Getting High

by Paolo Hewitt

  ‘Recovering in Sri Lanka,’ Blackburn replied. Karen was the girl who accompanied Oasis to all their TV and radio shows. Her reputation was that of a tough negotiator, a perfectionist. It was her job to see that everything ran smoothly: that the band were on time, the show went according to plan.

  Blackburn, who was sitting in the front seat, turned to Noel. ‘See, to be quite honest with you, we’ve never had a band like yours, one that’s gone... shoosh!’ He made a motion with his hands of a plane quickly taking off. ‘So for her it’s been mad.’

  ‘It has been for us as well,’ Noel quickly reminded him.

  ‘I killed her the other day,’ Blackburn said laughing. ‘I phoned her up in Sri Lanka and said, “By the way do you know the Oasis single has been put back a month? That’s your first job when you get back.”’ He laughed and turned back to face the road. ‘She loves it really.’

  ‘What’s the worst band you’ve ever worked with?’ Noel asked.

  ‘There’s not one band,’ Blackburn said carefully, ‘but the worst incident was with Primal Scream. They’d put out the follow-up to “Rocks” and it wasn’t doing that well. So I went to Top Of The Pops and begged them to do something special.

  ‘They were in Ireland at the time and I persuaded Ric Blaxill, the show’s producer, to build them a special set for the show. It was a really big deal. They don’t often put themselves out like that.

  ‘Come the day, I get this phone call from Jeff Barrett. The band can’t make it. I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. I couldn’t believe it. At three in the afternoon I had to call the show up and say, “Look lads, the Scream can’t make it but I have got this other band...” It put me in so much shit, I dropped them after that. Nightmare, absolute nightmare.’

  ‘What was up with them?’ Noel asked.

  ‘I think they were too out of it to get on the plane. I wouldn’t have minded but it was a private jet. All they had to do was pour themselves on it.’

  Noel burst out laughing. He had been grinning throughout the whole story. ‘Proper,’ he said, mimicking one of Andrew Innes’s, the Scream’s guitarist, most quoted phrases, ‘fucking proper.’ Noel settled back in his seat. The story had cheered him up no end.

  The car pulled up by the stately home. Noel got out wearing his fake-fur coat, a paisley shirt, jeans and Gucci shoes. The producer met him and led him to his own caravan. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll be wanting make up.’

  ‘I don’t suppose I will. But I’d love some scran.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Food. Something to eat.’

  The producer laughed self-consciously. ‘Oh, right. What do you want? We’ve got things like bacon sandwiches...’

  ‘Ah, bacon butty, yeah.’

  Dani Behr then made her entrance. She had interviewed Noel once before on The Big Breakfast Show. It was when Noel was on tour in Japan and they spoke by phone. At the time, Behr was secretly seeing the Newcastle player Les Ferdinand. Noel didn’t know the relationship was meant to be hush-hush.

  Halfway through the interview, Noel started dropping hints about the pair of them. Behr kept trying to change the subject but Noel wasn’t having that. He kept on about Ferdinand. After their chat was over, Noel put down the phone in his Japanese bedroom. Then it rang again. It was Meg calling from their Camden home.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ she cried. ‘You’ve just told the whole of the country about Les Ferdinand and Dani Behr and no one is meant to know.’

  Today Behr was bearing no grudges. She was all sweetness and light, long boots and short skirt.

  As no bacon butty was immediately forthcoming, Noel was taken into the huge house. The owners had allowed the show three of their main rooms. The rest of the house was cut off. Noel would be filmed checking into the hotel. Then he would be interviewed by Behr before performing in the show’s bar to an assembled audience.

  The interview came first. It was all frivolous stuff. How much money have you made? Who does your mum love more, you or Liam? What’s it like being a star? Throughout it all, Noel answered as best he could. He put on his diffident manner and struggled to make wisecracks in the face of such anodyne probing. After the second question, you could see Noel turning on to auto-pilot.

  Nearby, a young girl, sixteen, no more, watched the proceedings with growing disgust. She was an extra on the show, employed to sit around and look pretty.

  ‘They always do these stupid interviews,’ she said. ‘It’s all right if it’s crap like Boyzone, but that’s Noel Gallagher.’

  The only interesting moment came when Behr asked Noel about the Maine Road shows. They had only been known about within the Oasis camp for less than a week and already the word was out. The question caught Noel on the hop. ‘I’ll take the fifth amendment on that one,’ he said, thereby confirming the shows. Mentally, he was making a note to find the leak.

  Afterwards, he was placed on a stool by the bar. As the cameras and lights were prepared, Noel absent-mindedly strummed his guitar. He played ‘Hung Up’ by Paul Weller and ‘A Day In The Life’ by The Beatles.

  Finally, they were ready. Noel positioned himself on his stool and then performed ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ three times. The crowd cheered loudly after each performance.

  And then, as soon as they said go, he was off to his caravan. There, at last, was his bacon butty. He wolfed it down and in between mouthfuls, said to Blackburn, ‘This is a crap show.’

  Blackburn grimaced, caught between a hard rock star and a soft-headed TV show he would have to do future business with.

  ‘I know, Noel, but the viewing figures are good. By the way,’ he said swiftly, changing the subject, ‘Channel Four have got this new show starting. It’s called The Girlie Show. The idea is that it’s presented by kind of laddish women. They want you to go on it.’

  At this news, Noel brightened up considerably. ‘I’ll have some of that,’ he said, wolfing down the rest of his butty.

  In the Rolls on the way back, the talk turned to politics.

  ‘I can’t think of any politicians I like,’ Noel said. ‘Tony Blair. And Tony Benn, maybe.’

  ‘Yeah, but he was the one who banned pirate radios in the 1960s,’ Blackburn pointed out.

  ‘Did he? Right, he can fuck right off. I know. Dennis Skinner, the Beast of Bolsover. One day, I reckon he’s going to get up and go to some Tory bastard, “Right, you cunt I’ve been meaning to say this for years...”’

  Blackburn said his goodbyes and got out at Chiswick. Noel moved into the vacant front-seat. The car moved off. As Les was driving, Noel started to inspect the car’s walnut dashboard.

  ‘They sculpt that out of one piece of wood,’ Les told him. ‘It’s not like in other cars where they put it together from all different parts. They actually take one huge piece of wood and sculpt it out of that.’

  ‘What, this is wood?’

  ‘Of course it is, you divvy,’ Les replied. ‘Fucking Rolls-Royce, isn’t it? You got it all, mate. Wood, leather, the lot.’

  ‘Look mate,’ Noel said, opening up the dashboard and feeling the leather interior, ‘I’m from the 1970s and 1980s. If it ain’t Formica I’m confused.’

  In central London, the car got caught up in traffic. At one point, it stopped by a huge advert for Blur’s The Great Escape album.

  Noel looked over at it and said, ‘I heard the other day that the album isn’t selling as well as they want it to. Serves their record company right, fucking around with the Help album like that. It’s their karma.’

  Noel was referring to EMI’s bid to have the Help album registered in the charts as a compilation album and not as a proper LP. EMI had lodged a complaint with the BPI three days before the album’s release. A storm of criticism hit them within hours of the news. EMI then withdrew their complaint. But it was too late. The BPI had voted in EMI’s favour and wouldn’t rescind their decision.

  The album would now only show in the compilation charts and not the more influential main LP
chart. As Help was being released the same week as Blur’s record, many people had been putting two and two together.

  Noel looked at the poster and kissed his teeth in disgust. The Rolls silently moved away.

  The next day, for the first time, it was reported in one of the tabloids that Liam had been seen on a night out with Patsy Kensit.

  A few days later, the band travelled to Germany for four gigs. Marcus stayed behind to arrange the Maine Road shows and further negotiate another concert, Oasis headlining at Slane Castle in Ireland.

  The next day the NME carried this information in their news pages and Channel Four’s Teletext service reported that seven Oasis singles were in the Irish top forty and that Morning Glory had re-entered their LP chart at number one. The magic showed no sign of weakening.

  At their first German concert, the Music Centre in Utrecht, the band were forced to cut short the set when Liam’s voice started to fade. A section of the crowd reacted badly and started to smash up the hall. The band, now safely ensconced in their dressing-room, watched the proceedings on closed-circuit TV.

  ‘Go on, my son,’ Noel said, watching a fan hurl a chair in the air.

  ‘You want to watch out, Noel,’ Guigsy said. ‘That’s your amp that geezer’s going for.’

  ‘Give a shit,’ Noel replied.

  The band then travelled to Munich. Much to Noel’s, Liam’s and Guigsy’s delight, the aircraft hangar they were playing in was situated on the same runway that the aeroplane carrying the 1958 Manchester United squad had crashed on, wiping out eight players.

  At the gig that night, Liam came on-stage and kept shouting ‘Muu-nich, Muu-nich, Muu-nich’ into his microphone for about two minutes. The crowd roared back thinking he was saluting them. Not so. This was the chant used by City fans to seriously distress their hated United rivals and Liam couldn’t resist the opportunity.

  The band also bought a pile of postcards that depicted the airport and sent them back to Mark Coyle, a fervent United fan.

  When Coyley received the first card, he thought, that’s cool, the band sending me a card. Nice. When the fourth one came through the wind-up became apparent. He was left to grind his teeth in fury.

  The band moved on. They played Huxley’s in Berlin, where Liam and Bonehead were interviewed by MTV. Noel gave his security guys the slip and visited Berlin Zoo. He figured he wouldn’t be recognised and could relax for a couple of hours. Wrong. A group of visiting British school-children spotted him. He spent the next half-hour signing autographs.

  The next day they travelled back to Britain by coach and ferry. Noel had stayed up all night and was comatose by the time they reached the border.

  Roger, Bonehead’s and Whitey’s roadie, woke him up. ‘Noel, have you got any drugs on you?’

  ‘Sure,’ Noel sleepily replied, fiddling in his pocket. ‘Rack me out a line as well.’

  ‘No, you idiot, get rid of them. We’re at the border.’

  They arrived back in London late afternoon. Noel picked up Meg and then they travelled over to Julie’s restaurant in Holland Park for Kate Moss’s birthday party.

  A gaggle of reporters were waiting outside, having been tipped off to the event. Noel and Meg breezed past them and into the restaurant where everyone had just finished eating.

  They ordered Jack Daniels and coke and fell into conversation with Kate and her boyfriend, actor Johnny Depp, about the last time they had met. This had been about a month earlier when the band played a surprise concert at his LA club, The Viper Room.

  ‘What did people think of the gig we did?’ Noel asked Johnny.

  ‘Ah, man, people were buzzing after that show.’

  ‘Do you remember,’ Noel said, ‘how we’d been up all night and you asked us to play and we were all, “Yeah, we’ll have some of that?” Well, when I went to bed, about ten in the morning, I thought, nah, everyone’s too smashed to remember when we wake up. There’ll be no gig.

  ‘So I go to sleep, wake up, turn on the radio and there’s this geezer going, “And tonight at The Viper Room, Oasis will be playing a special concert.” I thought, oh shit.’

  Depp smiled. ‘That was your brother. I said to him, “We can keep this a dead secret or we can advertise it in which case there will be chaos.” Liam just went, “Chaos, let’s have some chaos.”’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Noel said. ‘I turned up and it took me about half an hour to get in. I was going to the bouncer on the door, “I’m in the band,” and he was going, “Yeah, you and million others, mate. Now get to the back.”’

  After the party Kate, Jess, Meg, Noel and a few others went back to Paul Simonon’ s flat. Simonon, once the bassist in The Clash, and his wife Tricia had a child and a spacious apartment in Ladbroke Grove.

  As they played old Dubliners’ records, Noel sang along to all of them. Then he and Meg gave Kate her present, an exclusive four-CD set of Burt Bacharach songs. They had been released to influential music figures only and just a few sets had been pressed up.

  They put the CDs on. When ‘This Guy’s In Love With You’ came on, Noel with his arm around Meg and sitting on the sofa, sang the song to her.

  Nineteen

  There had to be some bad news soon. Just had to be. It couldn’t last like this. Life in the world of Oasis could never be smooth. If it was, then that’s when you’d have to seriously start thinking about jacking it in.

  In January, it was announced that Tony McCarroll would be suing the band for half a million pounds. His dismissal, he claimed, wasn’t due to his lack of ability but simply because Noel Gallagher disliked him. When Oasis’s lawyer looked into the matter he discovered some bad news. When McCarroll left the band, the record contract that he had signed with the other four members hadn’t been re-negotiated or the partnership dissolved. Therefore, the claim couldn’t be ignored.

  Meanwhile, Oasis were in Germany, playing Utrecht on the 10th, Munich (‘Muu-nich!’) on the 12th, Berlin on the 14th, Bielefeld on the 15th. They were annoyed that McCarroll was still haunting them, but any anger was softened by the news from America.

  ‘Wonderwall’ had started selling and that in turn had massively boosted the sales for Morning Glory. Both records now looked like entering their respective US charts. The band’s forthcoming US tour, starting in late February, could only help matters.

  Oasis now returned to play three UK gigs, one at Whitley Bay and two at Edinburgh’s Ingliston Exhibition Centre. On the second night, after support band Ocean Colour Scene’s set, the PA piped through producer Brendan Lynch’s remix of ‘Champagne Supernova’, another one-off twelve-inch record designed for the clubs.

  Liam, the purist, was standing on-stage with Guigsy and Bonehead at the time and when he heard the mix he started shouting at them, ‘I fucking hate these records. It’s not Oasis, it doesn’t suit us. They’re shit.

  Lynch, who had worked on all of Paul Weller’s solo material, had, on Noel’s request, completed and delivered three versions of the song. The one he most liked, Noel rejected. The one he thought too obvious, Noel okayed. Brendan was very aware of Liam’s dislike of such records. The singer had told him so in no uncertain words.

  After the gig, in the hotel bar, Lynch regretfully said, ‘I wish I had never agreed to do it. It’s been absolute mad.’

  As he spoke, News Of The World reporters were casually sat around, watching the band’s every move. Ocean Colour Scene were also present that night. They had recently been signed to MCA and were now excitedly getting ready for their first record in years to be released.

  Noel sat with Meg and Jefferson Hack, the editor of Dazed and Confused, a new magazine that wanted to interview him. Noel wasn’t interested.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he told the editor, ‘you’ll get far better stuff if you get fifty Oasis fans together in a room and interview them. They’ll tell you much more than I ever could.’

  This was a regular trait of Noel’s, to dismiss breezily his work and refuse to analyse it. It was as if h
e believed that by putting his mind to explanations it would somehow kill the magic. Often, he would laugh off his work.

  ‘People go on about “Cigarettes and Alcohol”, being a great insight into Thatcher’s children,’ he’d say with a pretend laugh, ‘But I was taking the piss when I wrote it.’ Or ‘that “Live Forever” song, wrote it in ten minutes, mate’.

  It was his defence mechanism, another way of warding people who wanted to get too close, who desired answers.

  The next morning Noel woke up to find Liam and Ocean Colour Scene’s vocalist, Simon Fowler, still drinking at the bar. He and Meg then flew back to London, and that night attended the NME Brat awards.

  Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer hosted the ceremony. Among the winners, which were decided on a mixture of the writers’ choice and readers’ voting, Pulp and Black Grape were both honoured.

  The hosts then announced that there were no more bands to talk about as one band had totally swept the board. They were, of course, Oasis, who this year had won the awards for Best Act, Best Album, Best Single and Best Band.

  Noel slowly walked to the stage and holding his four trophies, he told the audience, ‘It’s really hard to come up here and be humble. So I won’t. You’re all shit.’

  Later, he had his photo taken for the NME, backstage with Jarvis Cocker and Shaun Ryder. ‘It was funny,’ he later reported. ‘Ryder was going to Jarvis, “I know what you’re like, you’re like one of those kids who always sat at the back of the class but was a real perv and had loads of girls and that.” I don’t think Jarvis knew what was going on.’

  In February Noel went down to a London studio to sing on a Chemical Brothers’ track. The idea had first come about because of the Chemicals regularly playing the Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ within their breakbeat-fuelled sets at the Social. Noel had expressed an interest in singing on a cover of it with them. Instead, that idea was dumped and Noel came up with a set of lyrics, which he entitled ‘Setting Son’ (he had now renamed his own song of that title, ‘D’Ya Know What I Mean’), and then sang over a new Chemicals’ track. It took him about an hour. Then he was gone. In October 1996 it would enter the charts at number one.