employees, who had been informed of the bust-up in Los Angeles, attended the concert with some trepidation.

‘It was an amazing gig,' Marcus states, ‘one of the very, very few times they've ever done an encore which is an indicator of how good they felt for that tour, because they had got through it.

‘By the end of that tour, which was the longest they'd ever done, they really were playing with a packed punch and the record company knew it had gone off the rails, and three weeks later we turn up in New York, and what they got was a mega rock ‘n' roll band. It just added to the whole thing of who Oasis are.'

In between the furore in Los Angeles and the restart in Minneapolis, the new single, ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol', was released in the UK on 10 October. It came with the live version of ‘I Am The Walrus' (attributed to the Cathouse in Glasgow), ‘Listen Up', another real gem, plus the punk-style ‘Fade Away'.

It scooted into the charts at number seven and the accompanying video was easily their best yet. With the band looking both menacing and wasted, and with a bevy of similarly emaciated and trance-like models waiting for them in the dressing-room, this film updated the sex, rock ‘n' roll and drugs culture, and placed it right in the middle of the 1990s. It was an old story told in new hands, and it brilliantly served its purpose. Now a million young men wanted to be in Oasis and a million young girls dreamt about getting their hands on them.

But there was no breathing space for the band. On now to Europe and four dates in France, starting on 3 November in Lille, then shows in Paris, Lyon and Marseille.

After the Paris show, which took place with lesser British talents at the Les Inrockutibles Festival, Liam was accused by Simone Foerst, deputy manager of the Amiral Duperre hotel, of being discovered ‘urinating in a corridor', a charge he denies to this day, saying that a Gallagher was caught but it wasn't him. Or his brother.

The next morning it was discovered that Noel had gone missing. He was tracked down by the band's security guard, Ian Robertson, who two years later would be sacked after an altercation with Liam, and who would then write a book about Oasis.

Between the 6th and the 16th of November, Oasis were in Britain. On the 9th, Noel attended the Q Awards at the Park Lane Hotel. Oasis had won the Best New Act category. His acceptance speech was brief and to the point. He told the audience, which also included the Labour Party leader, Tony Blair, ‘To the readers – I'd just like to applaud your wisdom. Thanks.' As he went back to his seat he was still trying to work out how
Definitely Maybe
had lost the Best LP award to the new Blur album
Parklife
, but he was photographed with Damon Albarn and spoke cordially to him.

At the same time, Noel had started a relationship with MTV presenter Rebecca de Ruvo, whom the
Daily Mirror
would describe as ‘a leggy blonde', despite her small stature.

Noel had met her in New York through Evan Dando and he later discovered that Rebecca shared a ground-floor flat in Maida Vale with two other girls. There was Kadamba, an actress who would later have a fling with Liam, and footballer Matthew Le Tissier's cousin, Meg Matthews, then running Flavor, a DJ booking agency she had set up with her friend Karl Castillo.

Noel first met Meg that terrible day in November when Manchester United caned Manchester City 5-0, and Noel sat with Tim Abbot in the Landmark Hotel as miserable as sin. What made it even worse was that City hadn't scored a goal, not like United who had at least managed one against City on the happiest day of Noel's life.

Abbot gloated, and Noel regularly snapped, ‘If you say one more thing I'm going to kick you out of this room.'

The room, Meg recalls, was a tip, a rock ‘n' roll bedroom. She had accompanied Rebecca and Kadamba to see Noel and remembered ‘things being strewn everywhere, a complete mess with his Q Award on top of the TV. I think his bill came to something like five grand, and that was just his drinks tab.'

Her first impression of Noel was ‘friendly and quiet, a nice guy. I didn't feel anything for him but they were doing a gig in Amsterdam about a week later and Tim was going to me, ‘You've got to come to the gig with Rebecca.” But Rebecca wanted to go to the MTV Awards so me and Kadamba went to Amsterdam.'

On the 16th, Oasis kicked back into life again with three dates in Sweden, followed by four German concerts before the band returned to Amsterdam.

It was on this tour that Liam was spotted in a Swedish service station stealing a bag of plastic razors. Their total value was somewhere in the region of £1.50. He was caught by two policemen as he tried to board the coach and ceremoniously frogmarched back to the shop to hand them over. The incident made the front-page of the papers the next day.

Afterwards, on the coach, Liam firmly blamed Noel for the incident.

‘How the fuck can it be my fault?' Noel demanded. ‘How do you manage to shift the blame on to me? Tell us, I really want to know.'

Liam looked at his brother. ‘It's your fucking fault because it was you who showed me where the razors were. You pointed them out to me.'

‘But I didn't say steal them, did I?'

‘Nah, but I didn't have any money.'

‘So why didn't you ask to borrow some?'

‘You should have known that I would have to borrow some. But because you didn't lend me any and you showed me where they were then it's your fault I tried to steal them.'