Getting High

by Paolo Hewitt

  He goes on to say that Mark Cooper at BBC2’s Later show, Gary Crowley at Carlton TV’s The Beat, The Word and The Big E had been serviced, and that ‘everyone very interested’.

  Add to this, Marcus Russell’s strategy of slowly building up a fan-base while deliberately avoiding a high-profile show in the capital, and it was no surprise that the gig had sold out in minutes, leaving a substantial amount of people waiting outside the Water Rats trying to get in.

  No doubt the band would have had sympathy for those unable to buy tickets but, as Marcus would have pointed out, it was better at this point to play a small place and have people clamouring to get in, than to satisfy everyone straight away. Marcus would repeat this game-plan until even he, two years later, had to finally cave and book the band into the biggest gig ever seen in Britain: two nights in Knebworth Park playing to a quarter of a million people. And even then, that would still leave one and three quarters of a million people disappointed.

  That night, 27 January 1994 Oasis played for forty minutes. They performed ‘Columbia’, ‘Bring It On Down’, ‘Shakermaker’, ‘Supersonic’, ‘Digsy’s Dinner’, ‘Up In The Sky’, ‘Live Forever’, and ‘I Am The Walrus’. There was no encore.

  ‘I remember us being in this poxy dressing-room,’ Bonehead says, ‘and opening the door to look out and this club which had seemed so small when it was empty was now absolutely packed. It was top.’

  ‘Nah, it was full of fucking journalists and media people,’ Noel says dismissively, although the audience did also include musicians from The Verve, Saint Etienne and The Charlatans.

  Two days after the show, when he should have been back in Wales, Noel was taken by McGee down to the MTV studios in London to witness Primal Scream’s first live TV appearance for two years in support of their new single, ‘Rocks’.

  ‘It was the first time we had played live in ages,’ Bobby Gillespie points out, ‘so we just kept playing because it felt so good. Then our drummer went out for something and I saw Noel there and just shouted at him, “Noel, the drums!”’

  Unfortunately, as Noel strode towards the drum kit, the MTV producers decided enough was enough and turned the cameras off. Footage of the Primals and Noel performing ‘Rocks’ and The Rolling Stones’ ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ was never recorded.

  Noel had already met Bobby at a Paddington hotel about a month before. He was a big fan of the Primals’ Screamadelica album and an admirer of their outspoken views. Bobby recalls Tim Abbot bringing Noel to their room, and he and Throb, the Scream’s guitarist, performing various Sam Cooke and old soul tunes. Noel then asked if he could play a song.

  ‘And he did a really beautiful version of “This Guy’s In Love With You”,’ Gillespie recalls with obvious admiration. Eleven months later, Noel would support the Primals on their Christmas show at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire. Paul Weller would also appear with the Primals.

  The reviews for the Water Rats show were unanimous in their praise, but at this point in their career, despite the gig’s success, Oasis really weren’t in the mood to celebrate. The reason was that the recording of their debut album was now completed and not only had the sessions been agonisingly slow, but the finished tapes were nowhere near the sonic assault Noel and everybody else wanted.

  In part, Noel had to blame himself, for. he had made some unexpected decisions concerning the album. First off he had totally baffled the band by refusing to record ‘All Around The World’ or ‘Whatever’.

  ‘Nah,’ he had firmly stated, ‘”All Around the World” isn’t going on the first album and certainly not on the second one. It might go on the third album but probably the fourth. As for “Whatever”, that’s going to be our sixth or seventh single.’

  That was fair enough, showing Gallagher foresight, but the second surprise proved to be costly: Noel’s choice of producer David Batchelor.

  Noel knew Batchelor from his Inspirals’ days, when he had mixed them live. Batchelor had produced the cult 1970s band The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, a group renowned for their carefree attitude that had acted as a real precursor to the punk movement. He had then gone on to work with acts such as The Kinks in the late 1970s, and his musical CV strongly appealed to Noel. They had similar musical tastes.

  ‘He [Batchelor] talked a great record,’ McGee explains.

  The other main contender at this point was obviously Coyley, but his inexperience in the studio went against him, a fact he was the first to point out. He would be more than happy to engineer and let someone more knowledgeable man the controls.

  That man was Batchelor, but as the sessions progressed he was finding himself increasingly at loggerheads with the band owing to his production technique. Instead of recording the band live and then adding various parts, known as overdubbing, Batchelor insisted on recording each member of the band separately.

  This method not only prolonged the sessions but the mixes that were being achieved didn’t match up to the raucous sound the band wanted.

  Noel’s ambition was to make Oasis records as loud as The Who’s Live At Leeds album, but these early mixes were far too tame for both his and the band’s tastes.

  ‘It didn’t sound like us,’ Guigsy explains. ‘It was too nice. He tried to make us sound nice instead of just taping us.’

  Ironically another Manchester band, The Stone Roses, whose audience Oasis would so dramatically swipe, were recording their new album, the long-awaited follow-up to The Stone Roses, down the road at Rockfield Studios.

  In nearby Monmouth, Noel had bumped into their singer Ian Brown, who reportedly had said, ‘Oasis, yeah, about time.’

  (Later on, as everybody waited for Oasis to self destruct, it was the Roses, who took something like fourteen months to put this album, The Second Coming, together, who fell apart and not the hell-raisers from Burnage.)

  The sessions dragged on. Liam vociferously complained about Batchelor, and McCarroll was routinely abused by every band member. Somehow, the hapless drummer was able to convince himself that the band’s vicious insults were actually demonstrations of their regard for him which, of course, further aggravated his tormentors.

  Things only really livened up when the band partied. This either meant massive drinking sessions in nearby pubs, or riotous affairs in the studio. But on one occasion Bonehead was at it so hard that he nearly got a hiding from Noel, and the band produced one of their most scintillating performances.

  ‘It’s about four or five in the morning,’ Guigsy remembers, ‘and everyone is drifting off to bed. But Bonehead’s still going and he wants to speak to people. Everyone’s in their rooms and it’s pure country quiet where you can hear everything and you can hear him walking downstairs going, “What do I do? What do I do? I know, phone people up.” So after he’s tried a few people, he’s decided, “I know, ring the Roses.” So John Squire comes on the phone and Bonehead puts on a Rasta accent, “Hey man, is that the man Squire from the Squire family, we meet you at the comer, man, get you some toot.” Then he puts the phone down and rings up again only this time he’s an Indian curry shop owner with their takeaway orders.

  ‘Bonehead’s like laughing and crumbling to bits. Eventually he goes to bed. Then he opens up the window and starts shouting at the rabbits outside, “Ya fucking Mr. Bunny, go to bed, come on Mr. Bunny, beddy times.”

  ‘And that wakes the whole gaff up. Next morning, I’m eating breakfast and he comes down the stairs. He’s like, “All right, Guigs?” and then he sits there just farting and laughing his head off. Then Noel comes down and he is double grumpy. Noel’s like, “You better go to fucking bed, dickhead, because I don’t want to see you,” so Bonehead goes off and Noel sits down going, “I’m going to kill the cunt when he wakes up. Wait until he sobers up.”

  ‘So to calm Noel down I take him into town, buy him the papers and some Pot Noodles, crisps, cream cakes, all the stuff he likes, and then we pop into the pub at about half-ten and order a cab for eleven. Half-five in the evening me and No
el are still sitting and we are proper off our faces. Then we go back to the studio.

  ‘Bonehead is now avoiding us, he’s like, “Noel is going to kill me,” and Noel walks into the studio and goes, “Right you bastards, we’ll do ‘Slide Away’.” After each take we got more and more off our heads, but Noel’s going to Bonehead, “You’re staying straight, you’re not getting off it ever again.” Liam had fucked off somewhere but it was one of these takes that we used on the album.’

  As this was the band’s first real experience of a proper recording studio, they had reluctantly bowed down to Batchelor’s experience. But as they struggled to find a way through, the unexpected news broke that they wouldn’t be able to call on their record company boss for advice and support.

  In early 1994 Alan McGee suffered a complete physical breakdown, caused by his massive drink and drug intake, and frenetic lifestyle. He would be the first of many to temporarily fall by the wayside as the Oasis juggernaut gathered pace.

  ‘Basically,’ McGee admits, ‘I became a professional drug addict. There was this image of me as Alan McGee, the party animal and I was playing up to it. Cocaine, amphetamines, Ecstasy, speed pills, diet pills, Jack Daniels, and then taking Night Nurse to go to sleep.

  ‘And it wasn’t just the drugs, it was everything connected to it. The whole company was based right round me. It was the cult of personality, and there was no respite. I’d get back home in the morning and there’d be like twenty’ three messages on my answer machine. I was just too available. There was no cut-off point.’

  McGee entered the Florence Nightingale clinic in London’s West End. On his first day, the fire alarm bell went off. Everyone was evacuated. Some patients tried to escape, others, like McGee, stayed outside on the street. As he was waiting to go back in a patient pushed past him, bent down and picked up an empty crisp bag.

  ‘I’ve found my handbag,’ she announced.

  ‘That was the point,’ he now says. ‘I just went, all right, Christ, this is real. But I also realised I might be fucked up and I need a lot of therapy to sort my head out, but the bottom line is, that is a crisp packet and I know it’s a crisp packet.’

  It would take nine months, four in re-hab and five spent slowly readjusting his life, for McGee to take hold fully of the reins again. Dick Green, his partner, and all the other key Creation employees would now have to fill the space McGee had vacated. And they did so brilliantly, according to the Creation boss.

  Despite his absence, McGee insisted on being involved in Oasis, even if it was at a distance. Therefore, he was totally supportive of the band’s decision to scrap the Mono Valley sessions, replace Dave Batchelor with Mark Coyle and go to the Sawmills Studio in Cornwall to re-record the album.

  The decision was taken back in London. After Mono Valley, the band had gone to the Olympic Studios in Barnes, London, to mix the album. This was the studio where The Rolling Stones and The Small Faces had produced some of their best work. But it quickly became apparent that it was a fruitless exercise. The only track to survive these sessions was ‘Slide Away’, one of Noel’s finest compositions, bolstered by one of Liam’s most stirring vocal performances, apparently recorded in just one take. They also spent wasted time in Eden Studios, Chiswick, opposite Noel’s flat. With Coyley now producing and with a new engineer, Anjali Dutt, on board, the band decamped to the Sawmills studios in Cornwall. This time, Oasis were recorded live and the sessions went quickly and smoothly.

  But when it came to mixing the album in Chiswick, again they ran into problems: the tapes still didn’t sound right. The sound Oasis were after still eluded them. As they now had a string of dates corning up, it was left to Marcus to sort out.

  ‘What came out of the Sawmills in recording terms was good,’ he states, ‘but when it came to the mixing stage, it wasn’t happening.’

  ‘I think Mark and Anjali were too close to the tapes to mix them, which is quite often the case. The person that records it can’t mix it, they’re too involved with what went on the tape in the first place. And that’s where Owen Morris came in.

  ‘I knew Owen wasn’t just an engineer,’ Marcus continues, ‘although he wasn’t a producer at the time. I knew him well enough to know that he isn’t someone who just pushes the buttons but that he’s got ideas and the guts to suggest them. Plus he’s very good at dealing with musicians.’

  It was an astute choice. One of Owen’s all-time heroes is the producer Phil Spector, the man who created the Wall Of Sound. Spector’ s emphasis on volume and his penchant for having as many instruments as possible playing, was to play a massive influence on Owen’s work. And now here come Oasis desperate to achieve a huge sound. The chemistry could not have been bettered.

  Owen was also a huge admirer of the producer, Tony Visconti, who had worked with David Bowie in the early 1970s, the start of Bowie’s golden years as the most influential musician in Britain. Noel wasn’t really au fait with Spector but he loved Bowie’s work from 1972, starting with the Hunky Dory album through to 1975 and the Young Americans LP.

  In this period, Bowie also wrote one of Noel’s favourite songs, ‘All The Young Dudes’, which he then gave to Mott The Hoople. Owen loved that record as well. He remembered it well from his youth.

  Owen Morris was born in Caernafon, North Wales, but had spent his childhood near the town of Port Talbot in South Wales. He dropped out of school during his A-levels and found a job working in a Cambridge studio called Spaceward. It was there that he had met Marcus when he was managing The Bible.

  Owen stayed there for nearly three years and then went to work on a Stranglers album that never saw the light of day. After that discouraging experience he asked Marcus to manage him. He was tired of engineering and he very much wanted to move into producing.

  Through Marcus, he engineered the first Electronic album, the project started by Johnny Marr and Bernard Sumner from New Order. But after two years of working with Marr, Owen, frustrated at not being able to move into the producer’s chair, ditched Marcus as a manager. A year later he had a huge falling out with Marr.

  Owen had seen Oasis play at the Boardwalk in November 1992, and so when he heard they were signed to Creation and about to enter the studio he applied and was turned down for the producer’s job.

  Now Marcus, who he had retained friendly relations with, was on the line asking him to come in and mix Oasis. Naturally, he accepted. Marcus then sent him the Sawmills tapes and Owen realised he had a job on his hands.

  ‘I just thought, fucking hell, they’ve made a real fuck-up here and I guessed at that stage that Noel was completely fucked off. Marcus was like, you can do what you want with it, literally, whatever you want.’

  Owen’s first move was to book two days in the Loco studio in Wales to pre-record Liam’s vocals on ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Star’ and ‘Columbia’.

  It was here that he first met Liam. ‘Liam’s version of events,’ Owen states, ‘is that he came in and said to me, “You’re Phil Spector,” and I said to him, “You’re John Lennon.” I don’t know if that’s true, but I do remember Noel shouting at Liam, “You are not fucking John Lennon and he is not Phil fucking Spector, now just shut the fuck up and get on with it.”

  ‘Those two mixes,’ Morris admits, ‘are total Spector and Visconti rip-offs. I just got out the Phil Spector tape-delays and used Tony Visconti harmonising tricks, and they’re like total hats-off to those two.’

  According to Morris, one of the problems was Noel’s prolific nature. He had been allowed to put too much into the songs, filling up his compositions with numerous different guitar parts.

  ‘But there was no cohesive thought to it,’ Owen says, ‘So I remember when I mixed “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” I dumped about half the guitars, arranged them differently and then put a Phil Spector-style tambourine on the snare drums.

  ‘Then I thought, Noel is going to freak out now because I’ve just wiped about half of his guitars off.’

  He called Noel into the studio and
nervously played him the mix. After intently listening, Noel turned to the sweating producer and said, ‘I like that tambourine.’

  A relieved Morris then repeated this method with ‘Columbia’, stripping it down and again eliciting a casual but positive response from Noel.

  ‘Very, very strange having so little feedback apart from, “Yeah, it’s good,”’ notes Morris.

  Noel’s nonchalant attitude disguised his shyness, but also he knew that to go overboard with congratulations leads to complacency. The best compliment he could give Owen was to ask him to finish the album. In reality, everyone was, in Marcus’s words, ‘ecstatic’ about his mixes. At last, the sound that Noel had heard raging in his head all these years was coming to fruition.

  Over the May bank holiday weekend, Owen entered Matrix Studios in Fulham, London, and mixed Definitely Maybe. He worked incredibly fast, mixing a song a day, which is an impressive pace to maintain in anyone’s books. He was helped no end by Marcus, who would come to the studio every day laden with bottles of the producer’s favourite red wines and various constructive comments.

  The only mix that was met with any disapproval was Owen’s first mix of ‘Live Forever’, where Owen had wiped off Noel’s guitar solo.

  ‘You’re fucking joking,’ the songwriter cried when he heard it, ‘I spent months working that fucker out.’

  As Definitely Maybe came together Oasis travelled up to Scotland to play a Sony Records convention at the Gleneagles Golf club.

  On arriving, Noel went to the bar and asked for some drinks. After being told to put his money away as everything was free, he said to the barmaid, ‘Well, if that’s the case what’s the most expensive drink you’ve got?’

  The barmaid turned around and said, ‘Those bottles of brandy which are a grand apiece.’