Getting High (50 page)

And so it continued.

‘A wasted opportunity if you're being generous,' wrote David Cavanagh in
Q
. ‘A shot in the foot if you want to be more melodramatic.'

The most favourable reviews were to be found in the quality newspapers such as the
Independent
and the
Guardian
. Marcus also pointed out to the band that the UK reviews were more than nullified by the rave notices that had started to pour in from Europe.

The band were surprised by the reaction. All five of them had been playing nothing but the album songs for weeks and they were sharp enough to know what was good and what didn't work. It would only be Liam, later on, who would point out that their fast recording pace sometimes left songs feeling too rushed or, worse, made them miss opportunities to play and sing them better.

It was generally agreed that for the next album they would take their time, but they still harboured few doubts about
Morning Glory
. They were immensely excited about it. Indeed, Bonehead had got himself barred from the Swiss Cottage Hotel when he climbed up on to the roof in the early hours and blasted it out for all the residents to hear.

He was staying in London because Oasis were back in the studio, continuing from where they had left off on the Sunday to record two new songs as B-sides. They were ‘Round Are Way' and ‘The Masterplan'.

After the basic recording had finished, Liam, Alan White and Guigsy then travelled to Paris to conduct interviews whilst Noel stayed with Owen in the studio mixing the songs.

Security guard Ian Robertson accompanied them. It was here that he and Liam clashed really badly, when he entered the singer's room to drag him out to a press conference. As Liam had company, he didn't take too kindly to the intrusion. All day, he brooded over Robbo, as he was known.

‘All I know,' Guigsy says, ‘is that later on I was in this bar doing an interview. It was about ten at night and Liam started kicking up about something. So he got off and as he walked by, he was like, “You can fuck off as well, dickhead.”

‘Then about three hours later he comes back in going, “You fucking dicks,” and he's got a coat on but no shirt. His coat was open and he was bare chested and he's going, “You fucking dicks, fucking nobs,” so I just got off. I was like, “I'm going home, I'm not doing any press.” So the next morning, I refused to do any more interviews and went home.'

About a week later, Liam called Guigsy and apologised. Ian Robertson, meanwhile, had been relieved of his duties.

‘I spoke to Noel about it,' he said, ‘and Noel said, “I agree with you but he's my brother.” I have to go with him. And that was that.'

After completing their work at Maison Rouge, the band then started rehearsals at Brixton Academy for the upcoming UK tour. The call was for five that evening but by seven o'clock, Guigsy had failed to show. The band were used to late appearances but that was usually Liam's forte. Guigsy was the solid one, the guy who swept up behind them, who remained in the background with his big spliffs but kept a careful eye on everything. He totally understood the band's psychology, knew their character traits. It was him who could calm a situation, cool down tempers. It was Guigsy who could sit there and faithfully predict how someone was going to react at least five minutes before they did. It was Guigsy, good old dependable Guigsy with his laid-back demeanour, and his encyclopaedic knowledge and passion for football, his wisecracks, and an ability to find flaws in people's arguments and gently pull them apart, who acted as a real antidote to the mayhem. But cross him or the band just once and then his temper would flare and he would defend his friends, his family to the last, just as he had done on the ferry to Amsterdam.

And while everyone had been waiting for either Noel or Liam to crumble under the stress of their complex, fiery relationship, it was Guigsy who woke up on the first day of rehearsal and literally couldn't drag himself out of bed. His body had given up on him. His nerves were shot right through. Every time he even thought about a bass guitar a feeling of abject sickness erupted in his stomach.

He stayed in bed, closed his eyes and slept for twenty hours straight. Then he went round to Marcus's house. It was Friday. Guigsy told him, ‘Look, if I can't get out of bed I can't tour, therefore I can't be in the band so you'll have to get someone else.'

At first, Marcus thought he was severely hungover.

‘No, no,' Guigsy insisted, ‘You don't understand. I can't physically do it. It's not that I don't want to be in the band, I literally can't be in the band.'

Then he left to see a doctor and Oasis were forced to handle another major crisis.

Late that night, as they lay in their beds, they heard the words on the wind creeping through their windows and into their minds, telling each and every one of them, that they were finished now, the game was over. Now they would slowly descend to whence they came and they would do so with the eyes of the world upon them. As they listened, their collective fists clenched tighter and tighter.

By their own admission, they had completely taken their eyes off Guigsy. Maybe alarm bells should have gone off the day Alan White joined and he saw the bassist badly shaking as he lifted the glass to his mouth. Or maybe they should have taken more time out.

‘There was hardly any daylight between the
Definitely Maybe
campaign and the
Morning Glory
campaign,' Marcus admits. ‘I knew that, but that was part of the whole thing, to get across that this band was a phenomenon and not just some band putting albums out now and again. And Guigsy wasn't ready in his mind to go out full-on as you have to be to do it. And he had enough guts to come round and tell me.'

The focus will always be on Noel and Liam. Those are the two that people look out for, keep their eyes upon. They are also the ones that the media make a bee line for, rushing past the others to get to the source.

Guigsy, Bonehead and Alan White never had a problem with that. For them, just to be part of such an important band, their names now enshrined in musical history, was enough. They each knew their worth and what they brought to the table. They knew that they were working with an exceptional songwriter and a unique singer.

In tow with these two, they had travelled the world now, experienced life to the full, gained financial security and made homes with their loved ones.

Guigsy, by his own admission, will tell you, ‘I am not a great bass player but somehow my playing fits into this band and that's how it is.'

But now his body had failed him. On the first day of rehearsals, it refused to move. On the second day, he went to the doctor's. It was important that he did so. Unless Oasis supplied a genuine doctor's certificate, they would be liable for thousands of pounds by cancelling the tour.

‘I had this disease,' Guigsy reveals, ‘where it means you've got no radiator in your system, there's no cooling system. It's something that you're born with. It means your blood pressure goes up and up and up, and it just stays there, it doesn't come back down.

‘So doing things like cocaine, sends it further up until your body can't take it anymore. Your body's working too fast inside and you just crumble. Which is basically what happened. But it took some time to find out.'

With Ruth and his family away in Manchester, after being examined Guigsy travelled North to spend time alone in the house he had grown up in. Since gaining success, he had been pleading with his mum to move to new accommodation, an area where nobody knew what her son did for a living. The house had already been burgled once. But all they took was a selection of Guigsy's CDs. Weird. But it was a pointer, he would tell his mum, of what was to come. Teresa McGuigan stood firm. I'll move if I want to, she said.

Guigsy spent a couple of days in the house, totally alone. Then he returned to London.

‘I basically chilled out,' he says, ‘I didn't speak to hardly anyone, didn't go out, didn't leave the house except to have loads of blood tests, went to about four of five different doctors, urine tests, hair tests, I had everything until they finally diagnosed me. Then once they found out what was wrong, they prescribed me these tablets and it was proper way-hey the very next day. Everything was back to normal.'

But the cure wasn't really so immediate. As Guigsy slowly healed, Oasis moved the tour back a month and then sat down to work out a temporary replacement. Alan White suggested using Julian Taylor from his old band Star Club. But Liam wasn't having that.

‘He's got to be from Manchester,' he stated, ‘Can't have any more cocknees in the group. No offence, Alan, but you know what I mean.'

Eventually, they decided to approach Scott Mcleod of The Ya Ya's. He agreed to join on a temporary basis and rehearsals finally got underway at John Henry's studio. During this period, Liam and Noel also attended a birthday party in King's Cross for James Brown, editor of
Loaded
magazine.

Everybody had a drink, everybody had a line, everybody had a good time. But as they were leaving, one of the guys on the door called Liam a dickhead. Before even he could react, Noel was upon him.

‘Don't you ever call my brother that,' he roared. And then the two brothers laid into him before exiting and going their very separate ways.

On 12 September 1995 Oasis attended the Mercury Awards at London's Savoy Hotel. They didn't win but part of the ceremony involved every nominated artist receiving a plaque and making a speech.

Noel stood on-stage and said he'd like to thank... then he read the menu out. Liam said, ‘I'd like to thank myself', and Noel added, ‘all six of him'.

In Europe, MTV ran part of the interview they had conducted with Noel in July. This included his acoustic rendering of ‘Don't Look Back In Anger'. Noel ended the song and said, ‘Better than Blur any day'.

It now felt like the world was dividing itself into two camps, Oasis or Blur. In football, there was Cantona (Oasis) or Shearer (Blur). In snooker, Ronnie O'Sullivan (Oasis) or Stephen Hendry (Blur).

But perhaps the best example of this was Irvine Welsh's
Trainspotting
novel which was now selling at a phenomenal pace, the first time in ages that an authentic British working-class writer had smashed his way into the smug literary world, making no secret of his roots or his pure 1990s lifestyle.

If Irvine's outlook was Oasis, then the other recent publishing success, Nick Hornby with his two books
Fever Pitch
and
High Fidelity
was Blur.

Noel would meet Irvine Welsh the following year at the Cannes Film Festival where
Trainspotting
, the film of the book was being shown. Noel and Meg hung out all night with the Scottish writer who, every twenty minutes or so, would grab the Oasis man and roar, ‘I knew you'd be a good bloke, Noel, I knew it, you wee fucker.'

Irvine's huge success would slightly open the gates for other like-minded writers, such as John King and his
The Football Factory
novel, in precisely the same way that Oasis now had A&R men scurrying around towns desperate to sign the ‘new Oasis'.

Again, there were parallels with the 1960s. Just as many of the major groups socialised together then and made various guest appearances on each other's records, so many of the new 1990s groups forged a similarly healthy relationship. Most groups didn't see each other as rivals but as complementing each other.

Indeed, after their Irvine Beach show, Noel imagined people such as Primal Scream, Weller, Ocean Colour Scene and Cast all releasing albums on the same day and advertising the fact by being photographed together holding up each other's albums. He was also keen to host a huge open-air concert and call it Mods In The Park.

The success of Oasis had also introduced other elements into the culture. Now, instead of things being ‘wicked', they were ‘top'. People you didn't like were ‘dickheads', and you were ‘arsed' about things you didn't care about.

Hedonism, drugs, Mods, scooters, The Beatles, again and again, the echo of the 1960s provided the underlay for 1990s pop culture. The only difference was economic. Most teenagers had money in the 1960s; in the 1990s, British society was characterised by the huge and ever-increasing gulf between rich and poor. The latter had to withstand, among many things, attacks on free medicine, social security and council housing. This laid the conditions for what the Right-wing termed as the underclass, the poorest of the poor. In one of their earliest recordings ‘Bring It On Down' Oasis firmly represented the latter.

To that end Noel publicly supported the Labour leader, Tony Blair, bringing to mind the relationship that existed between The Beatles and Harold Wilson, the then Prime Minister.

Noel met Blair at the Q Awards and was astonished when the Labour leader informed him that he listened to the first Oasis album on his way to work by car.

In football, the 1960s were also brought to mind when England hosted the Euro ‘96 competition. In June 1996 at Wembley, England would again outplay Germany, just as they had done thirty years previously, but this time they would sleep with defeat in their mouths.

But Oasis wouldn't.
(What's The Story) Morning Glory?
, despite the reviews, smashed its way straight in at number one, the week their UK tour finished. Oasis had played Blackpool, Stoke, Bournemouth and Gloucester. Vital Distribution reported that an extra 150,000 copies had been ordered by shops in the first week, topping up the 400,000 that were originally sent out.

On 10 October, Oasis left for yet another US tour. There were signs now that America was starting to move their way a little. In its first week of release
Morning Glory
had sold some 250,000 copies in the US, an encouraging sign.

Also, the industry publication
Music Week
had just held a US radio workshop in London's Hurlingham Club. Eight of the most prominent radio planners in the States were played one track each from new successful UK bands. The playlist included, Supergrass, Blur, Pulp, Black Grape and Oasis.