Getting High

by Paolo Hewitt

  Then they started singing, to the tune of ‘Lazy Sunday’ by The Small Faces, ‘Blu-uur are cocknee, cocknee cunts.’ At which point the fuming guitarist complained to the landlord. The brothers were swiftly ejected and informed they were banned for life from the pub.

  Undeterred, they then walked over to the Underworld pub, near Camden tube station, where they fell into a fight with some of the locals and were again ejected and banned. Another top night out.

  In the same Melody Maker issue that carried Paphides’s dismissal of ‘Supersonic’, Calvin Bush, very much a fan, wrote a page-long interview on the group, finding Noel in a very bullish mood.

  ‘Listen, right,’ Noel forthrightly states, ‘if anybody doesn’t buy my music, I’m gonna be the most upset man in the world. We write music for the guy who walks down the street to get his copy of the fucking Daily Mirror and his twenty Bensons every day, and he’s got fuck-all going for him, he’s got no money.

  ‘Even if somebody can’t afford to buy our record, if they put on the radio while they’re cleaning the house, and whistle along and go, “Fucking hell, did you hear that tune?” That’s what it’s all about.’

  Such virulent sentiments hadn’t been expressed in the music press for years, and no doubt slightly alienated the middle-class students who make up the core of the readership.

  But then Noel, as he increasingly tended to in interviews, went on to twist facts so as to glamorise even further the Oasis story. He told Bush that at the King Tut’s gig, McGee jumped on-stage during their second song and offered to sign them on the spot. Right. Noel also revealed that he only listened to old music, but that three records of late had impressed him: Paul Weller’s Wildwood album, Grant Lee Buffalo’s Fuzzy, and Beck’s single ‘Loser’, ‘which blew my fucking head off’.

  Undoubtedly, Noel had been captivated by Beck’s unusual use of a bluesy acoustic guitar set to a heavy hip-hop drum sound, and carefully filed this musical combination away for further use. Certainly ‘Wonderwall’ utilises the same ingredients, but in a very different fashion.

  It is also in this article that ‘All Around The World’ is first mentioned, Noel insisting that Oasis will enter the Eurovision Song Contest with it and win by ‘at least, oooh thirty points’.

  In truth, when he first wrote the song in the early 1990s, ‘I knew that people wouldn’t be ready for it, they wouldn’t get it. I had to put it aside and wait, which is why it didn’t go on the first album. Then I briefly thought about putting it on the second album but then I went and wrote “Champagne Supernova”, and you can’t have two seven-minute epics on one album, can you?’

  At time of writing, this song, one of Noel’s most stirring and beautiful efforts, is down for the third Oasis album, provisionally entitled ‘Be Here Now’. To give you an idea of its potency, it is as if McCartney had written ‘Hey Jude’, and then kept it hidden for years.

  On 29 April Oasis resumed touring. They played the Adelphi in Hull, then it was on to the Coventry University where 200 kids were left outside. The next night, 2 May, it was the Wedgewood Rooms in Portsmouth where NME writer Simon Williams met up with them to write the band’s first NME cover-story. They were, again, a journalist’s dream.

  After the gig, back at the hotel, the barman unwisely vacated the bar. Swiftly, two of the Oasis crew snatched numerous bottles of beer and stowed them away. Bonehead then decided to go for a swim in the pool next to the bar area.

  The party moved over to the pool where all of a sudden, and obviously off their heads, Noel and Liam started viciously tearing into each other. When Guigsy tried to separate them, he too was punched.

  As they wrestled on the floor, someone started throwing poolside chairs at Bonehead in the pool. Then a few tables were aimed at him. The commotion brought sleeping residents to see what the fuck was going on, and a girl, standing behind her boyfriend on the balcony, kept unwrapping the towel she was wearing and flashing her naked body at the band. Finally, at six in the morning, the Oasis party were informed by the night watchman that he couldn’t serve them any more drinks as he was off to bed, and by the way, the police were now on the way over.

  The next day at lunchtime Noel and Liam laughed off their fight and mutually agreed that they should never have been booked into such an establishment.

  ‘It’s true,’ Noel says, looking over at the swimming pool, ‘Those plate-glass windows are just saying, throw a chair through me.’

  The gig that day was at TJs in Newport and the band stayed in the King’s Head Hotel. Coincidentally, the hotel bar was named the Oasis, and Liam duly posed in front of the sign for photographer Kevin Cumming’s camera. This was used as the NME’s cover-shot.

  Cummings also suggested a photo session with Noel and Liam wearing Manchester City tops. Cummings is a Mancunian and a fervent City supporter, attending every game he can.

  No surprise then that the boys readily agreed to his suggestion. With Brother, City’s aptly-named sponsors, emblazoned across their chests, they posed by a corrugated iron fence that had BLUES graffitied on it. The NME used two pies. One was of Liam with his arm slung nicely over Noel, the other of them mock fighting.

  The point these pictures made was that Oasis were a major band coming directly from the football terraces and the first in the 1990s to place football on an equal level with music.

  Ask Noel Gallagher what the best day of his life was and he – the man who will play the biggest gig ever in Britain, write songs that will remain with people forever, and become a multi-millionaire – will unhesitatingly point to the day in 1989 when he and his fellow City fans stood in the Kippax Stand, E’d off their heads, and watched Manchester City beat Manchester United 5-1.

  This kind of attitude not only preceded football’s massive current popularity but mirrored a cultural shift that was best exemplified by the success of Loaded magazine, launched in 1994 and which reflected Oasis’s appeal. Indeed, every time Noel met a Loaded writer he would tell them, ‘Get a Loaded TV show together. I’ll present it from my sitting-room. It’ll be top.’

  Loaded’s appeal lay in its unabashed celebration of young masculinity. It had no qualms in running pictures of scantily-clad girls, devised its own language to compliment laddish behaviour – ‘Good work, fella’ – and, just like Oasis, celebrated and advocated total hedonism.

  Such was its appeal, that within a few months Loaded had overtaken every other men’s magazine on the market, and forced competitors such as FHM, Arena, Maxim and others to incorporate some of Loaded’s philosophy.

  In parallel with Oasis’s rapid ascent Loaded became the publishing phenomenon of the 1990s, and it was no surprise that when they first featured Oasis, the band were photographed playing football.

  Similarly, women in the 1990s also adopted a far more aggressive approach. They too had no qualms about expressing their sexuality and they demanded not only equality but, as countless articles would testify, far more from their men, both in and out of bed. Many of these 1990s girls were to be found at Oasis concerts. The Oasis appeal wasn’t limited just to a male audience.

  Liam, naturally, was the complete Loaded man, but his public image, like the rest of the band’s, wasn’t a calculated act. He was the real thing, straight from the I-really-don’t-give-a-shit school of thought. Therefore, Oasis could blow up at any time.

  Noel had already foreshadowed this feeling in his song ‘Hello’. Written way before Oasis entered the public consciousness, he states, ‘We live in the shadows / And we had the chance but threw it away.’

  Over the next two years that’s precisely what Oasis looked like doing. But those who predicted it forgot one crucial fact: music. At this point, no one else bar the band members, had any real grasp on the true nature of Noel’s songwriting ability. How could they? They hadn’t been privy to hear songs such as ‘All Around The World’ or ‘Stand By Me’ or ‘Daytura Dream Deferred’. But the band had.

  They knew that Noel, despite his unstoppable appetite for anything
that would drastically alter his mindset, wasn’t only hugely talented but also utterly disciplined.

  He tries to write every day of his life and even when he isn’t working his musical radar refuses to turn off. All you had to do back then was study him carefully and there he would be, fingers tapping away, his eyes darting around, his mind on twenty-four hour alert for anything that might inspire him. Of course, not all that flowed from his muse was great, but the majority of it was excellent.

  The rest of the band knew that Oasis had it in them to create records that would resonate down the years, just like all their idols had. How many times had they sat there, listening to The Beatles, The Kinks, Marley, Bacharach, Hendrix et al., and thought how great it would be to make music that successive generations would get off on every time?

  Now, with Oasis, they could achieve that very goal. That is why throughout every major bust up, music was the glue that served to keep them together. That came first and they knew that to throw away something so precious would haunt them for the rest of their lives. But Liam, above all, would and always will, test that strength. Which is why a million and one men wanted to be just like him.

  The tour continued and the momentum increased, visiting the Wherehouse in Derby on 4 May, followed by a night off and then on to the Charlotte in Leicester, the Old Trout in Windsor and the Roadmenders in Northampton.

  At all these gigs fans were left outside as the band’s reputation for brilliant music and outrageous behaviour spiralled into public knowledge.

  Oasis were now constantly being mentioned in music press gossip columns. ‘Jokey’ articles, such as NME’s ‘At Home With Oasis’, based around Noel and Liam’s tempestuous relationship, now became regular columns.

  There hadn’t been a band as open as this about their behaviour since Primal Scream. But the cost of such coverage, as Gillespie and co. were to find out, was that writers zeroed in on their personal lives and forgot about the music.

  Johnny Hopkins was aware of this potential trap. His policy was to encourage writers to discover the band for themselves and then make their own minds up.

  ‘And that worked,’ Marcus points out, ‘because they came to the gigs and saw with their very own eyes a brilliant rock ‘n’ roll band with all these wonderful tunes.’

  They would also have noted the crowd’s fanatical reaction to the band as they played the Army And Navy in Chelmsford, the Boat Race in Cambridge and then back to London for a gig at the Venue in New Cross.

  After soundchecking at this gig, Noel had gone out to the pub for a drink and then returned to the venue. A tall bouncer at the door refused him entry, not believing he was in Oasis. Noel finally convinced him of his credentials. The bouncer’s name was Terry and two years later he, alongside Kevin of Top Guard, would be employed by the band as personal security guards.

  At this gig the band ran into a little fracas with Sheffield band Shed Seven over the banners they had erected on-stage, and NME duly reported that back at the Columbia Hotel, Liam and a girl he had just taken to bed, had been disturbed by Alan from Shed Seven banging on his window.

  On 14 May Oasis played the Leadmill in Sheffield and then prepared for the release of their second single, ‘Shakermaker’, a song that had already gained notoriety by its obvious use of the vocal melody from The New Seekers’ song ‘I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing’, which was also immortalised in a 1970s TV advert for Coca-Cola.

  Noel, in a new Mancunian mood, hadn’t only lifted the melody wholesale but seized upon the obvious drug connotations by inserting the line, ‘I’d like to buy the world some coke.’

  In the 21 May issue of NME it was reported that the band had refused, despite the threat of legal action from Coca-Cola, to remove the line.

  ‘We might have to write-off half the royalties,’ Noel fumed, ‘but fuck it. For someone in a suit to come along and say we’ve got to change a song we’ve been playing for two years isn’t on. If we ever get to pay back our advance, which most bands don’t, then it’s just going to be another five grand on top.’

  A week later Melody Maker ran with a Creation press release which stated that the line hadn’t even been recorded. The only way it could surface would be as a live version of the song and that had never been considered a possibility.

  Knowing this, Noel’s fiery quote to the NME was obviously designed to whip up a controversy that never existed in the first place and so keep the band in headlines. Oasis did not need the press but they were now in a position to start playing games. And they liked that power.

  The band had now been booked to appear at the Glastonbury festival and judging by the attention they were receiving ‘Shakermaker’ looked likely to outsell ‘Supersonic’. Again, Mark Szaszy was employed to direct the video, this time shooting the band performing in the backyard of Bonehead’s house and playing football in a nearby field. There were also shots of Liam and Bonehead being driven around in a car by Brian Cannon, their friend and sleeve designer.

  On 1 June Oasis began their third UK tour, kicking off at Edward No. 8 in Birmingham and then on to Cardiff University. After this show, Noel was interviewed in his room at the Moathouse Hotel by Lisa Verrico of Vox magazine. Halfway through a speech attempting to play down the band’s rock ‘n’ roll image, thereby switching the attention to music, his attention was caught by a table flying downwards past his window.

  He went over, opened up his window, and looked up to see a grinning Bonehead gleefully surveying the damage he had just wrought. ‘What was that about the stories of hotels being smashed up being untrue?’ Lisa asked a sheepish Noel. The next night they played the Island in Ilford, and NME’s Stuart Bailie expressed the dominant feeling that was growing around Oasis. Brilliant, superb band but ‘they might self-destruct tomorrow’.

  The next night, at Creation’s Undrugged show, ambitiously held at the Royal Albert Hall to celebrate the label’s tenth year, Alan McGee, who was still recuperating, sent his uncle on-stage to introduce Oasis, who were minus Liam. He had a sore throat.

  McGee’s uncle told the audience, ‘Since Alan can’t be here tonight, he’s asked me to convey his best respects to you all; and he wants me to introduce the next act, and he says, his quote is, “They are the best reason to believe in rock ‘n’ roll in 1994.” Oasis!’

  Noel and Bonehead, armed with acoustic guitars, then came on-stage to outshine every other act that night. They opened with a beautiful version of ‘Live Forever’, –played a ragged ‘Shakermaker’ and then finished off, with the crowd now clapping along, with ‘Sad Song’.

  Later at the Embassy Hotel, they partied to the early hours with most of the other acts who had performed. As part of Creation’s anniversary, the label had given NME a tape of all their acts to give away with one of their issues. Cleverly, the last track on the tape was Oasis’s ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’, further cementing their reputation as a great singles band with total attitude.

  Two days later, 6 June, they were back on-stage at the Arts Centre in Norwich, and then it was back to London for an appearance on Channel Four’s Naked City show.

  Oasis performed two songs, ‘Supersonic’ and ‘Shakermaker’, and then Noel was interviewed for the first time on TV. The interviewer was Caitlin Moran, to whom Bonehead would later complain about the lack of free beer.

  ‘We’ve put two million on your viewing figures,’ Bonehead snorted, ‘and we can’t get free ale? You’re fucking joking, aren’t you?’

  Noel wore his shades for the interview, a wise decision. That day he had downed some Ecstasy and his pupils were badly dilating. His fellow-interviewee was Peter Cunnah from the group D:Ream, but by the end of the chat he was probably wondering why he even bothered to show up. Noel dominated the conversation from start to finish.

  ‘How has being famous affected your friends, Noel?’ asked Moran.

  ‘I haven’t seen my mates in about six months. Apart from the ones that work for us.’

  ‘Do you get your friends to work f
or you so you can tour round in a big group?’

  ‘No. It’s so we can exploit them. The thing is, if we didn’t have them working for us they’d be burgling our houses, so it’s best to have them with us. [Noel then looks over at his friend Chris Johnson standing in the audience.] Innit, Chris?’

  The next day the band made their way to the Marquee in London, a gig they all had been looking forward to. The band soundchecked and then at about six that evening, Noel and Liam sat down in a music shop on nearby Denmark Street to be interviewed by The Beat’s Gary Crowley. Then they walked back to the Marquee.

  This venue had witnessed performances from all of Oasis’s favourite acts, from The Who to Jimi Hendrix, The Sex Pistols to The Jam, and from the outset, Noel had wanted Oasis to combine elements from all these groups; to be as debauched as the Stones, as destructive as the early Who, as reckless as the Pistols, as meaningful as The Jam, The Smiths and the Roses, and maybe, just maybe, as culturally significant as The Beatles. Now at the Marquee, it was Oasis’s chance to prove they could do it, that they were now the Young Guvnors. Naturally, they succeeded. The place was packed with expectant fans and the band stormed through their set, egged on by the jubilant crowd.

  ‘Absolutely electric,’ Crowley called it.

  The next night the band went home to Manchester and played the University, and then it was over to the Avenham Park in Preston to play a free festival Heineken beer had sponsored.

  For some reason The Boo Radleys had been given top spot and the band’s Martin Carr was later quoted in Melody Maker as saying, ‘I feel a real twat with Oasis because they’re the first other band I’ve really loved since joining a band myself... I can’t talk to them properly because I keep on thinking, “You bunch are fucking ace”.’

  On-stage someone threw a glass of beer at the stage. Liam threatened to leave the stage, stating, ‘We’re not fucking Blur.’

  They travelled to Glasgow for two shows at the Cathouse and then it was over to Paris to make their French debut at the Erotika club.