Visit Live4ever Media!
Follow Oasis Newsroom on Twitter

Home of the web's most popular Oasis Forum

follow newsroom on twitter
L4E Homepage

Established 2002

Twitter





Site Navigation






Oasis Bootleg Board



Social Media







Read Our Exclusive Interview
News Archives

  • December 2002
  • January 2003
  • February 2003
  • March 2003
  • April 2003
  • May 2003
  • June 2003
  • July 2003
  • August 2003
  • September 2003
  • October 2003
  • November 2003
  • December 2003
  • January 2004
  • February 2004
  • March 2004
  • April 2004
  • May 2004
  • June 2004
  • July 2004
  • August 2004
  • September 2004
  • October 2004
  • November 2004
  • December 2004
  • January 2005
  • February 2005
  • March 2005
  • April 2005
  • May 2005
  • June 2005
  • July 2005
  • August 2005
  • September 2005
  • October 2005
  • November 2005
  • December 2005
  • January 2006
  • February 2006
  • March 2006
  • April 2006
  • May 2006
  • June 2006
  • July 2006
  • August 2006
  • September 2006
  • October 2006
  • November 2006
  • December 2006
  • January 2007
  • February 2007
  • March 2007
  • April 2007
  • May 2007
  • June 2007
  • July 2007
  • August 2007
  • September 2007
  • October 2007
  • November 2007
  • December 2007
  • January 2008
  • February 2008
  • March 2008
  • April 2008
  • May 2008
  • June 2008
  • July 2008
  • August 2008
  • September 2008
  • October 2008
  • November 2008
  • December 2008
  • January 2009
  • February 2009
  • March 2009
  • April 2009
  • May 2009
  • June 2009
  • July 2009
  • August 2009
  • September 2009
  • October 2009
  • November 2009
  • December 2009
  • January 2010
  • February 2010
  • March 2010
  • April 2010
  • May 2010
  • June 2010
  • July 2010
  • August 2010
  • September 2010
  • October 2010
  • November 2010
  • December 2010
  • January 2011
  • February 2011
  • March 2011
  • April 2011
  • May 2011
  • June 2011
  • July 2011
  • August 2011
  • September 2011
  • October 2011
  • November 2011
  • December 2011
  • January 2012
  • February 2012
  • March 2012
  • April 2012
  • May 2012
  • June 2012
  • July 2012
  • August 2012
  • September 2012
  • October 2012
  • November 2012
  • December 2012
  • January 2013
  • February 2013
  • March 2013
  • April 2013
  • May 2013
  • June 2013
  • July 2013
  • August 2013
  • September 2013
  • October 2013
  • November 2013
  • December 2013
  • January 2014
  • February 2014
  • March 2014
  • April 2014
  • May 2014
  • June 2014
  • July 2014
  • August 2014
  • September 2014
  • October 2014
  • November 2014
  • December 2014
  • January 2015
  • February 2015
  • March 2015
  • April 2015
  • May 2015
  • June 2015
  • July 2015
  • August 2015
  • September 2015
  • October 2015
  • November 2015
  • December 2015
  • January 2016
  • February 2016
  • March 2016
  • April 2016
  • May 2016
  • June 2016
  • July 2016
  • August 2016
  • September 2016
  • October 2016
  • November 2016
  • December 2016
  • January 2017
  • March 2017
  • April 2017
  • May 2017
  • June 2017
  • July 2017
  • August 2017
  • September 2017
  • October 2017
  • November 2017
  • December 2017
  • January 2018
  • February 2018
  • March 2018
  • April 2018
  • May 2018
  • June 2018
  • July 2018
  • August 2018
  • September 2018
  • October 2018
  • December 2018
  • January 2019
  • About US

    Live4ever Media LLC (NYC / Leeds) are purveyors of new music, daily news, exclusive features and photo galleries on the world’s best Indie bands.

    Live4ever also produces and promotes high quality live music events, and is enjoying a growing industry-wide reputation for both discovering and showcasing new bands.

    Among the network of websites published are the acclaimed Live4ever and The Oasis Newsroom, the web’s most popular site reporting on the brothers Gallagher.

    Live4ever was founded by 3-time Emmy Award winning cameraman and concert photographer, Paul Bachmann. Senior editor Dave Smith is based in Leeds, England and heads up Live4ever’s UK content, as well as overseeing all writing assignments for the site.

    “I love Live4ever – It’s a great site and always bang on the button!”

    Alan McGee,
    Creation Records Founder, Producer
    Community
    Oasis Web Links
    Partners

    Today's Top Stories

    Monday, February 20, 2012


      Noel Gallagher: Oasis Not Reforming Before The Smiths Or The Kinks

    Noel Gallagher’s new band is doing well, though not quite as well as his old one. He explains why Oasis won’t be getting back together before The Smiths, or The Kinks

    It's early evening in Adelaide and “bloody boiling”, according to Noel Gallagher, who’s taking advantage of the air-conditioning in his hotel room before an appearance at the city’s Big Day Out festival. You could say he’s in hog heaven, but Boss Hog heaven would be more accurate. “How about this for an afternoon of telly: The Dukes of Hazzard – Boss is a legend – Magnum, Nightrider, The A-Team. I’ve been texting all my mates back home because that’s bloody fantastic.”

    I was mildly surprised to discover that Gallagher had checked in under his own name. Not for him a silly rock-star alias like Harry Bollocks (Ozzy Osbourne), Sir Humphrey Handbag (Elton John), Bobo Latrine (Elt again) or Brian Bigbun (you-know-who). But then I remembered how often I’d seen him with Sara MacDonald, then his girlfriend and now his wife, walking round her home city of Edinburgh, hand-in-hand, maybe a Harvey Nicks bag or two, just being normal.

    Gallagher, when he was in Oasis with his kid brother Liam, used to rule the world. Well, apart from America, which they never quite cracked. The What’s the Story (Morning Glory)? album shifted 22 million copies and the band helped found a music movement (Britpop), a cultural one (Cool Britannia) and an ideological one (Laddism). Everyone, not just northern working-class tykes, wanted to talk like them (lots of swearing) and walk like them (the way carpetfitters do, as if lugging heavy rolls under each arm). With the cigarette-lighter anthems Wonderwall and Don’t Look Back in Anger, they encouraged men to show their emotions, or at least to indulge in beery hugging-wrestling at the end of yet another Binge Britain night. Even Tony Blair, after receiving Noel at Number 10 and reflecting on the historical significance of the cheese-and-wine, slurred into Gordon Brown’s ear, “You’re my best mate, you are.” (Well, almost).

    The man who wrote the songs, Gallagher was a big, big star and always acted like it, but at 44 this is how normal his life is now: “I do the supermarket shop. In fact, I do it so often that when my trolley is full of Guinness and crisps the whole store knows Sara must be back in Edinburgh with our kids. Ask me what are the best-value nappies and I could tell you.

    “People seeing me there for the first time are always surprised. They’re like, ‘Mate, what the f*** are you doing here?’ They watch me with my Pampers and six-packs of yoghurt, and their faces are a mixture of sympathy for me and their own personal disappointment. They want me in a top hat and a cape with a syringe hanging out one eye. It’s what’s expected, even on a Tuesday afternoon.”

    He tells his stories well. A born comedian with his own catchphrase, the incredulous response, “I’m not having that.” There’s just the right amount of pause and local colour in the yarns and the throwaways that are actually crucial to the build-up of the drama. For instance, this is Gallagher on how he and Sara finally decided to get married after 11 years together. “I was watching TV one Sunday night … Coast, I think, with that Scottish bloke with the hair [Neil Oliver]. I remember there was this interesting item about a silted-up bit of the Humber, and Sara came and stood in front of the screen and said, ‘Just so you know, I’m not getting married when I’m 40.’ I had to ask how old she was – 39. Then I said, ‘So are you asking me to ask you to marry me?’ We’d talked about it before but no one wanted to organise it. She’d say, ‘But I’ve got the kids to look after’ and I was like, ‘But I’ve got the band to look after’.”

    Who had the tougher job, the one involving the most wailing? It would be a close-run thing. The sibling relationship at the heart of Oasis was never less than highly flammable, fascinating psychologists and tabloid editors alike. When I worked for a more excitable journal, one Liam walk-out triggered the setting up of a special investigative unit. Each morning we would be asked, “What’s the Oasis follow-up today?” Anyone with a point of view was interviewed, including Hue & Cry’s equally combustible Pat and Greg Kane. We lasted a week before the subject was exhausted. In the new century, the band became much less vital, but in 2009 the Gallaghers squared up for one last ding-dong involving smashed guitars and a flying prune. Oasis were no more. Well, until that big reunion tour, obviously.

    This seems the right moment to ask: how are things with Liam? “I’d better not talk about him,” says big brother. Last year there were assorted spats played out across the front pages of the NME, culminating in threats of legal action. Are they speaking? “Well he has been round the world [with new band Beady Eye] and now I’m doing it. Through the wonders of modern technology, it’s possible to speak without actually speaking. Other than that, we communicate through our mum.”

    Gallagher is Down Under with his High Flying Birds, less a group than a bunch of musicianly mates. Last year’s self-titled album, while not a giant leap for him, was well received and is still selling well. And yet he says he only made it because Sara was fed up of him hanging around the house. “That’s not a joke, by the way. I’ve never wanted my music to be like a real job; if you put out too much stuff, people get bored. After Oasis, I think they were definitely fed up with us, and I was very happy doing nothing for a year, no interviews for two years, because I’ve got a young family and as much as possible I want to see them grow up. But after a while I was like, ‘This shit ain’t going to pay for itself.’”

    His remark about needing to earn some money sounds like a joke; surely not even Oasis could have blown the proceeds from, all told, 55 million albums on mansions, cars and cocaine? Nevertheless, is he surprised by the success of High Flying Birds? “Well, part of me is like, ‘Wow, this is incredible’ but there has always been this voice which goes, ‘F*** off, you’re the bollocks.’ Apart from the first two albums, Oasis were never a critics’ band – they loathed us. But the people’s faith never wavered.” Still flaunting his bollocks then, but now with added humility – this seems to be Gallagher in 2012. Yes, he lived the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle to the fullest, and why not? There’s a lock-up in Buckinghamshire that houses, “without guilt”, half a million quid’s worth of art. This isn’t the spoils from some lottery splash – he wrote those songs and played those shows. But then he tells you about the Lifetime Achievement Award bestowed on him by Q magazine. “I found that slightly embarrassing, to be honest – but in a good way.” Suddenly, after all that sneering about being too obviously influenced by the Beatles, he had the respect of his peers. “The guys from U2 and Queen gave me a standing ovation. I’d never had one before, not even at my own wedding.”

    Gallagher grew up in Burnage, Manchester, the middle son of Irish immigrants, and his violent and abusive father told him he’d never amount to anything. Of the journey from obscurity to omnipotence, he says, “You start off as a kid in an Adidas top and you end this guy in a fur coat and two pairs of f***in’ sunglasses.”

    He insists he was at his happiest before fame, as a roadie for the Inspiral Carpets, earning £300 a week to set up the drums, a “normal lad” in a great city pulsating with the fab new sounds of Madchester. And he also talks wistfully about his decade on the dole. “My mate Paul Kelly did such a noble thing: he was the first of our gang to get his own flat and he set it up to be a drugs den where we could smoke weed, watch the kind of telly that’s been on today and listen to Simon & Garfunkel. I’m forever indebted.”

    But it doesn’t take a genius to work out he has never been more content than right now. “I’m glad I lived through the madness – the fur coats and the crocodile-skin shoes and the women.” Here he’s talking about Supernova Heights, the house in London’s Primrose Hill he shared with Meg Matthews, and to which he returned from tour in 1988 to find it full of people who’d transformed his home into a nightclub.

    He resolved, “I’m not having that – I need to get a f***in’ life” and never touched cocaine again. “The day I left Oasis I was offered the chance to write my memoirs. but I’ll never do a ‘My drugs hell’,” he adds. “I absolutely loved being famous. It was all great, up until the point when it wasn’t.”

    But contrast Supernova Heights with his present abode in Maida Vale. The big attraction for him and Sara moving there was a garden for their sons, Donovan, four, and Sonny, 16 months, although Paul Weller has just bought a flat across the road – “He can see right into our kitchen and he’ll often text: ‘Milk and two, mate’” – and he likes this connection to his old life.

    He’s a full-on dad – nappies, bedtime stories, trips to the park. No qualms about private schooling – he wants his boys to have a better education than he had. And this is his parenting philosophy: “You have to make the effort with children. You can’t have them thinking that I reckon I’m special otherwise they’ll start thinking they’re special. I want them to feel normal for as long as possible because God knows they’ll reach an age when they’ll be told they’re not.”

    Normal Noel and his normal boys, and he was “playing at pirates” with them – that attention to story detail again – when Simon Cowell phoned up to offer Gallagher a job as a judge on The X Factor. “I love the show but could you have imagined the ‘judges’ houses’ week: all those checkout girls from Rochdale trampling on my daffs and scaring the cat? I wasn’t having that.” At least one girl was devastated that the gig went to Gary Barlow: Anais, his 12-year-old daughter by Matthews. “She was raging when I turned it down and still hasn’t forgiven me.”

    He met Sara in a nightclub on Ibiza, not believing in love at first sight – but that was what it was. He loves visiting Edinburgh, her favourite restaurants, can’t remember their names, but is just happy being part of someone else’s world. His all-time favourite night out – “Imagine how many I’ve had” – was in the city on Hogmanay, when he and his friends in Kasabian started a conga outside the Balmoral Hotel. “I turned round and there must have been 300 people tagged on the end.”

    And Sara’s parents, did they want to lock up their daughter after finding out who she was dating? “I think they had enough faith in her judgment to realise I wasn’t Pete Doherty. If you meet me, I’m obviously not a dickhead. I mean I was once, and quite proud of it too. But, you know, they were smitten with me right away.”

    You’ll have noticed by now that Gallagher has mellowed. Once a firebrand on politics and class, it’s difficult to get him going now. He says he has lost faith in politics since the MPs’ expenses scandal, is mildly dischuffed to find himself governed by a coalition when that wasn’t on the last election’s voting slips, but in any case had put his cross next to “this guy standing as a pirate”.

    Meanwhile, about posh rockers and the charts being 60 per cent privately educated, his response is considered rather than angry. “There doesn’t seem to be any working-class heroes now – guys like Ian Brown, Shaun Ryder, Richard Ashcroft, Bobby Gillespie and Liam who were knowledgable, proud, looked good and made something of themselves. Instead of being a way out, music is now a career move. A lot of the stuff I hear is utterly forgettable. You wouldn’t stand in the rain to hear these guys. You don’t want to dress like them and you don’t want to be them – they’re squares.”

    He used to say he could never imagine Oasis splitting up because his little brother was the one who could always make him laugh. “My wife can do that now,” he says, “and so can our four-year-old.”

    But surely Oasis will get back together one day? “We’re not reforming before The Smiths – or The Kinks. If I thought getting back with our kid would make me happy then I’d do it. But until that day, I don’t even think about it.” He’s just not having it.

    Via L4E source: scotsman.com



    Share Post
    [+] 3 comments

    For Breaking News visit our flagship site Live4ever Media

    Make sure to join the world's largest Oasis Community

    Pretty Green - mens clothing from Liam Gallagher




    Visit our extensive news archives on the left sidebar for more!


    Pretty Green Ltd
    Newsroom Homepage

    Made in NYC
    Our Sponsors

    ---------------------------


    Pretty Green







    ---------------------------


    ---------------------------
    Oasis Rarities


    ---------------------------


    SHOP

    ---------------------------


    Stats

    ---------------------------

    Visits Since 2002:

       24 Million & counting

    Registered Members:

       33'000




    | Contact |    | Privacy / Terms & Conditions |

    | RSS Feed |    | Twitter |    | Forum |


    All Rights Reserved; Live4ever Media LLC 2002-2021