by Paolo Hewitt
‘I had to get away from the guy with the scars. Doing me fucking head in,’ Noel told Bonehead.
‘What about that Alex Higgins?’ Liam said. ‘He’s off his tits. All that money and fame and shit and he’s blown the lot. What a fucking way to go. I hope that happens to me. One big fucking blowout. Top.’
‘You did well last night,’ Bonehead said to Scott. There was a general murmur of agreement.
‘It was only when we got there that I realised what I had got myself into,’ he revealed. ‘Didn’t think about it before, like.’
He returned to gazing out of the window.
The coach was heading for Stoke. At the hotel Robbie Williams was waiting in the foyer for the band to arrive. This was his hometown and now, since quitting Take That (or Take That quitting him, whatever), he had money in the bank and time on his hands.
He greeted the band, arranged to take them for a drink in a pub around the comer. On the way there the locals recognised Williams. There were admiring glances from the girls, who-the-fuck-do-you-think-you-are? looks from the boys.
But everyone who checked Oasis gave them a smile, a thumbs-up.
In the pub, a quarter full, Robbie used the word irony.
Bonehead said, ‘Don’t know what that means, mate.’
‘It’s Jamaican,’ Liam said. ‘They say it when they’re pressing their trousers. Iron the knee.’
Noel interrupted. ‘No, no, it’s Irie-knee,’ The brothers laughed. The band smiled. The mood was good. Expectant.
A pint later and the band went back to the hotel and then on to the coach for the trip to Trentham Gardens.
It was there that a TV crew from BBC2’s The 0 Zone were waiting for the group. They were shooting a half-hour documentary on the band. Again, as soon as he reached the hall, Noel rushed on-stage, grabbed his guitar and started hammering out loud chords. Lost once more to the world.
In contrast, Liam loathed soundchecks. He would come up and sing one song, maybe two, and then leave it at that. Soundchecking was boring. As long as his mike and monitor (the on-stage amp that allows the band to hear themselves) were in order, then fine. The others could sort out the rest.
Sometimes, Liam would walk round the hall checking out the sound. He did this at prestigious gigs. Other times he just seemed to disappear.
Tonight catering had been placed in the upstairs part of the hall. It was a huge room where The 0 Zone people had taken over a corner and were busy setting up their lights and cameras.
This was a TV special in which Liam and Noel would be interviewed separately by the presenter Jayne Middlemiss, and Bonehead, Whitey and Scott together.
Noel was the first to be interviewed but every time they went to ask a question, the soundman stopped them. He kept picking up Liam’s voice from right across the hall.
‘Can you keep it quiet?’ the producer asked, half-heartedly shouting to the singer. Liam, as if still at school, kicked a chair.
‘Not getting enough attention, then?’ Noel bitterly shouted over to him. Liam giggled, pretended to kick the chair again.
‘I’m warning you,’ Noel threatened.
Finally, they were ready. Noel wore his dark brown suede jacket and gave a lively performance. When asked who his heroes were, he instantly named the four Beatles, his mam and Paul Weller, the former frontman of The Jam and The Style Council. He denied having an argument with Liam about the recording of ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’. And then, to prove it, he shouted across to Liam, ‘Did we have an argument about “Don’t Look Back In Anger”? We didn’t, did we?’
‘Yeah, we did,’ came the sullen reply.
Turning back to the interviewer, Noel said, ‘Yeah, we did.’ He paused. ‘That’s going to start an argument now.’
Noel talked about how he shouldered the responsibility (‘Someone’s got to carry the can’), and then made a telling observation about his work. ‘I don’t write songs because I want to or I need to,’ he firmly stated, ‘I write songs because I have to.’ Noel asked to be remembered as someone who did daft things, supported a crappy football team, wore great shoes, ‘and did it’.
Now it was Liam’s turn and he looked suitably nonchalant and disinterested. He wore shades, a dark blue top and incessantly swigged on a bottle of water. His voice was gruff and curt.
‘Don’t you ever feel like dancing on-stage?’ the interviewer asked.
‘I didn’t join a band to dance. If I’d have wanted that I’d have joined Take That.’ Of Blur, Liam said, ‘I won’t play the game with students. They’ re not worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as us.’ And on being a ‘sex symbol’, he snorted, ‘Not interested, I’m a singer, me.’
Naturally, the casually bitter way he said those words would send a million hearts fluttering when the show was broadcast.
Out of the other three, Bonehead spoke the most. He blamed the press for the Blur I Oasis spat, and for hyping up the argumentative side of Liam and Noel’s relationship.
‘People going mental, that’s the buzz,’ he said of live work. ‘That’s what it’s all about.’
Yet the most telling part of the afternoon’s filming was not to be found in any answers. It occurred during Noel’s interview. As he spoke, one of the crew tripped over a wire that had somehow got entangled around a heavy light stand. The wire tightened and the stand toppled right on to the presenter’s head with a sickening thump.
‘Oh my God,’ someone shouted as the lamp then lazily thundered on to the ground, leaving the woman clutching her head in shock and agony.
As people rushed towards her, Noel burst out laughing at her misfortune. ‘I’m sorry...’ he spluttered between laughs, ‘but it’s... ‘ It was as if he had had an attack of the giggles.
One of the crew, kneeling down and tending to the woman shot him an accusing look.
‘Well, you would have laughed if it had been me,’ Noel pleaded. ‘Wouldn’t you?’ He looked in all innocence at the TV crew and no one there had any idea how to answer him.
The Stoke gig was tighter and better than Blackpool. And for the first time, when Noel came on-stage, he walked to his guitar with his palms turned upwards, asking the crowd, like a footballer who’s just scored, to give him even more applause.
The band and audience had a ball. No one was disappointed that night. Watching from the balcony, halfway through ‘Supersonic’, a young lad came up to congratulate Digsy on Smaller’s support performance that night.
‘Really liked a few of the songs,’ the fan said, ‘you’re a good songwriter.’
Immediately, Digsy pointed to Noel on-stage and said in his loud scouse accent, ‘Nah mate, that’s a songwriter down there. I’m a songteller. He’s a songwriter.’
An hour after the last note had died away, Oasis, minus Noel, were in their dressing-room. Robbie Williams was also present.
Bonehead had a copy of the New Musical Express with him. That week, Britain’s largest-selling music weekly had published a letter from an Oasis fan complaining about having to queue up hours for Earls Court tickets ‘only to find out that one-note-never-moves-on-stage-Guigsy is not playing because he is exhausted. Well, what about me who got to Earls Court at six in the morning.’
‘The geezer’s not far wrong,’ Liam said with a cheeky grin.
‘When that went down,’ Robbie said of Guigsy having to temporarily leave the band due to severe exhaustion, ‘I knew exactly how he felt. Been there myself.’
Outside, as the roadies trundled down gangways pushing huge boxes, Marcus Russell and Noel stood surveying the hall.
‘Bloody hell,’ Marcus said, looking at the fifty-strong road crew and local workers hired on the day to help out rushing around, ‘I remember when we played gigs where there weren’t this many people in the audience.’
It had, of course, all changed now. Marcus had come up bearing astounding news, and it was this: (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? was outselling even their high expectations.
Three hundred t
housand copies had gone to the shops on Monday and by the afternoon there were re-orders for 17,000 more. Today, that number was up to 48,000. It looked like being the fastest-selling album in the UK, ever. Another poke in the eye for the disbelievers.
‘So I’ve spoken to Johnny Hopkins,’ Marcus said,’ And I really think you should only be talking to the big dailies now and maybe a big Sunday paper, The Times or something.’
‘Yeah, whatever,’ Noel said. Then he spotted Digsy walking across the hall. Noel called him over, told him the news about the LP’s sales.
‘Can I swop bands?’ Digsy asked.
‘You can’t swop tunes,’ Noel replied.
‘Ah, that’s when you find out who your mates are.’
‘How about swapping brothers?’ Noel offered.
‘Nah, swop instruments, mate.’
The pair laughed easily, much time already between them. On the bus, Noel picked up the Sun and shouted, ‘Liam, come here.’
‘What?’
‘Look at this.’
Noel turned to the gossip page where they had run a picture of Liam from the Megastore gig. His eyeballs were right at the top of his eyelids. He looked half-blind.
‘Yeah, so? I was fucking E’d up. What do you expect?’
‘I expect pop singers to look better than that,’ Noel said with obvious glee.
At the hotel, everyone went down to the bar, except Noel. He stood by the lift, his white Adidas bag in hand. A friend of his then approached him.
‘What are you doing, Noel?’
‘Going to my room.’
‘Do you want a line?’
‘Nah, not for me.’
‘You sure?’ The friend had obviously never heard Noel turn down the offer of cocaine before.
‘I’ve got to get up early and drive back to London,’ Noel explained. ‘I’m doing some XFM [an independent radio] show on acoustic guitar and I don’t want to fuck it up. You going to the Bournemouth gig? I’ll see ya there.’
Meanwhile, in the bar, Liam had Digsy on his shoulders and Scott was chatting to a woman. It was about five a.m. before the last person straggled out.
The next day was travel day. Noel had left the hotel with Marcus, around ten. Two hours later the band got on the coach with Maggie. Liam had a copy of the film Head starring The Monkees. It is a wilfully psychedelic film from 1968 that had been written by Hollywood actor Jack Nicholson in an attempt to smash The Monkees’ clean-cut image.
As giant hoovers dispersed The Monkees into caves or they inexplicably spoke with Italian soldiers in the desert, Liam said, ‘This is the kind of shit we should get into. Do a mad fucking film that will mess with everyone’s heads. Be fucking top.’
He said it like a threat.
At a service station, Liam, Alan and Bonehead discovered a machine that gave the illusion you were being photographed with a celebrity. Liam, surprisingly, posed with Eric Cantona. So did Alan White. Bonehead had his head imposed on a Take That picture.
‘I’ll get the office to do a press release, then I’ll send it to the NME,’ he joked. ‘Tell them I’ve taken Robbie Williams’s place in Take That. Imagine, Bonehead Joins Take That.’
‘Don’t do that,’ Liam said. ‘The cunts will only believe you.’
Bonehead turned to Scott. ‘How did you get on with that girl last night?’
Scott shook his head. ‘Not at all. She said a few daft things. I thought, she’s a spunker, so I went to bed.’
‘Did you have a wank?’
Scott’s face turned a slight red, his voice a little defensive.
‘No.’
‘Listen mate,’ Bonehead said, adopting the tone of a sergeant major advising a private, ‘in this band you’re either shagging or having a wank. Got to be done, innit?’ He looked round for confirmation, and everyone solemnly nodded their heads. ‘Got to be done,’ he repeated.
The coach finally pulled into Bournemouth at about seven. It had been a long drive. Jason, Noel’s guitar roadie, wandered into the lobby as everyone booked themselves in.
‘A very good evening to everyone,’ he announced in his mock toff’s accent. ‘Not a lot doing here, boys.’ The crew had travelled over night and already been round town.
‘There’s some bar which is meant to be good. If you would care to assemble in the hotel bar in about an hour, we can take things from there.’
‘Rightio,’ Bonehead said.
An hour later, Oasis’s road crew and band members sat in the bar. There were three Birmingham girls sitting close by. They had planned a week’s holiday around the Bournemouth gig.
Two of them were good-looking. They were the ones getting a lot of attention. Their other friend, having sussed out the situation, had opted to play mother, and look after them. She thought this advisable because Liam was the obvious attraction, and he had just discovered a potent cocktail. In twenty minutes, he had downed three of them and the spirit was with him.
‘Have you ever noticed,’ he said to Bonehead, ‘how letters can become words?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, check this. U.R.A.Q.T.’
‘Fuck me, so they can.’ Bonehead thought for a moment, and Liam looked pleased with himself. Words weren’t his thing. He hated signing his name, for example. School had done that to him. Made him afraid of pen and paper.
He could stand in front of 20,000 people and front them out, big time. No problem there. But his achilles heel was words. Words frightened him. Words told him that there were two kinds of people in this world. There were those who could spell music and then there were those who could play it. Liam was the latter. Instinctive, no thought.
‘Liam?’
‘What?’
‘U.R.O.K.’ Bonehead said.
Soon after, everyone left the bar. Some went in search of food. Liam and co. stayed with the girls who knew of a bar where the drinks were cheap. When Liam entered, people stopped to stare. But few approached him. Half an hour later, he disappeared into the toilet with Paul, a roadie.
They had just snorted up some cocaine when they were surprised by a banging on the door. It was the bouncer. He had spotted them going into the gents together.
‘Fuck!’
Liam and Paul stared at each other. ‘What?’ Liam shouted to the bouncer.
‘There better not be two of you in there.’
Paul reacted first. He undid the lock and the pair of them stepped out.
‘Look,’ he remonstrated. ‘I know what you’re thinking but it’s not that. He’s just split up with his girlfriend and I was talking to him about it, in private, you know what I mean. I mean, he can’t get any peace out there and he is very upset.’
Paul and the bouncer looked at Liam. Particles of cocaine were falling out of his nostril. Paul knew then that it was useless to argue.
‘I don’t believe you,’ the bouncer said.
‘Okay, then mate, here’s the crack,’ Liam said. ‘Me and him are gay and we were in there doing it.’
‘Right, you two, out,’ The bouncer went to take Liam’s arm.
Liam stepped back an inch and fixed him with a cold stare. ‘Look mate, we’ll fuck off from your poxy joint but don’t you dare touch my fucking coat. That’s all. Don’t touch my coat.’
The bouncer considered the situation, stepped back and let Liam walk past him and out into the cold October air.
Back at the hotel there was football on the TV. Manchester City were playing in the Coca-Cola cup. Paul, Liam and the three girls retired to a room to watch it. The room had two single beds. Liam sat with the two pretty ones. Paul spoke to ‘mum’.
But despite all Liam’s subtle suggestions, there was to be no action tonight. The ‘mum’ of the party wasn’t going to leave without her brood. They were keen to stay. No doubt there. They said so every time their friend went to the bathroom. But ‘mum’ was adamant. She wasn’t budging without them.
Finally, reluctantly, they left for the house they were staying in. Liam
promised to put them all on the guest-list.
‘But I’m not putting the ugly one on,’ he viciously stated after they had gone. ‘She can fuck right off.’
Liam was now at a loose end. And he was pissed and wired. No way was he going to bed. Not in this state, not at this time. He grabbed the phone and ordered up some drinks, produced the coke he had left over, started chopping it out, started talking. Of all things, he spoke about his name first.
He hated William. Too long. Far too long. But he did have John and Paul to go in between William and Gallagher, and as they were the best songwriters ever, it was a good sign.
His brother’s name then came up. Inevitably.
‘Look at him kicking me out of his flat,’ Liam said with mild disgust, like you would about someone who hadn’t washed for days. ‘Half of that flat is mine. I’m his brother, half of it’s mine.’ This was Liam logic.
Yet the main grievance wasn’t about house evictions. No. It was about money. The way it worked was simple; Oasis members all got the same cut from records and gigs, and were given weekly wages. Apart from Noel, whose songwriting royalties and publishing money saw to that. That slice of the cake wasn’t shared. To Liam, this was wrong.
‘If I was the songwriter – I’m not, but if I was – I would divvy up that money as well. Spread it out among everyone. Not keep it to myself.’
After all, why were the band successful? Was it just the songs? Or was it other things? Like Liam’s contribution. Or them working their arses off on the road. He didn’t like it when Noel got involved on the money side of things. It changed him.
It was like in 1994 when they first went to New York. The record company took them out for a meal and this dickhead from Epic called them ‘lucky’. Lucky? Lucky to be signing to their label. Fucking lucky? Us?
Liam rounded on him, ‘You’re fucking lucky to have us, not the other way round.’ And Noel sat there and said nish, acted all business-like. Liam got annoyed and had a go at Noel as well.
Liam loved his brother, obvious innit? But sometimes he felt that Noel never gave anything back.
He bobbed his head and began talking about the Newcastle gig, the one where Noel got smacked on-stage. Here, Liam became indignant, the new Mancunian in him flaring up as his thoughts about the gig tumbled out.
