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‘THE LAST POSTCARD FROM THE OASIS YEARS…’

NOEL GALLAGHER ON ‘STOP THE CLOCKS’

Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds faced an unusual situation when they played on 23 October 2011. Not so much that the gig had come just weeks after Gallagher’s debut album had been released and they had to introduce the audience to the new material. But that this was the first time that Noel Gallagher was appearing with his new band since he left Oasis in 2009. This wasn’t one of his charity appearances or a guest slot or an acoustic sideline. This was Noel Gallagher fronting his own band.

On one level, of course, there was nothing for him to prove. He was the acknowledged mastermind behind the Oasis masterplan. Over the years he had written not just their hits but the vast bulk of their songs. It had been his vision guiding the band from the moment he had joined them. He had shown he could perform alone many times with the solo sections that had become a regular highlight of Oasis shows. He was relaxed and confident without backup in front of the gigantic crowds the band attracted. When he and brother Liam had one of their almost regular fallouts he might be called upon to take over vocal duties even on the biggest hits. And he had built most of their back catalogue, certainly the ones that everyone remembered, from ‘Supersonic’ to ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ via any number of quieter b-sides. He had taken every song from the very basics of a guitar line to finished album track and he had come to record a number of vocal leads himself on the albums. He hadn’t got the nickname The Chief for nothing. Everyone one knew that he was the creative engine of Oasis and there was never any doubt that he could technically do it. But even with the two brothers’ relationship was at its tensest in Oasis, there was always the other one around somewhere – even if that was off stage shouting abuse. That October night there was no Liam.

There had always been hints that Noel Gallagher was a front man in waiting. A fully engaged presence in Oasis interviews he took the lead when the two brothers weren’t involved in one of their vaudeville banter routines. He was an arch manipulator of the press with an instinctive understanding of what made a great quote. He painted himself as a straightforward lad from Manchester’s Burnage, but he could also create as compelling an image of where Oasis stood in the great lineage of rock’n’roll. More arty bands like Radiohead – who he never lost a comic opportunity to dismiss for being clever but lacking passion in their music – were no more articulate and compelling in their vision.

Yet while his brother might take a secondary role with the journalists around, on stage Liam was more than a foil. His brooding, charismatic presence gave even his tambourine shaking a rattlesnake menace. The unmistakable roar of his vocals, their ebullient sneer and the way he could elongate vowels until they were offensive weapons defined the songs that his brother wrote. And the younger Gallagher kept the band visible even during time off with antics that delighted the tabloids. The very instability of the brothers’ relationship had for years seemed to be an intrinsic part of their creativity. It was simultaneously a soap opera and a reminder of real life in a music business that was increasingly engaged in auditioning itself out of real characters with endless talent shows.

Now it was Noel Gallagher fronting the whole show alone with just his High Flying Birds behind him at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin in autumn 2011. The band not only had to carry the weight of expectation felt by any new act but Gallagher had to find some way of presenting himself apart from Oasis. It was an unenviable position for anyone to be in, but Gallagher’s response to the questions that hung in the air was characteristically surefooted. He simply embraced his previous life with both arms.

He opened with not a song that was not only Oasis, the aptly-titled ‘(It’s Good) to be Free’, but had been the band’s first b-side originally sung by Liam on 1994’s ‘Supersonic’. Gallagher said that it had been included in the set after he had been playing around with the song in rehearsal with his new band and the rest of them all thought it was brilliant. But there was a wider significance to the start of the gig which no diverting anecdote could disguise. This opener was followed by another Oasis track – ‘Mucky Fingers’ from 2005’s Don’t Believe the Truth. In total the new band played nine songs from the old band – an incredible statement of intent from Gallagher. Here was a man clearly at ease with his old workplace.

When Gallagher’s inspiration and friend Paul Weller disbanded first the Jam and then the Style Council, he stayed away from much of their output. Robert Plant was initially shy of including Led Zeppelin material as he established his solo career away from Jimmy Page after the break-up of the band. All perfectly natural. The dissolution of any partnership, from the most intimate to the purely business is touchy and for musicians it can be a mixture of marriage and contractual entanglement. In an effort to define their new personas, ex-band mates will often turn their back on what made them famous, confining familiar numbers to the encore, although with time even the likes of Morrissey has allowed more Smiths tunes to creep into the set. Liam was the same when Beady Eye started in the wake of Oasis as – despite being the old outfit without the Noel – Liam, Gem Archer, Andy Bell and Chris Sharrock left the old catalogue untouched as they toured Different Gear, Still Speeding. But by early 2012, Liam was telling the press that future gigs would include Oasis tracks – ‘for anyone who’s bothered’.

His older brother simply seemed to feel no need to put the least amount of distance between himself and his previous output, even including such showstoppers as ‘Wonderwall’ and ‘Supersonic’ on that very first outing. Questions, anyone? He seemed to be asking. The Chief was getting back to business. Yet at the same time he was far from complacent. As much as he kept control of every aspect of his work, from demo to live sound, Gallagher was also a perfectionist. And as much as he was confident of the quality of his songs, he hadn’t been at all sure that the High Flying Birds venture would work until he had a chance to play a few gigs.

‘It’s easier than I thought it was going to be,’ he said. ‘I really thought I’d be a grumpy old man about it – I’ll just play these songs and if they like them, they like them and if they don’t, bugger them – but I kind of feel strangely relaxed about it.’ The old band weren’t around but he was also now only answerable to himself. If he messed up it was only a problem for him rather than something that affected everyone else in a group partnership.

That Gallagher saw no break with the past had already been established by the High Flying Birds’ eponymous album. Second track ‘Dream On’ dated back to the Oasis years, a slight number written towards the end of the sessions for 2008’s Dig Out Your Soul and he had even recorded a demo version of it with guitarist Gem Archer. ‘If I Had a Gun…’ came from the very last gasps of Oasis, having been written around spring of 2009. But these were just ghosts of the old band in comparison with closing track ‘Stop the Clocks’, which dated back a full ten years or so. A finished version of the track was rumoured to have been in line for inclusion on Don’t Believe the Truth in 2005 but Gallagher was never happy with the way it turned out. It was dropped a second time from the compilation album which took its name a year later and the fact that he was now finally allowing it to see the light of day was the clearest indication of how he saw his work as one continuous body. The same was true of ‘(I Wanna Live in a Dream in My) Record Machine’. It was another which had been left off Dig Out Your Soul, the final Oasis studio album, and here he re-recorded the instrumentation in a new key to suit his singing voice and added the choir that he had hoped to use on the original version. Noel Gallagher was showing himself to be a man as happy to claim his own heritage as he had done that of other notable bands in rock history when he first started with Oasis.

‘I probably won’t ever revisit it,’ said Gallagher of ‘Stop the Clocks’. ‘It’s kind of like a gift, clearing the decks for what comes next. The last postcard from the Oasis years.’ For Gallagher the work in Oasis hadn’t run its natural course, even if the band itself had.

And had they not broken up, many of the songs on Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds would no doubt have ended up appearing in some form on an Oasis release. It hadn’t, after all, been inevitable that Oasis would come to an end. The schism between the brothers had been widening for a long time, but then their relationship in public had always been uneasy from the moment they came to prominence. It was this tension that in part drove the band and if anything added to their appeal. Arguments similar to those that any ordinary family might have seemed to help create multi-million selling albums. They would fall out, have a battle of wits and get back together again – sometimes over the course of a single interview. But they always seemed to find some kind of entente cordiale in the end. They were for so long in a state of just about to have a final argument that when it happened for real it seemed more of a shock than had it been a fight that came out of nowhere.

When Gallagher did finally leave Oasis, it was with the end of the Dig Out Your Soul tour in sight. They had been touring the world since August 2008 and there had been disharmony within the band for a while. The end might have seemed to have come out of nowhere as far as anyone outside their immediate circle were concerned – although Gallagher seemed to be increasingly pictured alone or standing slightly away from the rest of the group in documentary footage of the time – but for Gallagher himself much of the tour had been characterised by a background of personal slights. There hadn’t been any one particular thing directed to his face but he spoke at the time of how it had got to the point where, if nothing else, Oasis needed to take a break from each other. It was no longer enjoyable. In an interview he gave to Q that June he was talking again about doing something on his own. The last album was already written before they went into the studio but he hadn’t even started on the next one. ‘I’ve got a lot of songs lying around,’ he said, ‘but they’re not Oasis songs. They’re going to sit there and do nothing, so hopefully at the end of this tour I’m going to go and do something for myself.’

Nothing more permanent had been mooted and still in promotional mode Oasis continued playing into 2009. They returned to the UK from a South American leg where they had found a new generation of fans who had taken the band to their hearts and injected new life into their tour. Back home they began the festival season, kicking off on 4 June at Manchester’s Heaton Park for a set of homecoming gigs. These proved not to be in the league of the Maine Road gigs in Manchester of the 1990s. On the first night there were a string of technical problems, starting with a generator failure during the very first song, ‘Rock’n’Roll Star’. To grumbles from the fans Oasis were forced off the stage until eventually they declared the gig to be free. ‘The curfew’s 11, but we’ll play until they kick us off,’ said Gallagher. ‘Keep your ticket and you’ll get your money back.’ It wasn’t clear how this offer would work in practice, particularly as the band recovered their poise and turned in an impressive 23-song set ending, as ever, with ‘I am the Walrus’. Later on in the night Gallagher said, ‘Kind of regret offering your money back now. Apply for it back if you wanna be a cunt, we do our best for you.’ Those fans who did apply got it via a cheque issued by the ‘Bank of Burnage’. There was no shortage of interest in Oasis with three gigs at Heaton Park in total, the third having been added when the dates sold out.

Following festival gigs around Europe, they played Wembley Stadium over three nights – the third also having been added due to demand – from 9 –11 July. This hardly signified a band on its last legs and there was still little outward sign of a looming bust-up. Or at least not more of one than usual. While there were exasperated quotes attributed to Gallagher about his brother, it was also said that he had no plans to do anything but go on holiday after the tour finished. Business as usual.

On 22 August they played the Staffordshire portion of the V Festival but the twin gig in the south the following night was cancelled. Noel Gallagher had written on his blog that he wasn’t feeling well, but it was his brother’s laryngitis which was cited as the reason for the cancellation of what would have been the final UK gig of the tour. They didn’t know it at the time but that was the end of Oasis in their home country. They’d gone without a whimper, much less a bang. There were only three more dates left in total, with festivals in France, Germany and Italy and then Gallagher and the rest of the band could take that much needed holiday. They would have finished promoting the seventh Oasis album around the world and Gallagher could have taken all the time he needed to decide what he wanted to do next.

The first of those last few dates was 28 August and the band were due to headline the first day of the Rock en Seine festival. As it was, they got only as far as the backstage area of the site just west of Paris before an argument broke out between the brothers which ended up in a reported face-off in the dressing room. Gallagher later said he remembered being quite calm, even as he stalked out of the building to seek the quiet of the car which was anyway waiting for him outside. His driver and bodyguard sat up front but nobody spoke. Gallagher considered his next move for a full five minutes, knowing that he was due on stage at exactly that moment. He later said he was well aware that if he told his driver to go that it would be the end of the band. It wouldn’t be the first time he had departed Oasis, but this would be different. This would be final. Eventually the silence was broke by the security man asking what they were doing. Gallagher answered, the car pulled away and Oasis finished. As he later recounted the story, he said the Mancunian factor couldn’t be dismissed in all of this. This was the way that problems were resolved for lads from the Gallaghers’ home town. And there was Noel’s perennial enjoyment in making the big gesture. ‘There is something pretty special about walking out,’ he said with a laugh.

Screens outside relayed the news to fans who initially took the deadpan style to be a joke – ‘As a result of an altercation within the band, the Oasis gig has been cancelled.’ That other stalwart English group of evergreens, Madness, played their second set of the day in place of Oasis.

The band’s website soon carried the news. ‘It’s with some sadness and great relief to tell you that I quit Oasis tonight,’ Gallagher was reported as saying. ‘People will write and say what they like, but I simply could not go on working with Liam a day longer.’ The news was reported with some uncertainty – even seasoned Gallagher-watchers thought that this could be just another brotherly disagreement. It was left to Noel Gallagher himself to end speculation with a statement that seemed to make it clear that his disagreement with the band went deeper than his youngest sibling. This seemed to be particularly serious.

‘The details are not important and of too great a number to list,’ wrote Gallagher. ‘But I feel you have the right to know the level of verbal and violent intimidation towards me, my family and friends and comrades has become intolerable. The lack of support and understanding from my management and band mates has left me with no other option than to get me cape and seek pastures new … I would like to thank all the Oasis fans, all over the world. The last 18 years have been truly, truly amazing. A dream come true. I take with me glorious memories. Now if you excuse me, I have a family and football team to indulge. I’ll see you somewhere down the road.’

‘It’s obviously the worst fall-out that they’ve ever had and they’ve had some pretty bad ones,” said Alan McGee, who had first signed the band to his Creation label. ‘But they love each other – they’ll come back together … Whether you’re an electrician or a rock’n’roll star, you can only do and be who you want to be. He is the same as everybody else – he didn’t want to do it any more and he stopped. People don’t do anything now that they don’t want to do.’

Gallagher would be candid in the press about the regrets he had in splitting from Oasis, which were perhaps surprising to hear given the deep rift which had opened up. But while there were clearly still many sore points, as Noel talked about his new life he seemed to be very well disposed to his former bandmates. He had socialised with drummer Chris Sharrock and wished all of them the best. In his contact with the press he made it very clear that he was going to draw a line under his previous incarnation and that everyone concerned should feel they could move on. He might not have wanted things to have ended in the way they did, but he was being realistic about it.

‘What we did from being a load of working class kids on a council estate with some second-hand guitars was incredible. The fact that we stayed together so long was a miracle,’ he said. While he could be roused to temper quickly, he could also remain cool in the most challenging of circumstances. An astute judgement of what worked both in his music and in the business side of things was a key part of what had kept him at the top for so long. Even when Creation was dissolved following the departure of Alan McGee, Gallagher was level-headed in his responses to the press. ‘When you go to bed it’s a crisis,’ he said of McGee’s news. ‘When you wake up it’s just another problem.’ He was able to create the same emotional distance as he talked about the band he had led for more than 18 years.

‘I think people had stopped listening,’ he said of Oasis, adding, ‘that’s just the way it is when you go for so long. Does anybody care about a new Rolling Stones album these days?’ As he saw it, fans of old bands would go and see their heroes play with more enthusiasm than they would check out their new releases. This was a new fact of life in the internet age – artists whose days signed to a record label were long behind them could keep on going with a decent cyber presence and even an album by an act like the Stones was no more than a taster for the inevitable world tour.

Yet Gallagher’s blunt summary of Oasis’s recent output was reached with the fact of the break-up. While the band was still going he had never thought of them as being in a similar position, despite lukewarm reviews of some of the later Oasis albums. He had then often just shrugged off criticism which had little real effect while the band was still selling its albums in large numbers and he had just kept going. But now Gallagher had the perspective of distance from the old band to reassess what it meant to him.

In 2012 Gallagher talked to the BBC’s Mark Lawson for an extended BBC Four interview which touched on the break-up. ‘It was never going to end like REM have ended,’ he said. Those other elder statesmen of rock had gone from indie status to stadium legends without ever blowing their credibility. They announced an amicable dissolution in September 2011, quickly followed by a final compilation album and promoted by members of the band who confirmed in gentlemanly fashion that they wouldn’t play again. Oasis, said Gallagher, ‘was always going to end in a fight of some description. Everybody was aware of that. We all wanted it to last forever. I certainly did, but I was always aware that when it came to it that one of us would eventually say, “Fuck you and you and you and you.” It just happened to be me. It could well have been Liam.’ But even as he spoke he seemed to realise that it would be down to him to end the band, that the element of control had always been with him. He added, ‘I think maybe it was inevitable that I would walk out. I’ve got a pretty long fuse and pretty thick skin until the day that I haven’t and then it’s just like, “No, no, no… I’m out of here”.’

Much had been made of Gallagher’s driving ambition and he didn’t always seem comfortable with the notion, as if it somehow implied something negative, rather than the creative impetus he felt. ‘I’ve had this reputation since the band broke up of being called a control freak and all that,’ he told Mark Lawson. ‘And I was,’ he continued, glancing directly into the camera. ‘And I controlled them all the way to Knebworth and Wembley and all the way to the top of the charts.’ And again, Gallagher looked into the camera directly, his level gaze with just a ghost of a smile giving no sign as to whether he was talking to fans or addressing critics or even former band mates. ‘So you’re welcome.’

Despite his assertion that he had lots of songs ready to go post-Oasis – and it was well known that he was always writing, always topping up his stockpile of killer tunes – he was now out on his own and he was keen to give himself plenty of time to kick back and make plans at leisure. It was left to his brother to make the first move and, always portrayed in the media as the more impetuous of the two, Liam never really took himself out of the public eye. In the aftermath of the split he was interviewed about his clothing line, Pretty Green, and could be relied upon to provide quotes about his brother. More than anything, he never stopped what had been Oasis. Within a couple of months of Noel’s departure, Liam announced that the line-up of himself, Gem Archer, Andy Bell and Chris Sharrock would write new material and continue with the addition of bassist Jeff Wootton.

The younger Gallagher had been writing songs for several years and while the number of offerings that made it onto Oasis albums was relatively small, he had quite quickly amassed a large number of half-finished attempts. His brother had been generous in his opinion of those first steps. ‘I’ve got demos of his at home with about 40 tunes,’ Noel had said years earlier, ‘which, if he could be bothered finishing, would be amazing.’ Almost a full decade before he went solo, Noel Gallagher had come close to predicting his brother might end up doing more with his own material. ‘He’ll be the best songwriter in this country in five years time,’ Noel said of Liam in 2002. ‘People thought I was being ironic. I wasn’t, his new songs are great.’ The circumstances were now far from what Noel Gallagher would have wanted all those years earlier, but his praise seemed heartfelt.

With Oasis gone, neither brother needed to continue working – they certainly didn’t need to go out separately and try to make their names separately. They might have always seemed to need to prove something to one another, but they both knew that the press and public would be judging whatever they did against the highs of Definitely Maybe and (What’s the Story?) Morning Glory. It was a measure of the passion for music of not just Noel but Liam as well that they were both willing to subject themselves to the ordeal of starting out again. The Gallaghers were jointly worth around £63 million, according to the Sunday Times rich list of 2012 and for many aspiring musician the experience of having either written or sung on even one song such as ‘Champagne Supernova’ or an elegiac moment like ‘Half the World Away’ would have been enough. Both Gallaghers seemed more driven, but what Noel did next was in a way going to be more of a challenge for him than what he had done first. Because this time around, everyone was watching. There were certain expectations.

It might not have been a battle to compete with the struggles between Blur and Oasis in the mid-1990s, but there was just as much riding on how the two brothers approached their new lives. A bullish Liam was enthusiastic about how his future looked with the new line-up and with the new name, Beady Eye, proceeded without hesitation. Details of recording sessions were announced and their initial single in January 2011 would be the first indicator of what fans made of a post-Oasis world.

In the past, Noel Gallagher had been vocal in how little attention he made to chart placings and he was dismissive of acts which monitored their careers like corporate executives following their stocks. By and large he claimed not to keep up with the fortunes of his brother’s outfit. Yet even took notice as news of Beady Eye’s reception came in. ‘The Roller’ peaked at UK No 31 which, as a debut for any other new band, would have been more than satisfactory – coincidentally, it was the position that ‘Supersonic’ reached back in spring 1994. But everyone connected with Oasis had become used to the conveyor belt of hits and Noel got no pleasure from seeing his brother brought up short. ‘I thought it would do what Oasis singles do,’ he said when asked by the NME if he felt a certain ‘glee’ at the disappointing figure. ‘… To be quite honest, it was a bit of a wake-up call for me. ’Cos I was like, right, well, fucking hell, maybe that’s what’s out there for me.’

The album Different Gear, Still Speeding followed at the end of February. It did well, hitting UK No 3 and as an album, well, it wasn’t bad. It had the energy and the attitude that you’d expect from Liam Gallagher. The sound was retro-classic, a bit of Led Zeppelin here and a touch of the Beatles there, but subsequent singles failed to make any impact on the charts, while the band toured to respectable responses for the rest of the year in support.

With Beady Eye a fact of life in the music industry, the storm around the bust-up of Oasis eventually subsided. Life moved on, Adele dominated the charts, X Factor winners came and went and so when Noel Gallagher made his move, there was genuine interest in him and novelty about his return. It felt like he had properly been away and as a result people wanted to know what he had to say. As ever, he had judged the timing of his entrance with consummate skill.

By the time he did, he had also made a further change to his life – this time in the personal sphere. On 18 June 2011 he married Sara MacDonald – his girlfriend of a decade. He had said that he would never marry again after splitting from Meg Mathews in early 2001, but he and MacDonald already had two sons – Donovan, born 2007, and Sonny, born 2010. ‘I just got to the point where I’d introduced Sara as my girlfriend one time too many. I was like, “I sound like Rod Stewart. We should all have the same surname in our house.”’ Russell Brand was the best man at the wedding. He and Gallagher had a mutual old chum in controversy and when the comedian and Jonathan Ross had got in trouble back in 2008 over rude messages left on the answer machine of actor Andrew Sachs, Gallagher had spoken up for him. ‘Yet again, the joyless fuckers who write the columns in the Daily Mail, the Telegraph or the Observer have dictated the tone and are telling people how to behave.’ Gallagher had found a kindred rebellious spirit in Russell Brand, both of them operating in their own unique ways in different branches of an otherwise increasingly corporatised media.

Gallagher had been a semi-permanent guest on Brand’s show and was a radio natural, going on to sit in for Dermot O’Leary in 2011. During that stint he showed himself to be no more in awe of the BBC than anyone else he’d encountered in his career, mischievously making references to Brand’s departure from the corporation following the infamous phone prank. When Gallagher introduced Matt Morgan, who had worked with Ross, to his own show, Morgan self-deprecatingly called himself the sidekick and Gallagher leapt in to tease the BBC, ‘“Sideshow” Matt on the Russell Brand radio show. Can we mention his [Brand’s] name here? Or is his name dirt round these parts? His name is mud, isn’t it?’ The affection was obvious amid the baiting of BBC suits and it was Brand who presented Oasis with their Outstanding Contribution to Music award at the 2007 Brit Awards.

Like Brand, Noel Gallagher had always seemed to be at home in the media, self-aware, yet confessional and intimate. He was not just adept at giving quotes but putting almost as much into making interviews notable as he did into the music itself. He was a consummate entertainer, with a star’s instinctive understanding of timing. He was very skilled at turning awkward questions around and if there was a positive spin he could be relied upon to find it. When critical opinion reassessed 1997’s Be Here Now as not the triumph it had first seemed, he was the first to agree, but he would quickly add that follow-ups were ‘fuckin’ mega’. For someone so intimately associated with rock’n’roll mayhem he was a surprisingly upbeat and positive character.

Yet he was also a realist and while he could be deafeningly vocal about his talent and his standing in the rock’n’roll hall of fame, he talked like a man very willing to pay his dues as a solo artist in order to win his audience over again. The month after his wedding, Gallagher held a press conference to confirm the details of his solo album. Ever aware of his duty to entertain, he said he had decided that ‘Noel Gallagher’ on its own didn’t sound ‘showbiz’ enough. ‘It’s hardly Ziggy Stardust,’ he said. Oasis, for all its plain dealing in its public persona, had been designed to be about escaping the mundane. Not for Gallagher the leap from Style Council to plain old Paul Weller. ‘I didn’t see my name in lights. I was passing Shepherds Bush Empire [in west London] one night and someone was on there and… I just don’t see it.’ The line-up was fluid, he said, but if it ever became something more permanent he would just drop the ‘Noel Gallagher’s’ bit. His new trading name itself hinted at a kind of ambiguity in his feelings about the solo life. There was the practical inclusion of his name, so there could be no doubt as to who was behind it – he said the inspiration came from Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac. But then there was the rest of it, as if he was still not entirely sure that he didn’t want a band around him.

Of the rest of the High Flying Birds, bassist Russell Pritchard came from the Zutons, the quirky Liverpool indie band who had come to Gallagher’s attention after frequently supporting Oasis in the early 2000s. Hearing that a new band was on the cards, he had simply asked Gallagher if he could be in it. The drummer was Jeremy Stacey, brother of Gallagher’s friend and sometime collaborator Paul. Keyboardist Mike Rowe had often appeared with Oasis live and had contributed to Be Here Now and Heathen Chemistry, while US-born Tim Smith had been in a number of bands such as the quirky American pop act Jellyfish and as part of the back-up for Sheryl Crow. The album’s supporting musicians included, from the unremarkable north London district of the same name, the Crouch End Festival Chorus. They were also enlisted by Gallagher to accompany the band on their arena tour in 2012. And the ‘High Flying Bird’ itself flew in off a track on 1974’s Early Flight, by US rockers Jefferson Airplane.

The band had impeccable pedigree but the chart experience of Beady Eye showed that success was not at all ordained. Yet Gallagher had been prepared for reality from the start. He had already said he was fairly certain that he wouldn’t be doing stadium gigs without Oasis. When a journalist suggested that one man like Paul McCartney could fill a stadium, Gallagher said, ‘But then he was in the Beatles… Well – I suppose I was in Oasis!’ It was almost as if he needed to remind himself that he could do this thing. He was as blunt about his chances now as he had been confident about the future as a younger man. Almost hesitatingly, he said he could probably fill an arena – at least in Manchester. ‘I’ve not been in this position since Definitely Maybe, where it’s just like, “We’ll put this album out, don’t know what’s going to happen”.’

At the same time as plans for the High Flying Birds were announced, Gallagher said that he was collaborating with eccentric electronic duo Amorphous Androgynous. It was an intriguing counterpoint to the more traditional line-up of his other new band, although perhaps a little too different, as the results seemed unlikely to see the light of day at the time of writing. Amorphous Androgynous had previously provided one of the more sprawling remixes of Oasis’s final single, ‘Falling Down’, clocking in at over 20 minutes. Gallagher had first got in touch with the pair, Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans, after enjoying a psychedelic compilation album they issued. Like Gallagher, the two were veterans, their work dating back to 1980s’ act Future Sound of London. It would be far from the first time that Gallagher had dabbled in electronica, having guested before with the likes of the Chemical Brothers.

Gallagher’s interest in working with Amorphous Androgynous again showed how wide he was casting his net. It was almost as if he couldn’t be sure that rock’n’roll with Noel as a front man would work out and he was going to try all sorts of different projects. Yet while Gallagher confirmed work was advanced with the Amorphous Androgynous collaboration, it almost immediately began to recede into the background. The sessions were reported to be at the experimental end of the studio – and it was easier to see how that was more possible without Liam around. ‘He has an irrational fear of keyboards,’ Noel had said back in 2008. ‘But this is the man who thought we had gone too dance when I wrote “Wonderwall” because the drums didn’t go “boom-boom bap, boom-boom-bap”.’ Noel’s attitude was not so straightforward. Oasis would seem to suggest that he adhered to the absolute basics, but he had always been intrigued by the possibilities afforded by embracing samples and loops. His frequent references to Radiohead in interview, although mostly mocking, suggested that something about the process of playing with technology held some kind of fascination for him, however uneasy.

Conventional strings and choir would be a hallmark of the High Flying Birds’ album and they were recorded in the same night on hallowed ground for Gallagher, the legendary Beatles home turf of Abbey Road. The guitar sound was also augmented in less traditional ways. When it came to ‘The Death of You and Me’, Gallagher couldn’t make the melody work any other way but on trumpet. He was a long-time admirer of Kasabian, who had come up in Oasis’s wake and had indeed been seen as pretenders to the throne. It was their trumpet player, Gary Alesbrook, who he recruited to lead the New Orleans-woozy brass section for the song. It went on to be the first single from the album, with a video shot near Los Angeles, in and around a diner that had been first built for the 1991 Dennis Hopper movie Eye of the Storm. Over the chirpy rolls of the guitar, the clip depicts Gallagher in the diner, writing and gazing out from his table, meeting the prickly gaze of the Mojave Desert through his shades. ‘My favourite pastime,’ Gallagher said, ‘is staring out of the window. When I get on tour I can spend hours and hours just staring out of the window, just thinking of nothing. I love all that.’

The diner provided a setting that was continued in the promos for the next two singles, the follow-up ‘AKA… What a Life!’ featuring former best man Russell Brand in full flow. More importantly, ‘The Death of You and Me’, released on 21 August, answered the most immediate question of how the world would take to a Noel without an Oasis by hitting UK No 15. ‘AKA… What A Life!’ was released on 9 September and that peaked at UK No 20. Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds followed on 17 October and was a UK No 1, also hitting US No 5 in Billboard’s 200. The world had decided it liked Noel Gallagher on his own. By 2012, the album had sold more than 600,000 copies in the UK alone, making it a double platinum release, while by contrast Different Gear, Still Speeding had managed just over 165,000.

The NME was rather equivocal in its review of Gallagher’s album in the main, although it did end with a shout of encouragement: ‘Fuck radio, fuck the charts and fuck nerves. Noel’s still got it. Only a fool would write him off.’ Meanwhile, the dependably acerbic Alexis Petridis in the Guardian noted of the traditional aspects of Gallagher’s writing that some had said that ‘“Dream On” represents a diversion into “Dixieland jazz”: it’s got a trombone on it – which in fairness is one trombone more than Oasis ever featured – but then so did “The Floral Dance” by the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band.’ Even the Guardian allowed that for all its conservatism, ‘For now, it’ll do that it’s a more enjoyable album than Oasis’ latter-day catalogue.’

And there was certainly no bluster on the album. Gallagher’s vocals were nuanced and rather than trying to recreate the swagger of the band he’d left behind, he soaked the songs in the experience of his years. There was an arresting brightness to the album which marked it out as an assured statement. …High Flying Birds never needed to sound like an album with from somebody with something still to prove – but it did. In a way it seemed like the album he had been building up to, sounding all the more coherent and rewarding for not attempting to recreate the primal energy of the first Oasis albums. Its invention and atmosphere were something very different. Gallagher seemed very much to have remained in love with making records. He had said it himself over the years but it never seemed truer than after he left Oasis.

His music was still fuelled by his belief that it should be essentially celebratory. ‘Great music is not about real life, it’s about how great life can be,’ he said. ‘Real life’s fucking shit!’ He was a sentimentalist in his keenness to believe in the magic of rock’n’roll. He might not have been the technological luddite that Oasis had suggested, but he did hate the way the internet bought artists and fans too close. ‘Everyone just wants more and more information. All the fantasy’s gone out of music, ’cos everything is too fucking real. Every album comes with a DVD with some cunt going, “Yeah, well, we tried the drums over there but…” Give a shit, man! It makes people seem too human, whereas I was bought up on Marc Bolan and David Bowie and it was like, Do they actually come from fucking Mars?’

Meanwhile, Amorphous Androgynous remixes of High Flying Birds’ tracks appeared on Gallagher’s singles over 2012, including a version of ‘Everyone’s on the Run’ which clocked in at over 15 minutes and dripped with strings and soaring backing vocals. It was disco, dancey and sounded like it was meant to be taken not entirely seriously. This was someone who was having fun and enjoying not needing to make a big guitar statement. But there was no sign of the album that had been discussed between the two and as Gallagher enjoyed his solo success the prospect of it ever arriving seemed increasingly unlikely.

Gallagher explained that the mixes for the album weren’t right and he didn’t have the time he wanted to dedicate to making it right. But it was also true that the second album was very different to …High Flying Birds. He hadn’t said that he’d wanted to see whether rock or electronica would work best, but if he had asked that question, the answer seemed unequivocal. And he simply seemed to be having enough fun getting out with his new outfit. There didn’t seem to be any reason to hurry with a new album, though the very fact that he had kicked off solo life by working on two albums simultaneously was interesting in itself. At the height of Oasis mania in the 1990s, he’d often been depicted in the press as a party animal who had simply got lucky with a revivalist rock band. But his work rate now, in his 40s, belied that caricature. Underneath the Oasis rock’n’roll stereotype seemed to lurk a driven and imaginative creative force.

The High Flying Birds tour became markedly bigger into 2012. They would go on to play summer dates into September, including festivals and arenas, which made Noel Gallagher one of the biggest solo artists in the UK. He had adapted to what could have been a daunting change. ‘Oasis was a big cruise liner and now I’m like a Sunseeker speedboat,’ he said.

At T In The Park in Scotland on 7 July, the soap opera headlines which might once have tracked Oasis were all about the reunion of the Stone Roses but the High Flying Birds preceded them with a set that nevertheless commanded total attention. As a live proposition, Gallagher always had a look about him that spoke less of the rock star aura than it did of an expression of concentration on his playing that might be mistaken for mild exasperation. Yet the audience notably sang along to all the new songs as much as the classics from the old band. He concluded with ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ and, as had become customary, left the choruses to the fans. They were still singing them after the band had left, a whole field of people holding the band’s presence for just a few more minutes, many of them too young even to have seen the last line-up of Oasis perform the song live.

The doubts and the critics were silenced in 2012. The Scottish performance came midway through a tremendous year which had begun in great style with a Brit nomination for his new album and the NME Godlike Genius award – the recognition of lifetime achievement which had previously gone to Primal Scream and Gallagher’s own friends and influences Ian Brown and Paul Weller. Things had panned out to a perfect balance for Gallagher, succeeding on his own terms and yet playing gigs of a size manageable enough for him to give b-sides an airing which would have been lost in the stadium years of Oasis. But Gallagher had always been good at remembering what it was like to want to hear the less obvious numbers in a band’s catalogue as a fan himself – ‘I used to go and see the Smiths and they’d always play those fucking brilliant b-sides and I’d always think, Fucking hell, “This Charming Man” is great but “Rubber Ring”? That’s the shit!’

On stage for the first time with his new band at the Olympia in Dublin in late 2011, Noel Gallagher had emphatically realised the potential inherent in …High Flying Birds. He’d craftily become an accomplished front man over 18 years almost without anyone noticing, but then from his earliest years he had always been good at learning as long as it hadn’t involved going to school. From the days when he first realised how much music moved him, he had soaked up influences and carefully watched how the industry worked. It had seemed unlikely that Oasis would ever survive past their first or second album, but Gallagher’s upbringing and first steps into the Manchester music scene made him uniquely placed to take the industry and make it his own.