Getting High

by Paolo Hewitt

  It was a fury so fearsome it shook her. But what was she to do?

  ‘Thirty-odd years ago,’ she explains, ‘you never really heard of divorce. Thirty-odd years ago you never heard of the pill or birth control. You just thought you were married and that was your job, just get on with it.

  ‘Like my mum used to say, you made your bed, now lie in it. I was in it then so I plodded along and made the most of it.’

  On 11 January 1966 Peggy gave birth to her first son, Paul Anthony Gallagher. Fourteen months later, on 29 May 1967, a second son followed. He was proudly named Noel Thomas Gallagher. The Beatles’ revolutionary album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released three days later on 1 June.

  Peggy didn’t go to hospital for either birth and both babies were delivered by a midwife in the house. Despite Thomas’s threatening behaviour, Peggy could hardly contain her joy.

  ‘That was a happy time and all,’ she says. ‘It was great when I had them, the two of them together. I was wanting two boys together ’cos I thought, they’d grow up and play football together and they’d be great friends for each other. ‘They used to get along great. Paul and Noel went everywhere together up until they were teenagers. They’d half-kill each other but then you’d see them walking out of the gate together. They were always together.’

  Their father worked on a building site and Peggy stayed at home to tend to her precious babies. When Noel was eighteen months old Peggy took an evening cleaning job. It was a real necessity. Bringing up two sons was expensive and their father wasn’t that forthcoming with his wages.

  The problem of what to do with the children while Peggy worked was solved when Peggy’s sister Una agreed to come and babysit them.

  The arrangement was that she would stay until Thomas returned from work, but more often than not, it was Peggy who would be home first. Thomas would roll in much later. He hadn’t started drinking then, but he’d curtly inform his wife he had been playing cards. End of discussion.

  ‘I used to do a lot of cooking myself,’ she recalls. ‘I’d always make me own bread, you see. I’d spend Sundays in the kitchen making apple-pies, making my own jam, my own bread. My life revolved around the boys. I’d spend my time washing, cooking or cleaning, and wherever I went they were with me. If I left the house, they were always with me.

  ‘If I’d go out of a night-time visiting, they’d go with me. Even from an early age they wouldn’t stay in the house with their dad because they never got any attention from him. He wanted to sit and watch television and that was it. Everything else was switched off. They wanted to watch cartoons and he’d say, “They’re a load of rubbish.” And he’d put on what he wanted to watch. So when I went out, they went out.’

  Some children choose their football teams, others have them thrust upon them. Noel was the latter. The team given to him was Manchester City. At the age of four, he says, his dad would take him and his brother to Maine Road, Manchester City’s football ground.

  This choice of team reflected Thomas’s contrary nature. Most Manchester Irish supported Manchester United. The brilliant Northern Ireland winger, George Best, played for them.

  But Thomas Gallagher picked the Sky Blues. That said, City weren’t a bad team, dominated at the time by class players like Mike Summerbee, Colin Bell and Francis Lee.

  In 1969 they had won the FA cup at Wembley, beating Leicester City 1--0. The following year they bought home the European Cup Winners’ cup, after beating Gornik Zabrze of Vienna 2-1. Lee and Young scored.

  In 1971 it was Manchester City’s policy to let people in for nothing after half-time. Thomas would take advantage of the scheme, getting to the ground at around a quarter to four and then locating himself and his sons in the ground’s Kippax Stand.

  ‘It was a big stand,’ Noel recalls,’ and down the side, where the perspex screen was, there’s a big slope with this ledge type thing.

  It was just big enough to get a kid on so all the dads would put their kids on there. It was like 2,000 kids all sat in a canoe and each dad knew exactly where his son was. He’d leave you there with a flask of Oxo and a bag of crisps and fuck off to the bar.

  ‘All you could see was this big wall of little kids with big bobble hats and scarves on. Then me dad would come back at full time and pick you up and that would be it.’

  To a four-year-old it must have been an amazing experience, to be sat there amidst a sea of grown men, taking in this deafening spectacle of noise, colour, songs and, when City scored, witnessing for the first time an eruption of unbridled mass joy, everyone jumping up and down, noise everywhere.

  Then the songs would start, a community of working-class men joined together in one voice. The impression it made on Noel’s mind was indelible. To see everyone so happy warmed his spirit and gave an inner glow. That feeling and how to produce it would form an integral part of his musical vision. It’s why Maine Road became as important to Noel as the church would be to a thousand soul vocalists. It was his public place of inspiration.

  When Noel, Paul and his dad entered the ground at half-time, the hit records of the day would be played through the speakers as everyone awaited the second half. The number one records that Noel might have heard that year, 1971, included The New Seekers’ ‘I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing’, T-Rex’s ‘Telegram Sam’ and ‘Metal Guru’, ‘Son Of My Father’, by Chicory Tip, ‘Take Me Bak ‘Ome’ and ‘Mama Weer All Crazee Now’, by Slade, and ‘You Wear It Well’ by Rod Stewart.

  The same tunes would be played at full-time as they left the ground to travel home to Longsight.

  But soon the Gallaghers would leave the area. The family had received a letter from their landlords, the local council, informing them that their house had been marked for demolition. They were being rehoused across town in the area of Burnage.

  Their new premises were at 14 Ashbourne Avenue, situated in a cul de sac. There were three bedrooms upstairs, a sitting-room, kitchen and, luxury of luxuries, a toilet inside the house.

  The move meant new primary schools for the boys. Paul and Noel were currently attending classes at St. Roberts. Now, they were placed in St. Bernard’s, a Catholic school where they would stay until secondary school age. Noel says that the best thing he can remember about primary school was being allowed to watch TV programmes such as Stop, Look And Listen, Rainbow and Me And You, whose theme tune Noel loved singing: ‘Me and you / You and me / There’s lots and lots for us to see.’

  By all accounts, Paul was the easiest of the two brothers to teach. He, like his mum, loved reading and writing. Noel was bright as well, but prone to laziness. It was only when something interested him that he would apply himself.

  For instance, the books that most caught his fancy were mainly about football. He, as well as Paul, would often be found in the Burnage Lane library, poring over football annuals. Noel also had a leaning towards books that featured colourful, funny characters such as Tin Tin, Asterix and Doctor Seuss.

  At this stage in Noel’s life, music was on a par with everything else bar his fierce interest in football or his other hobby: the study of aeroplanes flown in the Second World War.

  ‘I’ve still not been able to work that one out to this day,’ he says. ‘But I can tell you your Spitfires from your Hurricanes from your Lancaster Bombers. I used to get those Airfix models and we’d make them ourselves. I can never remember why I got into it.’

  At night-time, after watching Blue Peter or Vision On, Noel and the local children would go outside on the street and play kickcan. This game involved one of them having to guard a ball while simultaneously trying to find where the others had hidden themselves.

  It was always a treat when they persuaded some of the local girls to play; they were never as good as the boys and you got to touch them.

  Peggy had no problems with her children playing on the streets at night. There was nowhere else to go and they were all within hearing distance. Plus this really was an era when you didn’t have to worry
too much about your child’s safety. Their dad, as ever, took another view. He seemed to hate his children enjoying themselves.

  ‘Where have you been?’ he’d snarl at his sons when they returned home, exhausted but happy after running around for hours. ‘Get to bed and don’t go out there again.’

  In summertime, the boys and their mum were freed from Thomas. In the long school holidays, Peggy and her sons would go back to Ireland, back to County Mayo to visit their gran, uncles and cousins. It was an idyllic and important time for Noel.

  Manchester was grey concrete, motorways and high-rise flats. County Mayo was breathtaking scenery where you could run for miles. The country air was sweet, the way of life totally different from what Noel knew.

  ‘We used to go out in the country,’ Noel fondly recalls, ‘picking blackberries to make jam. And my gran didn’t have any running water so you used to have to go over to the well to get water. And then we used to go fishing with our uncle to get fish to eat.

  ‘And then they used to have these big, massive, enormous barns. So my uncle and all the rest of my uncles and aunties would all be out and they’d have pitchforks, throwing hay into the back of the trailer.

  ‘My uncle would then drive it into the barn and me and our kid and all my cousins used to get up on a ladder and go right into the rafters. Then we’d jump down on all this hay. All of us jumping together, all of us on our arses. Then we’d start scrapping. It was fucking ace.

  ‘We used to love getting up in the morning. Chase cows around the field and that, throw stones at them ‘cos we were from Manchester. And bringing in the cows to get milked. We used to love doing that because it used to take about six of us to get one cow through a gate.

  ‘We used to pull a big stick off the hedges or somewhere and stand there like one man and his dog, only it was one man, his seven fucking nephews and a dog. It was ace.’

  Sunday mornings were a particular treat.

  ‘I’ve got so many memories of the local church in Charlestown,’ Noel enthusiastically recalls. ‘There was one Mass and it was like at ten in the morning and that was it, everyone was there.

  ‘The first person to leave two minutes before anybody else was the landlord of the pub across the road because he used to have to go and open up. He’d be at the front somewhere and the priest would give him a nod, because the priest was mad for the ale as well, so as soon as you’d see him leave, it was like a two-minute warning. You knew you’d be straight across to the boozer.

  ‘So we’d go over to the pub. I wasn’t allowed to drink but you were allowed into the pub. Everyone was there, police, everyone. Top.’

  On some occasions, when Noel accompanied Peggy into town, he would inadvertently witness the IRA at work. Towns such as Charlestown are easy prey. Totally isolated and with a police force of two men, such towns were the perfect spots for the IRA to stage robberies to replenish their funds. Who would dare stop them?

  The same principle applied to the town’s younger citizens. Young men, after a long session at the pub, would drive their motorbikes at high speeds and without helmets. Motorists would get behind the wheels of their cars, smashed on alcohol. No one seemed to care.

  ‘Nobody had driving licences,’ Noel states. ‘Everybody was drink-driving all over the place. There was like two police officers, and these geezers from the IRA used to bowl into town, walk into the bank, loads of people around, and go, “How you doing? You all right? How’s your mum? Give us the money. How you doing? Put the money in the bag. Thank you.” Off they go.

  ‘There’s only Dublin which has the high-up police, the superintendents. The rest are like kids from the village. It’s like the Wild West.’

  This sense of freedom aligned with a drinking culture made an impact on Noel. Later on, his music and band would stand precisely for that principle, for freedom, total and absolute freedom.

  Another element of Irish culture that would also seriously affect the young Noel Gallagher was to be found at night-time. His relatives couldn’t afford a television, nor, one suspects, would they want one. There was far more fun to be had when they gathered together at night.

  These get-togethers occurred at one of the family houses. Everybody would crowd in, young and old, and, in Noel’s words, ‘Talk all night. I remember sitting there crying with laughter. They all used to start taking the piss out of each other. And then me gran used to start going off at them, saying, “I remember when you did this when you were a lad.” And they’d all be blaming things on each other.’

  A radio would be on in the corner, playing Irish music, inspiring one of the family to pick up an instrument and lead the rest into a sing-song. The songs would always be melodic, with a great emphasis put upon the choruses.

  Many of the adults there would be encouraged to take solo turns, as would the children. It was a good training ground for a prospective entertainer, an Irish education that would serve as the perfect antidote to the stuffy English culture that Noel was also exposed to.

  (This was the England, remember, whose national radio station only five years previously had refused to continue its coverage of the 1966 World Cup Final between England and Germany, preferring instead to switch to the news as the players went into extra time.)

  Growing up, Noel heard and was struck by certain Irish songs. To this day he cites The Wolfe Tones’ version of Ewan MacColl’s ‘Dirty Old Town’ as one of the greatest recordings ever made.

  ‘There’s no drums in it, no bass guitar,’ Noel enthuses, ‘it’s just traditional Irish instruments and it’s mind-blowing.’

  Songs such as this, or other standards such as ‘Four Green Fields’, would have as much impact on Noel’s later songwriting as Burt Bacharach, Lennon and McCartney, Paul Weller, Johnny Marr [ex of The Smiths] and U2.

  Neither would it have escaped Noel’s attention how the humour, the wordplay and the art of story-telling practised by his relatives, all played a vital part in entertaining those assembled.

  Much of this rubbed off on Noel. He soon became a great storyteller, never adverse to changing a few facts to heighten the drama. From an early age people would always be drawn to him. He exuded a warmth and a humour that people found irresistible.

  ‘Noel was always a happy-go-lucky type,’ says Peggy, ‘always had loads of friends, Noel would be growing up and he’d always have loads of girls, every one that knocked at the door was for Noel.

  ‘Everyone loved Noel. Paul was more on the quiet side but they always had loads of friends. They were always well-liked as they were growing up and they were always happy-go-lucky.

  ‘I’d play Irish records to them as well,’ Peggy explains. ‘They would be quite interested in them and they’d sit and listen to them. Big Tom and all these Irish bands. Later on, of course, they got their own type of music. All mine have done the paper rounds. They’d get three or four pounds and that would go on buying their records.’

  It was Peggy who bought Noel his first record player, a high-fidelity machine with a glass top. It was bought on hire purchase. Peggy also bought her two sons their first guitars. Noel and Paul were obviously attracted to music, and anything her sons showed an interest in, Peggy would do her utmost to encourage.

  It was her way of making up for their father’s seeming lack of interest in his children, as well as expressing the sheer joy and pride she felt for them. She also covered for their father when their birthdays or Christmas arrived.

  ‘He wouldn’t give a damn,’ she recalls bitterly. ‘They woke up Christmas morning and there wasn’t a thing for them. It was all me that done it for them. I always made sure they had loads of presents. He’d go out Christmas Eve and you wouldn’t see him again until Christmas night.

  ‘And as the kids were growing up, he didn’t give a damn as to whether there was a thing there for them or not.

  ‘Then he’d say, “Why are you buying all these things for them? They’ve got more than enough.” I’d say, “It’s Christmas time.” But he never bough
t them a thing.

  ‘To be quite honest with you, I thought he was peculiar. I’ve never seen anything like it because he’d go out and spend money on others but his own never got anything. I always said that to him, his own never got nothing but everyone else did.’

  Noel easily adapted to the tight monetary situation. He instinctively understood the pressure on his mum.

  ‘You know,’ Peggy remembers, ‘as he was growing up, he’d say, “Will you do me a favour, Mam? Have you got a pound?” I’d say, “No, I haven’t got it.” And he’d say, “Okay, it doesn’t matter,” and he wouldn’t bother.

  ‘He wouldn’t ask for much because he knew I didn’t have it. And, then later on, when he was working, he would always come in and give you his keep. I remember when he was growing up, he was about sixteen or seventeen, and he’d see his father going out, and there would be all this shouting, and Noel would come down and say, “Here you are, there’s a fiver for you, you go and get your hair done or you go out as well. Don’t sit there and watch him go out, you go out as well.” Mind you, I always brought them up to realise that if you can’t afford something, you can’t have it.

  ‘If the money isn’t there, you can’t have it. They knew they couldn’t have the dead-expensive trainers. I’d say, “I don’t care what your mates have, they’ve probably got a dad in the house who must be giving them money.” See, their father wouldn’t entertain them with trainers.

  “’They don’t want them,” he’d say. “The trainers are bad for their feet.” It was just because he didn’t want to part with his money. God, he was tight with them as they were growing up. He wouldn’t give them a penny, not a penny would he give them.’

  On 21 September 1972 there was a new addition to the family. Peggy gave birth to a third son, William John Paul Gallagher. He would be her last child.

  Thomas Gallagher now found extra employment as a country and western DJ at the Holy Name Social club in Chorlton. For this, he earned £10 a night. Momentarily, Peggy was happy. She thought it might mean more money for the family. She was mistaken.