by Paolo Hewitt
Later that month, Noel travelled to Rome with Marcus and Meg to do radio and press interviews and take a long weekend break.
Oasis were highly popular now in Italy and Spain, and this was a chance to promote Oasis through various foreign media.
On Thursday, he booked into one of Rome’s top hotels on the Via Sistina. On Friday, a newspaper reported where he was staying and by Friday afternoon literally hundreds of fans had gathered outside the entrance.
Noel undertook interviews for both Italian and Spanish radio. The Spanish interviewer told him that Morning Glory was the number-one album, having sold some 85,000 copies.
‘To give you a perspective on that number,’ he told Noel, ‘Blur have sold about 25,000 copies. That’s the average sales for my country.’
Noel smiled at that news. On the Saturday, he and Meg visited the Vatican and then went shopping. Meg left him to go back to the hotel, and when he and Marcus finally arrived back, a sea of fans rushed him and he was literally lifted off his feet as carried to the door. As he sailed into the entrance on a sea of shouting, cheering kids, that beatific smile crossed his face once more.
On Sunday, he returned to London and made his way to the BBC studios in Wood Lane where Paul Weller was recording a special show for Later.
Noel watched Weller keenly and then afterwards at the party danced with Paul’s mum, Ann. ‘Fucking hell,’ he said, ‘I kept going to Paul’s dad, John, “Is this all right? I don’t want you whacking me”. Ann was going, “Oh, don’t worry about him.”’
The next day Noel travelled up to Manchester to meet the Manchester City chairman Francis Lee, spend time with Peggy and Paul, and also visit Mark Coyle and Phil Smith.
Then it was back to London for the Brit Awards and to start rehearsals for their most important US tour to date. Morning Glory was now nestling in America’s top-ten. The only British group to achieve that status in 1995 was The Beatles. And ‘Wonderwall’ had entered the singles charts at twenty-one. The hard work was finally paying off.
Oasis were now firmly embedded in Britain’s consciousness. Every week either the tabloids or the quality papers were running stories on them.
Girls regularly appeared on cheap front-pages dishing the dirt on their flings with Liam. For Noel, it was normally stories such as his father trying to sell a scrap of paper containing the lyrics for one of the first songs he ever wrote (apparently called ‘Sunday’, and which read in part, ‘You said yes on Monday / Wednesday we were wed / You left me on Friday / If it’s Sunday, am I dead?’ Consciously or not, this recalls the old traditional song ‘Solomon Grundy’, which runs ‘Born on a Monday / Married on a Tuesday, etc’). Other articles would examine the band’s US success.
The real proof of their celebrity status was when the popular satirical TV programme Spitting Image started to run sketches on the band. Their funniest shot concerned the brother’s well-documented liking of cocaine, with Liam saying to Noel, ‘There’s eighteen inches of snow in Scotland,’ and Noel replying, ‘Oh, that’s where I left it.’
On the day that Creation released the ninth Oasis single, ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’, c/w ‘Step Out’, ‘Underneath The Sky’ and ‘Cum On Feel The Noize’ (it came wrapped in one of Cannon’s best sleeves, the image being that of a drum kit covered in colourful tulips. It was a tribute to the time when Ringo Starr rejoined The Beatles, after briefly quitting in 1968, and George Harrison had the studio decked out in flower to welcome him back) Oasis arrived at Earls Court on the night of 19 February to attend the Brit Awards.
The band sat at a table with their girlfriends (Liam and Patsy were now a public item), management and record company, and were called three times to the stage to accept awards for Best Video with ‘Wonderwall’ (Guigsy commenting, ‘I’m not even in it’), Best Group and Best Album.
During their speeches, they swore profusely, insulting INXS singer Michael Hutchence (an E’d up Noel Gallagher telling him that ‘Has-beens shouldn’t give prizes to going-to-be’s’), Chris Evans (Liam stating, ‘No ginger-haired bastard can throw Oasis off-stage’), and took their revenge on Blur by singing the’ All the people, so many people’ refrain from, and ‘Shite Life’ to the tune of, ‘Parklife’, and ended with Noel stating that there were only seven people in the hall who could help young British people, and that was Oasis, Alan McGee and Labour leader Tony Blair, who was also present. The music business quietly seethed at their tables.
There were live performance from Pulp, Simply Red, David Bowie, and Take That put in their final appearance before splitting up.
But it was Michael Jackson, dressed in Jesus-like white robes and surrounded on-stage by hundreds of children, that prompted the night’s more memorable act when Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker tried to invade the stage to register his disgust. He was later taken to a nearby police station for questioning. Noel remained in the arena and told every interviewer who approached him that he didn’t give a shit what ‘fat cats earning £450,000 a year’ thought of his band, the only prizes worth having were the ones voted for by fans’.
Later on, Oasis partied until the early hours at the Landmark Hotel and then crawled into their hotel rooms or houses to watch the show on television that night. Carlton TV edited out all the swearing and Jarvis Cocker’s actions. But at a later date, in a late night slot, the TV station screened the whole affair. The bands that had upstaged, upset and insulted the entire music industry establishment were now so popular that TV programmers were willing to run the show at the risk of the undoubted ‘public outrage’ the newspapers would then whip up.
If anything, Oasis and Pulp gained even more support when their behaviour was made public in the next day’s papers.
And the industry should care. Record sales, after a slump in the early 1990s, were now, thanks mainly to the new breed, standing at an all-time high.
Music was now outselling computer games.
At about one-thirty in the morning, as the coach travelled towards St. Louis, Noel Gallagher stepped into the front area where Guigsy, Bonehead, Liam and Alan White were sitting, and said, ‘Have I got a tape to play you.’
‘What?’ Liam quickly demanded. ‘What you got? What is it?’
‘Ah, ah,’ Noel said, bending down to slot the tape into the machine. He pressed the play button and then sat down with an all-knowing smile on his lips.
‘Come on,’ Liam demanded. ‘What the fuck is it?’
Suddenly, the old Oasis number ‘Colour My Life’ started up through the speakers.
‘Fucking hell,’ Bonehead exclaimed, ‘it’s us!’
‘Where do you get it? Where do you get it?’ Liam demanded.
‘Bootleg CD that’s just come out,’ Noel informed him. ‘No prizes guessing who’s put it out.’
‘Who?’ Liam asked.
‘Well, who else apart from us and Coyley would have access to rehearsal tapes or a gig from the Boardwalk?’ Noel replied.
For the next hour the band settled down, delighted to hear themselves and their music from four years ago. Songs such as ‘Tape Me’, ‘See The Sun’, ‘Must Be The Music’, ‘Better Let You Know’, ‘Snakebite’, ‘I Will Show You’ and the acoustic number ‘Life In Vain’, took them straight back to the Boardwalk, to rehearsing and dreaming, of Liam being regularly thrown out of the club, of Noel bouncing cheques to pay their way.
Part of the CD also featured an early gig at the Boardwalk. ‘There were four people at that gig,’ Liam remembered, ‘and we were fucking giving it to them. Come on, Oasis!’
‘You know,’ Noel commented as the last song died away, ‘that’s better than the Beatles’ demo tape. Some of those lyrics aren’t too bad. I think I’ll use some of them.’
Then he paused to think.
‘How top would that be? I’ve ripped everybody else off. Now I’m ripping myself off.’
The American tour had started in Kansas City on 23 February, moved to St. Louis (a gig they had cancelled two times previously) on the 24th. Journalists fr
om the British music press and the nationals followed them everywhere.
Backstage, after the St. Louis show, a fan told the newly-bearded Liam, ‘You know, you really remind me of Charlie Manson with that beard.’
‘Fuck off, you dickhead,’ Liam shot back, ‘Did you ever see Charlie Manson singing on-stage?’ and then he walked off.
They played Minneapolis on the 26th and afterwards Noel sloped off as usual to the production room. Liam stayed alone in another room, ruminating on the subject of fame.
‘Fame,’ he sneered, ‘you keep it at one pace behind you all the time. You never let it walk in front of you because if you do then it totally blocks your view, gets right in the way of your goal. The reason I’m in a band is to get the music over to people. That’s it. I can’t be arsed with anything else.
‘The music. Simple. But you get all these people who read about you and stuff. They think they know you. But they don’t. How could they? They’ve never spoken to me. They’ve only read about me.’
Liam was talking in the week when over 400,000 Oasis records were bought by the British public. A quarter of a million of them were accounted for by the new single ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’, which had smashed its way in at number one.
On the coach that night they watched their appearance on Top Of The Pops. The video started as Blur were finishing off a frenetic performance of their new single, ‘Stereotypes’.
The camera then moved across to Noel, standing coolly at the mike. He was wearing shades, a white button-down shirt and playing his Union Jack guitar. It was a stately performance.
Then, for one of the very few times in the show’s history, Oasis performed a second number, this time Slade’s ‘Cum On Feel The Noize’, with Liam deliberately singing out of sync on the line ‘So you think my singing’ s out of time’.
The band replayed the video at least twenty times, Noel pointing with real pride in his voice, ‘That’s us, The Jam and The Beatles who have been given two numbers on the show.’ It hardly needed saying, but the war with Blur was finally over.
On 27 February, having stayed up until one-thirty that afternoon and then slept for just an hour, Noel Gallagher walked out onstage with Oasis and delivered a show in Chicago’s, Aragon Ballroom that Marcus later said was ‘frighteningly good’.
In the major American cities, ‘the music towns’, as road crew manager Trigger called them, Oasis thrived. In the smaller towns, a significant section of the audience had only come to hear ‘Wonderwall’ (‘that’s so cool, that song,’ the band were often told), and would often leave straight after hearing it in Noel’s acoustic section.
In Minneapolis, the band were photographed for the prestigious cover shot of Rolling Stone magazine, Noel and Liam attending a separate session the next day. They walked out after an hour. They were bored and as they told the protesting photographer, ‘Rolling Stone need us more than we need them.’
At the next gig in Milwaukee they played in a hall that had also booked a Mexican band for the club next-door, causing huge confusion as each set of roadies entered the hall with their equipment. Noel stayed on the coach, watching the farce and using his now-favourite expression, ‘I’ve got one of the biggest selling albums in America and this happens to me.’
It was Cleveland on 3 March, Detroit the next night, Indianapolis two nights later, and then shows in Fairfax and Philadelphia.
Prior to the latter show, Noel sat down with Ben Stud of the Melody Maker and in the course of the interview, confessed to having been involved in burglaries and car radio theft.
When the paper ran the article over two weeks in April, they pulled out and highlighted Noel’s statement. The Easter holiday is traditionally a barren time for news, so it wasn’t too long before an enterprising journalist rang up Dr. Adrian Rogers of the Conservative Family Institute for a reaction. Predictably, Rogers went public, demanding a full police enquiry and asking British fans to boycott the band.
The story quickly became a lead news item over Easter, and Chief Superintendant David James of the CID informally interviewed the writer Ben Stud. He was then asked to provide police with a written statement regarding the interview.
Stud did so, defending Noel and stating that the band were well known for their fanciful statements.
‘Had I believed he was remotely serious,’ Stud wrote, ‘as a professional journalist of some ten years’ standing I would have pursued him on the point.’
Even so, the row continued with, at one point, some MPs claiming that they would raise the matter in the Houses of Parliament.
Meanwhile, back in the US, Noel, not Liam, succumbed to a sore throat and the band cancelled gigs in Phoenix and Los Angeles. It was while recuperating there that Noel finally met his hero, Burt Bacharach.
They had breakfast together and Burt arranged for Noel to see his own personal physician. The half-hour visit cost Noel $1,000. Bacharach also revealed that he was booked to perform two shows in London in June. He asked Noel to make a guest appearance on the song ‘This Guy’s In Love With You’.
At Oasis’s Providence gig, as a result of objects being thrown at them in previous dates, tickets were printed with the warning that if anyone should throw anything on-stage the band would discontinue the gig.
Predictably, someone threw a boot at Noel during his acoustic set, and the band refused to return to the stage. The next day, Noel travelled to perform a solo acoustic set at a SNOasis show that was to take place in a mountain resort. There were other acts booked to play that afternoon.
Noel walked on-stage in the bitter cold air, played two songs and then quit. His hands had frozen up and he couldn’t play his guitar.
The band then travelled to New York.
On their first night there, they all gathered in a nearby Irish bar. Robbie Williams was also in attendance, having flown in with his girlfriend after holidaying in the Caribbean.
Patsy Kensit had also arrived, as had Tim and Chris Abbot, Johnny Hopkins and Jill Furmanovsky. Noel left the Irish bar early and walked up to Motown’s new bar opposite Central Park. He ordered drinks and was chuffed to fuck when the barman refused his money. Even Motown Records took Oasis seriously.
There was a party that night in Liam and Patsy’s room where Bonehead’s brother, Martin, who lived in America and was now clearly worse for wear, kept trying to talk to Noel about Oasis. Finally, Noel took a lamp off the bedside cabinet, crouched in the corner holding it up to his face and said, ‘Go away. I’ve got the biggest selling album in the...’
Richard Ashcroft, formerly of The Verve, was also present. He was supporting Oasis at their gig in the Paramount Theatre.
Later on, Noel sat in his bedroom, confessing to real nerves about recording the next Oasis album. ‘I’m a fucking millionaire,’ he said. ‘Most of my songs were written when I was on the dole. What do I write about now?’
It was a smokescreen. In the red-and-black-covered exercise book he carried everywhere with him, there sat some forty sets of lyrics, many of them already set to music in his mind.
The next morning, Noel travelled to JFK airport at the invitation of Johnny Depp, who was shooting his new movie Donnie Brasco with Al Pacino. Noel waited on-set for about an hour, hoping to meet Pacino. But at two he had to leave for a photo session with Jill in Central Park.
When Noel got back to the hotel, all the band minus Liam were in the bar waiting for the shoot. Finally, Kevin came over and said, ‘Liam doesn’t want to do it.’
Jill said, ‘Well, we could always do individual shots,’ and Noel looked up and said, pointing to the other three members, ‘Who the fuck would want to look at pictures of him, him and him? Fuck it, I’m going shopping.’
He stood up and said, ‘Liam’s a wanker. I could be meeting Al Pacino now, going to him, “Now Al, don’t do it like that, try this.”’
Oasis sounchecked at five that afternoon. The gig was actually in the same complex that housed Madison Square Gardens. According to Marcus the band could hav
e played there. ‘But where do we go when we come back?’ he rhetorically asked.
Meanwhile, tickets outside were selling for $250; Epic were forced to buy some off the touts so that their staff could get in to see this top-ten act of theirs.
The next day the band flew back into London for a brief rest before resuming with gigs in Wales, two in Cardiff on 18 and 19 of March and two in Dublin.
As the papers speculated on Liam and Patsy, Oasis flew to Germany for three dates, one in Offenbach on the 26th, two in Munich on the 27th and 29th, before taking in gigs in Milan on the 29th, Grenoble on the 31st, Barcelona on 2 April and Bordeaux on the 4th.
Then it was back to the States for three shows in Vancouver, Seattle and San Francisco on the 10th, 11th and 13th.
On their arrival home, the Noel’s robbery story had now broken large. At Manchester Airport, Liam was asked for a reaction from the crowd of photographers and journalists who awaited him.
‘Yeah, I did it,’ he shot back, ‘and your house is next.’
Noel meanwhile had travelled to Chris Evans’s new TV show, TFI Friday on Channel Four and delivered, in the circumstances, a very relaxed and humorous interview.
He applauded Jarvis Cocker’s actions at the Brits, and said of Michael Jackson, ‘He comes to our country and comes on-stage thinking he’s God. I mean who does he think he is. Me?’
But that night in his Camden flat, Noel locked all the doors and said to Meg, ‘I can’t believe it. They’re going to ask fucking questions in the House [Parliament] and all I’ve ever done is write some songs and swear on TV.’
For most people present, it was the most worried anyone had ever seen him. He was also fuming about McCarroll’s legal action.
‘It’s costing us thousands of pounds in lawyers,’ he fiercely stated, ‘and he’s claiming royalties on an album that is selling because Alan White, who doesn’t get any royalties from it, is flogging his arse around the world promoting. That can’t be right.’
