Getting High (55 page)

In central London, the car got caught up in traffic. At one point, it stopped by a huge advert for Blur's
The Great Escape
album.

Noel looked over at it and said, ‘I heard the other day that the album isn't selling as well as they want it to. Serves their record company right, fucking around with the
Help
album like that. It's their karma.'

Noel was referring to EMI's bid to have the
Help
album registered in the charts as a compilation album and not as a proper LP. EMI had lodged a complaint with the BPI three days before the album's release. A storm of criticism hit them within hours of the news. EMI then withdrew their complaint. But it was too late. The BPI had voted in EMI's favour and wouldn't rescind their decision.

The album would now only show in the compilation charts and not the more influential main LP chart. As
Help
was being released the same week as Blur's record, many people had been putting two and two together.

Noel looked at the poster and kissed his teeth in disgust. The Rolls silently moved away.

The next day, for the first time, it was reported in one of the tabloids that Liam had been seen on a night out with Patsy Kensit.

A few days later, the band travelled to Germany for four gigs. Marcus stayed behind to arrange the Maine Road shows and further negotiate another concert, Oasis headlining at Slane Castle in Ireland.

The next day the
NME
carried this information in their news pages and Channel Four's Teletext service reported that seven Oasis singles were in the Irish top forty and that
Morning Glory
had re-entered their LP chart at number one. The magic showed no sign of weakening.

At their first German concert, the Music Centre in Utrecht, the band were forced to cut short the set when Liam's voice started to fade. A section of the crowd reacted badly and started to smash up the hall. The band, now safely ensconced in their dressing-room, watched the proceedings on closed-circuit TV.

‘Go on, my son,' Noel said, watching a fan hurl a chair in the air.

‘You want to watch out, Noel,' Guigsy said. ‘That's your amp that geezer's going for.'

‘Give a shit,' Noel replied.

The band then travelled to Munich. Much to Noel's, Liam's and Guigsy's delight, the aircraft hangar they were playing in was situated on the same runway that the aeroplane carrying the 1958 Manchester United squad had crashed on, wiping out eight players.

At the gig that night, Liam came on-stage and kept shouting ‘Muu-nich, Muu-nich, Muu-nich' into his microphone for about two minutes. The crowd roared back thinking he was saluting them. Not so. This was the chant used by City fans to seriously distress their hated United rivals and Liam couldn't resist the opportunity.

The band also bought a pile of postcards that depicted the airport and sent them back to Mark Coyle, a fervent United fan.

When Coyley received the first card, he thought, that's cool, the band sending me a card. Nice. When the fourth one came through the wind-up became apparent. He was left to grind his teeth in fury.

The band moved on. They played Huxley's in Berlin, where Liam and Bonehead were interviewed by MTV. Noel gave his security guys the slip and visited Berlin Zoo. He figured he wouldn't be recognised and could relax for a couple of hours. Wrong. A group of visiting British school-children spotted him. He spent the next half-hour signing autographs.

The next day they travelled back to Britain by coach and ferry. Noel had stayed up all night and was comatose by the time they reached the border.

Roger, Bonehead's and Whitey's roadie, woke him up. ‘Noel, have you got any drugs on you?'

‘Sure,' Noel sleepily replied, fiddling in his pocket. ‘Rack me out a line as well.'

‘No, you idiot, get rid of them. We're at the border.'

They arrived back in London late afternoon. Noel picked up Meg and then they travelled over to Julie's restaurant in Holland Park for Kate Moss's birthday party.

A gaggle of reporters were waiting outside, having been tipped off to the event. Noel and Meg breezed past them and into the restaurant where everyone had just finished eating.

They ordered Jack Daniels and coke and fell into conversation with Kate and her boyfriend, actor Johnny Depp, about the last time they had met. This had been about a month earlier when the band played a surprise concert at his LA club, The Viper Room.

‘What did people think of the gig we did?' Noel asked Johnny.

‘Ah, man, people were buzzing after that show.'

‘Do you remember,' Noel said, ‘how we'd been up all night and you asked us to play and we were all, “Yeah, we'll have some of that?” Well, when I went to bed, about ten in the morning, I thought, nah, everyone's too smashed to remember when we wake up. There'll be no gig.

‘So I go to sleep, wake up, turn on the radio and there's this geezer going, “And tonight at The Viper Room, Oasis will be playing a special concert.” I thought, oh shit.'

Depp smiled. ‘That was your brother. I said to him, “We can keep this a dead secret or we can advertise it in which case there will be chaos.” Liam just went, “Chaos, let's have some chaos.”'

‘Tell me about it,' Noel said. ‘I turned up and it took me about half an hour to get in. I was going to the bouncer on the door, “I'm in the band,” and he was going, “Yeah, you and million others, mate. Now get to the back.”'

After the party Kate, Jess, Meg, Noel and a few others went back to Paul Simonon' s flat. Simonon, once the bassist in The Clash, and his wife Tricia had a child and a spacious apartment in Ladbroke Grove.

As they played old Dubliners' records, Noel sang along to all of them. Then he and Meg gave Kate her present, an exclusive four-CD set of Burt Bacharach songs. They had been released to influential music figures only and just a few sets had been pressed up.

They put the CDs on. When ‘This Guy's In Love With You' came on, Noel with his arm around Meg and sitting on the sofa, sang the song to her.

There had to be some bad news soon. Just had to be. It couldn't last like this. Life in the world of Oasis could never be smooth. If it was, then that's when you'd have to seriously start thinking about jacking it in.

In January, it was announced that Tony McCarroll would be suing the band for half a million pounds. His dismissal, he claimed, wasn't due to his lack of ability but simply because Noel Gallagher disliked him. When Oasis's lawyer looked into the matter he discovered some bad news. When McCarroll left the band, the record contract that he had signed with the other four members hadn't been re-negotiated or the partnership dissolved. Therefore, the claim couldn't be ignored.

Meanwhile, Oasis were in Germany, playing Utrecht on the 10th, Munich (‘Muu-nich!') on the 12th, Berlin on the 14th, Bielefeld on the 15th. They were annoyed that McCarroll was still haunting them, but any anger was softened by the news from America.

‘Wonderwall' had started selling and that in turn had massively boosted the sales for
Morning Glory
. Both records now looked like entering their respective US charts. The band's forthcoming US tour, starting in late February, could only help matters.

Oasis now returned to play three UK gigs, one at Whitley Bay and two at Edinburgh's Ingliston Exhibition Centre. On the second night, after support band Ocean Colour Scene's set, the PA piped through producer Brendan Lynch's remix of ‘Champagne Supernova', another one-off twelve-inch record designed for the clubs.

Liam, the purist, was standing on-stage with Guigsy and Bonehead at the time and when he heard the mix he started shouting at them, ‘I fucking hate these records. It's not Oasis, it doesn't suit us. They're shit.

Lynch, who had worked on all of Paul Weller's solo material, had, on Noel's request, completed and delivered three versions of the song. The one he most liked, Noel rejected. The one he thought too obvious, Noel okayed. Brendan was very aware of Liam's dislike of such records. The singer had told him so in no uncertain words.

After the gig, in the hotel bar, Lynch regretfully said, ‘I wish I had never agreed to do it. It's been absolute mad.'

As he spoke,
News Of The World
reporters were casually sat around, watching the band's every move. Ocean Colour Scene were also present that night. They had recently been signed to MCA and were now excitedly getting ready for their first record in years to be released.

Noel sat with Meg and Jefferson Hack, the editor of
Dazed and Confused
, a new magazine that wanted to interview him. Noel wasn't interested.

‘I'll tell you what,' he told the editor, ‘you'll get far better stuff if you get fifty Oasis fans together in a room and interview them. They'll tell you much more than I ever could.'

This was a regular trait of Noel's, to dismiss breezily his work and refuse to analyse it. It was as if he believed that by putting his mind to explanations it would somehow kill the magic. Often, he would laugh off his work.

‘People go on about “Cigarettes and Alcohol”, being a great insight into Thatcher's children,' he'd say with a pretend laugh, ‘But I was taking the piss when I wrote it.' Or ‘that “Live Forever” song, wrote it in ten minutes, mate'.

It was his defence mechanism, another way of warding people who wanted to get too close, who desired answers.

The next morning Noel woke up to find Liam and Ocean Colour Scene's vocalist, Simon Fowler, still drinking at the bar. He and Meg then flew back to London, and that night attended the
NME
Brat awards.

Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer hosted the ceremony. Among the winners, which were decided on a mixture of the writers' choice and readers' voting, Pulp and Black Grape were both honoured.

The hosts then announced that there were no more bands to talk about as one band had totally swept the board. They were, of course, Oasis, who this year had won the awards for Best Act, Best Album, Best Single and Best Band.

Noel slowly walked to the stage and holding his four trophies, he told the audience, ‘It's really hard to come up here and be humble. So I won't. You're all shit.'

Later, he had his photo taken for the
NME
, backstage with Jarvis Cocker and Shaun Ryder. ‘It was funny,' he later reported. ‘Ryder was going to Jarvis, “I know what you're like, you're like one of those kids who always sat at the back of the class but was a real perv and had loads of girls and that.” I don't think Jarvis knew what was going on.'

In February Noel went down to a London studio to sing on a Chemical Brothers' track. The idea had first come about because of the Chemicals regularly playing the Beatles' ‘Tomorrow Never Knows' within their breakbeat-fuelled sets at the Social. Noel had expressed an interest in singing on a cover of it with them. Instead, that idea was dumped and Noel came up with a set of lyrics, which he entitled ‘Setting Son' (he had now renamed his own song of that title, ‘D'Ya Know What I Mean'), and then sang over a new Chemicals' track. It took him about an hour. Then he was gone. In October 1996 it would enter the charts at number one.

Later that month, Noel travelled to Rome with Marcus and Meg to do radio and press interviews and take a long weekend break.

Oasis were highly popular now in Italy and Spain, and this was a chance to promote Oasis through various foreign media.

On Thursday, he booked into one of Rome's top hotels on the Via Sistina. On Friday, a newspaper reported where he was staying and by Friday afternoon literally hundreds of fans had gathered outside the entrance.

Noel undertook interviews for both Italian and Spanish radio. The Spanish interviewer told him that
Morning Glory
was the number-one album, having sold some 85,000 copies.

‘To give you a perspective on that number,' he told Noel, ‘Blur have sold about 25,000 copies. That's the average sales for my country.'

Noel smiled at that news. On the Saturday, he and Meg visited the Vatican and then went shopping. Meg left him to go back to the hotel, and when he and Marcus finally arrived back, a sea of fans rushed him and he was literally lifted off his feet as carried to the door. As he sailed into the entrance on a sea of shouting, cheering kids, that beatific smile crossed his face once more.

On Sunday, he returned to London and made his way to the BBC studios in Wood Lane where Paul Weller was recording a special show for
Later
.

Noel watched Weller keenly and then afterwards at the party danced with Paul's mum, Ann. ‘Fucking hell,' he said, ‘I kept going to Paul's dad, John, “Is this all right? I don't want you whacking me”. Ann was going, “Oh, don't worry about him.”'

The next day Noel travelled up to Manchester to meet the Manchester City chairman Francis Lee, spend time with Peggy and Paul, and also visit Mark Coyle and Phil Smith.

Then it was back to London for the Brit Awards and to start rehearsals for their most important US tour to date.
Morning Glory
was now nestling in America's top-ten. The only British group to achieve that status in 1995 was The Beatles. And ‘Wonderwall' had entered the singles charts at twenty-one. The hard work was finally paying off.

Oasis were now firmly embedded in Britain's consciousness. Every week either the tabloids or the quality papers were running stories on them.

Girls regularly appeared on cheap front-pages dishing the dirt on their flings with Liam. For Noel, it was normally stories such as his father trying to sell a scrap of paper containing the lyrics for one of the first songs he ever wrote (apparently called ‘Sunday', and which read in part, ‘You said yes on Monday / Wednesday we were wed / You left me on Friday / If it's Sunday, am I dead?' Consciously or not, this recalls the old traditional song ‘Solomon Grundy', which runs ‘Born on a Monday / Married on a Tuesday, etc'). Other articles would examine the band's US success.