by Paolo Hewitt
‘But then it got to 1992,’ he continues, ‘and I owed something like £1.2 million. I’d even sold the name Creation to Charles Koppelam who runs EMI Records. I sold him the name for $500,000 and I didn’t have anything else I could fucking sell. So I had to sell 49% of my company to Sony.
‘They signed the label for two reasons. Number one, because I had a history of finding bands. Number two, because they thought Primal Scream were going to become superstars.’
In March 1994 Primal Scream released their third album, Give Out But Don’t Give Up, and thanks to Sony’s huge distribution network the album, despite receiving poor reviews, outsold Screamadelica by some 400,000 copies, selling in total 600,000 copies. But it wasn’t enough. The album had cost £425,000 to make.
‘So basically at that point we were right in the shit with Sony,’ McGee explains. It would take something truly special to rescue both McGee and his label. How ironic then that Creation’s initial success which had started with two brothers who wanted to smack the fuck out of each other, would now be saved, by two brothers who often acted like they wanted to smack the fuck out of each other.
One of them, Noel Gallagher, is now sitting in his chair laughing at McGee who is sliding further and further down the sofa. All McGee can think to himself, as Noel reaches for another drink, is how the fuck does he keep going and how the fuck does he keep coming up with these amazing songs? And when can I get some sleep?
Ten
Noel Gallagher stands with about twenty other people in the Boardwalk, Manchester, watching his brother on-stage for the first time in his life. Because they cannot yet afford a microphone stand, Liam holds the mike in his hand.
Bonehead, Guigsy and McCarroll look nervous, but Liam doesn’t. He is, of course, fronting, even now asserting that ‘he was mad for doing it’.
As is so often the case with any important event, time rushes by. One minute they’re nervously plugging in, hands slightly shaking, and the next they’re playing the last song.
In the Oasis mythology, Noel now comes backstage, tells the band that they’re shit, offers to join and write all the songs and they start rehearsing the next day.
Not so.
He did heavily criticise them, and Liam would have then challenged Noel, pointing out that if they were shit what about him? Why not join and make us better?
Undoubtedly the offer would have appealed to Noel. He was now twenty-four and had never been in a band, despite having furiously written songs these past few years. And, Oasis was the perfect band for him to join. It contained his brother and people he knew, apart from Mccarroll.
Him aside, they all spoke the same language, came from the same class. They all liked football, scooters, clothes and cars. They were all obsessed with music. Perfect then, but Noel had a problem.
He couldn’t ditch his job with the Inspirals. He earned good wages. No way did he want to go back on the dole. So Noel prevaricated. What he did was to invite the boys round to his flat in India House to play them a few of his songs.
The band gathered round at Noel’s and, guitar in hand, he played them a few of his songs. One was called ‘Live Forever’. The others had titles such as ‘Colour My Life’, ‘See The Sun’, ‘Better Let You Know’, ‘Must Be The Music’, ‘Snakebite’, ‘Life In Vain’ [the title adapted from The Stones song ‘Love In Vain’] and ‘I Will Show You’.
The only song of theirs that Noel would even consider playing live was ‘Take Me’. He liked the lyrics.
Listening to Noel’s songs, Guigsy, Bonehead and Liam felt a growing sense of real excitement. It was obvious that they were now in the presence of someone who was obviously very talented. He not only had an ear for melody but his arrangements had class as well. They determined to get Noel in as soon as possible.
‘I remember ringing Liam constantly,’ Bonehead recalls, ‘asking if his kid had made his mind up yet.’ Indeed, one Sunday afternoon, as Noel watched the football, Liam turned up on his doorstep, demanding an answer.
Typically, Noel took the cool approach. A month after the Boardwalk show, Noel Gallagher finally committed himself to Oasis, but only under some strict provisos. The first was that they would give their everything to the band. No one would be allowed to miss rehearsals. Everybody had to make a 100% effort. Failure to do so would mean dismissal.
They would have to watch their drug and alcohol intake too.
‘The rule,’ Guigsy explains, ‘was that you could do what you want but only if you can handle it. Like I don’t drink before I go on-stage because I can’t handle it, but I can smoke loads of spliff. Whereas Liam can drink a hundred beers before he goes on and he can do it.’
Noel would carry on with the Inspirals and while he was away the others would have to keep on working. Any money they had would be put towards the cause.
They all eagerly agreed. By laying down these conditions, Noel Gallagher confirmed himself as the band’s leader. As time moved on, only his brother would ever challenge his right to that title.
Noel also pulled in his friend Mark Coyle to engineer their sound and help set up the equipment.
At first, the band were unsure of Coyley. He seemed quiet and contained. But they soon learnt that once he had had a few drinks, he livened up considerably. Plus, he was totally on their wavelength.
Noel and Guigsy would gang up on him and kick off a football debate on the merits of City or United. Mark would argue his case and then Bonehead would come in on Coyley’s side. He too supported United. But he was never as committed as Mark.
‘Well, you can shut up as well,’ Coyley would say to his United ally. ‘What the fuck do you know about it?’
Bonehead could only say, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’
Noel’s first concert, Oasis’s second, took place at the Boardwalk on 15 January 1992. They played a set lasting no longer than half an hour. They didn’t move an inch on stage and then they abruptly left. Some kids in the crowd heckled them.
The next morning at five-thirty, Noel made it to Manchester airport, having been up all night and then flew to Japan with the Inspirals and Coyley.
‘It was our two-week round the world tour,’ the Inspirals’ Graham Lambert explains with a laugh.
The remaining members of Oasis eagerly carried on rehearsing. But it was only when Noel was in town that they would feel the excitement of it all.
Meanwhile, Noel and Coyley were having a real good time. The Inspirals played Japan, and then moved on to Argentina and Uruguay, where they played at the River Plate’s famous football stadium.
In Estonia, they played a festival. Two stages had been erected and the crowd would move from one to the other. Directly before the Inspirals played, Bob Geldof performed. He ran overtime.
So, over on his stage, Noel got on the mike and started saying things like,’ All right Bob, you’ve done your bit. Come on, off you come. I mean you don’t need the money after all that Live Aid business, do you?’
Afterwards, Geldof came to their dressing-room. All the Manchester boys ignored him. As he left, Geldof slipped over, and the band and crew fell about laughing.
Graham Lambert recalls that in this period Noel was totally besotted by U2’s Achtung Baby album and that he finally learnt how to play that guitar standard, beloved of pickers everywhere, ‘Stairway To Heaven’ by Led Zeppelin.
The next Oasis gig was at Dartford Polytechnic on 19 April, which Noel had secured thanks to the connections he was making through working with the Inspirals.
To travel there the band hired out a van and Guigsy took his car. The band arrived, followed by about five of their mates. They went to the local pub where someone lit up a spliff. The band were chucked out and made their way to the college.
They had with them a plentiful supply of cocaine, speed and Ecstasy. By the time they got on-stage, they were seriously gone. Bonehead played with three cigarettes in his mouth, Noel was E’d up, Guigsy fell off the stage and McCarroll forgot to tighten the nuts on his cymbals so
when he first hit them, his drum kit half-collapsed.
So much for the band handling their drink and drugs.
Meanwhile, in the audience, the Manchester friends kicked off a fight with some students. Later on, some of the offices were raised and money that the students had collected for their traditional rag week was stolen. The band and their friends had to fight their way out of the college and into their cars.
Guigsy was in no condition to drive so by the time they reached a service station on the motorway, he pulled over and he, Liam and McCarroll went to sleep. They were awoken in the morning by a copper banging on their window.
They explained that they had got drunk and wanted to sleep off their hangovers. The policeman accepted their story and walked off, failing to notice the rather huge spliff that was in Guigsy’s ashtray. Top night out, then.
Noel had now informed the Carpets that he was in a band. In fact to everyone he met he told the same thing.
‘I’m in a band, we’re called Oasis and we’re playing at such and such place. Come down if you want to check it out.’ Then he left it at that.
At the Hippodrome in Oldham, Graham Lambert witnessed his first Oasis gig when the band supported The Revenge. He later saw them again.
‘When Noel asked me what I thought I told him that I thought the music was still a bit unfocused,’ he recalls.
But the interesting thing, according to Graham, was Noel’s obvious prolific nature. Then, just as now, Noel wrote most days of the week. Once he got on a roll there was no stopping him. He would show up at rehearsals with a whole new batch of songs which would then take precedence over the ‘older’ material.
During this period, Noel astonished the band with the quality and maturity of his songs. He had now come up with songs such as ‘Whatever’ and a real band favourite, ‘All Around The World’. There was also ‘She’s Electric’, (Noel recalling his primary school days and blatantly lifting part of the melody from the kids TV show Me And You) and ‘Hello’, which were demoed at Mark Coyle’s house at 388 Mauldeth Road West, although they wouldn’t see the light of day until October 1985 when Oasis’s second album was released.
‘They never played the same set twice,’ Graham recalls. ‘Within six weeks they had a new set-list which I told Noel wasn’t good for getting record companies interested. But he never seemed that bothered. I also remember Bonehead playing acoustic guitar at a few of the gigs.’
By now, the band had moved into a new rehearsal space. This was at the Boardwalk in Manchester. They were given a room downstairs where they rehearsed maybe two or three nights a week, depending on their finances. Then they came to an arrangement with another group, Sister Lovers, to share the cost. Once that was done, Oasis were in there every night of the week, starting at five in the evening and finishing by ten o’clock at night.
The rehearsals would start off with any new songs Noel might have. These would have included ‘Blue’, a song that Liam says was Noel’s first-ever epic.
Then the band would rehearse the songs they knew, maybe breaking off round about seven-thirty for a beer or a spliff. Then it would be back to playing until ten.
The room was small and sometimes there were pools of water on the floor. To liven the place up, Bonehead brought in some paint and they would sporadically paint the back wall in the colours of the Union Jack.
Noel had even written a song called ‘The Red, White and Blue’, and their fascination with the British flag caused a little consternation among some onlookers. One of these was the group they shared the room with, Sister Lovers.
In November 1992 one of the group’s members, Debbie Turner saw Creation boss Alan McGee at a Bob Mould gig at the Boardwalk. Afterwards, she invited him down to their rehearsal room for a spliff.
McGee entered the room where the most important band he would ever sign rehearsed and noted the flag. He was told that it was the work of this lads’ band, Oasis, and there were various mutterings about the band’s politics. McGee made a mental note to steer clear of them.
For the group, their interest in the flag had been prompted by bands such as The Who, who early in their career had used the flag in an ironic pop-art fashion.
‘But because we were lads who liked drinking beer and going to football,’ Noel explains, ‘no one thought we would be into art or anything. It was like this song I had, “The Red, White and Blue”. That song came about because one day I had gone down to Johnny Roadhouse to get some equipment. As I came out, there was some march going on. I’m standing there and this guy comes over and starts ranting at me for not taking any interest in his cause.
‘I’m like, I’m arsed about your cause. All I want to do, mate, is be in a band. If this is your thing, then fine, I haven’t got a problem with it, live and let live. But leave me out of it.
‘He just went on and on, so I wrote this song about how if you look a certain way you instantly get labelled and I called it “Red, White and Blue”, which was also about how things like the Union Jack get hijacked and if you use it people automatically think you’re part of something you’re not.’
The song was based around a riff not that dissimilar to Isaac Hayes’s song ‘Shaft’, with Noel utilising his wah-wah pedal to maximum effect. But he soon shelved the song.
‘All the band really liked it but I knew if we played it, it would cause more trouble than it was worth, which is why it got sacked.’
Because they were regular users of the rehearsal space, the Boardwalk would occasionally put the group on upstairs. This was probably done in some vain attempt to get the rent paid.
The band often missed payments. Buying equipment proved to be expensive and although everyone but Liam worked, the cost of maintaining themselves and Oasis consistently left them short of cash.
At the end of each rehearsal, the band would down their instruments and bolt for the door. The last one out had to hand the keys back which always meant making up some kind of excuse to the owners about paying tomorrow. Sometimes Noel would pay by a cheque that he knew would bounce higher than a kangaroo. Other times they would offer ten quid and solemnly promise to pay the rest the next night.
What bugged everyone was that they thought the place was a right dump. First off it was cold and leaked water, which was highly dangerous with all the electrical gear. It was also small and dark.
‘Well before U2’s Zooropa tour,’ Guigsy says, ‘Noel came up with this idea of turning off all the lights, getting a load of broken down TVs in and then just switching them on to light the room up.’
If you were to have seen the band practise at this time, you would have opened the door and, looking clockwise, found to your left-hand side, Noel playing his guitar. Guigsy would be in the far corner to Noel’s left and Bonehead was placed in the right-hand corner, playing next to McCarroll’s drums which had been set up against the wall. Liam stood in the middle of the room.
When the band jammed on an instrumental bit, Liam would sit cross-legged on the floor, spliff in hand, close his eyes and check the music.
If Coyley was taping a session there would be a mike placed over one of the pipes that ran above their heads. It was his job to set up the equipment and again the boys were initially impressed with his knowledge as he ran around checking amps and levels. It was only when equipment failed to work and Coyley’s eloquent response was to try to kick it into life, that they realised they had a fellow chancer on board.
There was some graffiti on the door and further down the corridor, Liam had drawn a plane and written a remark under it about being careful when you land on runways, a biting comment aimed at all United supporters. But still it was here that the unique Oasis sound first started to surface. It happened through volume. The band always played loudly. Noel would put his switch right up to ten and then hammer the shit out of his guitar, venting all his frustrations. Bonehead did the same.
It was at some point here that Noel realised that if Bonehead kept playing barré chords, his fingers covering all t
he strings, all of the time, that then allowed Noel the freedom to pick out melodies, riffs and guitar lines. Align that with a very basic, almost punk-like rhythm section provided by McCarroll and Guigsy and the sheer volume they played at, and the Oasis sound starts to take shape.
The only missing element at this point is Liam’s voice which was yet to take on the strength and character it now has. But that, with time, would come.
In their idle moments, the group would go and play tricks on other bands rehearsing. They would carefully open the doors to other rehearsal rooms and switch off all the lights as someone rehearsed. At other times, they would play knock-down ginger, banging on a band’s door and then running back to their room.
If anyone complained, well, there’s five of us here and you want to talk about it outside, mate? None of them ever did. But if anyone knew what the outside felt like, it was Liam. Every Friday night, after rehearsing, he would go upstairs to the Boardwalk’s Friday club night.
He would stroll in, skin up and stand there blatantly puffing on his spliff. The bouncers would then come over and ask him to put it out. He’d tell them to fuck off. They would then grab him, push him through the backdoors, down the stairs and out of the club on to the street. He would curse like mad, and then do precisely the same thing the next Friday night.
‘I went down those stairs so many times,’ he recalls, ‘it was ridiculous.’
His shenanigans were so regular that the Boardwalk management even wrote to the band saying that if Liam didn’t stop then the whole group would be banned from the premises. The next Friday, there was Liam, spliff in hand.
He didn’t care because he knew something that only four other people knew in Manchester. Oasis were going to be huge. It was just a fact. The songs that were rushing out of Noel were simply head and shoulders above everything else. And that fascinated Liam.