Getting High

by Paolo Hewitt

  ‘Right,’ Noel said, ‘I’ll have half a pint of that and one of these big cigars, please.’

  Meanwhile, Liam was upstairs complaining that his room was too big. It was a foretaste of what was to come.

  The next day the band got up early, but the conference was running behind schedule, so they put Noel, Liam and Marcus into a hospitality suite.

  Mistake. The trio sat in a room with a waitress and ordered drink after drink. Then Noel had an idea. He phoned up press officer Johnny Hopkins and told him that Bonehead had broken into the lodge of the legendary racing driver, Jackie Stewart, stolen an air rifle and was now out on the golf course shooting at trees.

  ‘It’s true,’ the songwriter insisted, ‘I’m watching him right now.’

  Hopkins duly reported this information to the press, and Melody Maker ran with it the next week, under the headline ‘Oasis Gun Drama’, thus further adding to the growing Oasis mythology.

  Eventually the band were called for a soundcheck. But by now, they were smashed out of their heads. In fact, Noel had to lean against his amps just to keep his balance.

  Even so, that didn’t prevent them from producing a magnificent version of ‘I Am The Walrus’, which they later placed, after it had appeared on a limited white-label edition, on the B-side of ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’. The applause at the end is sampled from another artist’s live album. The night ended at eight in the morning with Marcus roaming down the corridors singing Welsh songs and eventually having to be helped on to the plane home by Noel.

  In February, Oasis were given their first foreign date, the Paradiso Club in Amsterdam. They never made it. The band, with Coyley and Jason in tow, boarded a coach in Manchester at midday and quickly consumed two bottles of Jack Daniels. Then they stopped off to get another bottle before finally boarding the ferry.

  Once on board, they headed straight for the bar. They also located the duty’ free shop where they started stealing bottles of champagne which they then openly consumed back in the bar.

  The upshot of all this drunken mayhem was that the security guards were called and the band decided it was best to split for their bedrooms.

  As Guigsy and Liam drunkenly walked down a corridor, trying to locate their room, Guigsy heard a noise, turned and saw a guard coming out of a side door about to use his truncheon on the unsuspecting Liam. Without any hesitation, Guigsy punched the guy. From nowhere, eight guards suddenly appeared and piled into him. Liam, then made a bolt for the stairs.

  Guigsy was hauled downstairs, roughed up and thrown into the brig. About five minutes later he heard loud noises coming from the corridor and sure enough, here’s Liam shouting that the guards have thrown him down three flights of stairs and if he’s going into a cell they better not have any sexual desires for him.

  The boys were incarcerated for the next twenty-four hours, left, locked up, without food or drink, dehydrating like crazy. One of the guards, a big mean-looking man, even drew a chalk line in Liam’s cell and told the singer to lie down with his nose resting on it. If he moved over the line, he promised to attack Liam with his truncheon. Liam lay on the ground for three hours before the guard finally gave up watching him. Meanwhile, a guard entered Bonehead and McCarroll’s room and confiscated their passports. They would not be let into the country.

  As the bassist and singer languished in the cells, the boat docked in Holland and Noel and the rest of the Oasis crew disembarked only to find out hours later that all four band members were now heading back to England.

  The gig was cancelled and Marcus was informed of the incident. He then called a band meeting at which Liam defended himself by saying that it was proper rock ‘n’ roll behaviour.

  ‘No,’ Marcus vehemently said, ‘playing to 300 people in Amsterdam is proper rock ‘n’ roll behaviour, not getting arrested so no one can hear your music.’

  Noel was furious too, and had been the first to give Guigsy and Liam an angry lecture. Even Bonehead was upset by their behaviour. For two weeks they were blanked by the rest of the band, and the guard that Guigsy had hit was paid £1,000 not to press charges.

  In March, Oasis made their first national TV appearance. Karen Williams at Anglo Plugging had secured them a booking on Channel Four’s The Word to promote their first single ‘Supersonic’, a full month before its release.

  McGee had actually argued for ‘Bring It On Down’ to be Oasis’s first shot at the single chart, but Noel had firmly resisted the idea. As his contract gave him artistic freedom, McGee backed down.

  For their TV debut, late on a Friday night, Noel wore a red shirt and no shades. Liam sported a flight jacket, Bonehead a green cord jacket and Guigsy a burgundy jumper. Presenter Mark Lamarr introduced the band and Oasis ditched the song’s intro and went straight into the first verse.

  They didn’t smile or really acknowledge the cameras, although during the third verse Liam whipped out his own Hi 8 camcorder and started filming the audience. At the end of the song, he said, ‘Cheers, goodnight,’ and sauntered off the stage as Noel bent down by his amps to extract a few seconds of feedback.

  ‘Woops, bit of feedback there,’ said a smiling Terry Christian who, two years later, would co-author a book about the Gallagher family with Noel’s and Liam’s older brother Paul.

  This TV appearance went some way towards capturing the band’s prowess as a live act, and served to whet everyone’s appetite. It was patiently clear that Oasis had something that placed them well above their contemporaries. The sound, the look, the attitude, it intrigued and excited onlookers.

  With that in mind, Oasis again took to the road, this time with Whiteout, who had just signed to Silvertone Records, The Stone Roses’ old record label. The idea was that both bands would headline every other night. They started in Bedford on 23 March. Oasis played first, and the next day they all travelled up to London to play the 100 Club where Oasis now headlined the gig.

  Ted Kessler wrote in the NME of their performance: ‘At times tonight Oasis assumed the mantle of Best Live Band in the country with joyous arrogant Mancunian confidence. They may never be this good again...’

  The tour moved on to the Forum in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, this was 26 March, and then the Oxford Polytechnic where Oasis stole a television out of their hotel so that they could watch Manchester United play Aston Villa while at the gig. Villa won and Coyley kicked the television to pieces in disgust.

  The following night, in a move reminiscent of The Beatles in May of 1963 when they supported Roy Orbison, it was mutually agreed that Oasis should headline every night. Like it or not, after Oasis had finished playing, the majority of the crowd walked out leaving Whiteout to play to near-empty halls.

  ‘It was funny,’ Noel recalls. ‘We had this old van to travel around in and Whiteout had this big coach that the record company had given them, but after each show all the kids were round our dodgy old van.’

  It was on this tour that Marcus decided to relieve Bonehead of his tour manager duties and employ Margaret Mouzakitis, better known as Maggie, to take over. It is a position she still holds. Marcus also took on Phil Smith, a close friend and Stone Roses’ roadie, who was now free due to their recording commitments. Halfway through Oasis’s first US tour, Smith was recalled to the Roses’ camp.

  ‘When Maggie joined,’ Guigsy remembers, ‘we thought, brilliant, she’ll get us loads of drugs and girls. But she wasn’t having any of it, and that’s exactly what we needed at that point.’

  Guigsy is totally correct in his assessment. Set free on the road and finally receiving the acclaim they knew would one day be theirs, Oasis were starting to get a real taste of the stardom they had dreamt about.

  What more could you ask for? Everything they had read, envied and fantasised about rock ‘n’ roll bands now applied to them. Girls wanted to bed them and geezers wanted to be them. Gone were the days of playing to twenty disinterested people in some shabby flea-pit. Gone were the days of signing on and not having enough money for records, cloth
es or drugs.

  The word was out now, and accordingly Oasis ran wild as they saw all their boasts being totally vindicated. They would book into hotels, drink their mini-bars dry, go and play songs that would drive an audience into a frenzy, and then party into the early hours.

  Rooms would be smashed, girls would be bedded and then, in the early hours, with copious amounts of alcohol and chemicals coursing through their veins, they would do a runner from the hotel leaving their bills unpaid. Top, they would say to themselves as they discussed the previous night’s gig and events, fucking top.

  On 28 March Oasis played the Jug Of Ale in Birmingham, which is where Noel met up again with Ocean Colour Scene (having first met them at a Paul Weller gig in Oxford). He had heard a demo tape of theirs in the Creation office because Johnny Hopkins had been keen for Creation to sign them. But McGee wasn’t convinced.

  Noel was, and he actively helped their cause by booking them as support on numerous dates as they looked for a deal. Two years later, when Ocean Colour Scene’s second album, Moseley Shoals, was selling over half a million copies, Noel was heard to say to their MCA A&R man at Knebworth, ‘You better take good care of my boys.’

  The tour finished two dates later, the bands having played the Fleece And Firkin in Bristol and Moles in Bath. After four days’ rest, Oasis started their own tour in support of their forthcoming debut single, ‘Supersonic’. On the vinyl version, two new songs would be available, ‘Take Me Away’ and a live version of ‘I Will Believe’.

  CD buyers would be treated to an extra track too, in this case the white-label version of ‘Columbia’. This bias towards CD single buyers continues to this day, seemingly a strange anomaly for a band brought up on vinyl, until you realise that bands earn far more from CDs than they do from records.

  The band’s tour started with three consecutive gigs, Lucifer’s Mill in Dundee on 5 April, La Belle Angel in Edinburgh the next night, and then down to the Tramway in Glasgow.

  It was after this gig, at Glasgow’s Forte Crest Hotel, four days before the release of ‘Supersonic’, that Liam and Noel sat down with John Harris, then of the NME, to deliver an interview that would set the tone for all their future press.

  At this point, the NME were overtly keen to make Oasis, through repeated coverage, ‘their band’. They had already run a page interview in their 2 April issue, written by Emma Morgan. In it, Noel again foresees their future.

  Are you worried about living up to expectations? Emma asks.

  Noel shakes his head. ‘It’ll all be apparent when “Supersonic” (the first single) comes out,’ he replies. ‘Then it’ll all be WAY-HEY! from there.’

  Now Harris was here to write a much larger piece. To put it in context, it’s obvious that the ferry incident is still rankling Noel. Liam, sensing his brother’s annoyance, is determined to defend himself publicly.

  The article begins with Noel and Liam squaring up to each other, Liam shouting, ‘Let’s fucking go then, you DICK! Let’s have a fucking fight.’

  Harris then goes on to recount the colourful Oasis history to date, before moving on to Noel laying into the group Smash and then Miles Hunt, formerly of The Wonder Stuff, who, unknown to Noel, is booked to interview the brothers for his MTV show.

  Harris then throws in a question relating to the band’s image as rock ‘n’ roll pigs, and Liam responds by saying that he is into it and is dying to get 2,000 people into a gig to see him.

  Noel then interjects. ‘That’s not what he’s on about.’

  ‘He is.’

  ‘No, he’s fucking not. He’s on about getting thrown off ferries.’

  Which is the point when an almighty row, captured and later released as the single ‘Wibbling Rivalry’, now erupts, perfectly illuminating the tension between the brothers.

  For Noel, there is music and that is the most important thing; without it no one would be attracted to Oasis or any other band. The rest all comes second.

  But for Liam music is nothing without the attitude. That is the key. Otherwise you end up like Andrew Lloyd Webber.

  ‘Who’s Andrew Lloyd Webber?’ Noel asks, laying a trap for his brother.

  ‘I haven’t got a clue,’ Liam responds. ‘He’s a golfer or something.’

  Whether they were bluffing or not, the fact remains that in their first major interview, which thousands upon thousands of people would read, Noel and Liam Gallagher had no qualms about exposing their tempestuous relationship.

  They fight and scream and argue. They end up threatening each other and they also enter into surreal dialogues concerning conkers and, naturally, John Lennon.

  What gave this article true impact was its totally unguarded nature. It was not, as it could well have been given Noel and Liam’s streetwise cunning, a staged conversation designed to generate headlines, because the next morning, a worried Noel sat with Marcus at breakfast and confessed that he thought they might have blown it with the interview. In fact, the reverse was true.

  ‘For me,’ Johnny Hopkins states, ‘it was one of the great rock ‘n’ roll interviews.’ Hopkins had sat in the room as the interview took place. It was he who had attempted to separate the brothers when they nearly came to blows and it was he who knew that every writer in town would now make a beeline for the band. Oasis were now indisputably and undoubtedly great copy.

  The next night Oasis played the Arena in Middlesborough, having just learnt the shocking news that Kurt Cobain of the group Nirvana had put a shotgun to his head and blown his mind out.

  The group, who weren’t Nirvana fans but would later admire his work with the release of Nirvana’s Unplugged In New York album, dedicated ‘Live Forever’ to him.

  It was a symbolic gesture. The grunge rock movement Cobain had inspired, saw America finally succumbing to punk rock music. But grunge’s nihilistic viewpoint, which found its main appeal with bored, white middle-class kids, ran directly against Noel’s way of thinking, and as a counterpoint, he wrote ‘Live Forever’.

  On 11 April 1994 ‘Supersonic’ was released. The band were in Stoke playing the Wheatsheaf. The next day they made their way over to the Duchess of York in Leeds. This time the place was rammed. Again, a lot of people were left outside.

  The next night in Liverpool at the Lomax streetwise kids were discovered outside the gig selling useless ticket stubs to gullible fans. The band admired that kind of behaviour. It’s exactly what they would have done if they were in their shoes.

  On 17 April, during a break from touring, the band were boosted by the news that ‘Supersonic’ had entered the charts at thirty-one. It was a good if not spectacular opening on their chart account.

  A video had been shot of the band on the roof of a taxi company in London’s King’s Cross. Directed by Mark Szaszy, it was a straightforward film of the and playing live interspersed with various shots (filmed at Heathrow on the day the IRA launched a mortar attack on the airport) of, surprise, surprise, aeroplanes flying supersonically overhead.

  The single itself set the pattern for most of their future single releases. The A-side, a full-on Oasis rocker, the B-side, ‘Take Me Away’, a beautiful demonstration of Noel’s skills as a ballad writer, and then a live song coupled with a rarity such as ‘Columbia’.

  Lyrically, both ‘Supersonic’ and ‘Take Me Away’ would bring to light major themes Noel would constantly return to.

  His use of rhyme in ‘Supersonic’ works on the most basic level, totally in keeping with his pop throwaway sensibility which had been weaned on all those glam-rock singles from the 1970s.

  Noel’s sensibility is such that he can admire three-minute pop stompers (and extract from them their basic appeal), and he can swoon to Burt Bacharach and other deeper works. On Oasis singles, he would display both sides of these art forms.

  Thus ‘supersonic’ goes with ‘gin and tonic’; ‘doctor’ with ‘helicopter’; ‘home’ with ‘alone’; ‘tissue’; with ‘Big Issue’. For some this was the proof they needed to ridicule Noel’
s intelligence.

  But compare this deliberate pop throwaway style with the far more personalised approach to ‘Take Me Away’, in which Noel expresses his fierce need to escape from the world, and returns to a recurring Gallagher theme (first heard in the opening lines of ‘Supersonic’: ‘I need to be myself / I can’t be no one else’) of how people try to be everything but themselves, something he too experiences.

  No doubt about it, Noel found lyric writing the hardest part of his job but he was by no means a poor lyricist, although he was sometimes a lazy one.

  Certainly the press were divided over ‘Supersonic’s merits. NME’s Keith Cameron (another writer to pick up on ‘Live Forever’, in his review of the Tramway show) made ‘Supersonic’ Single Of The Week, and poured praise all over the band. He called the song ‘a paragon of pop virtue’, and wondered how on earth Oasis were so self-accomplished; he totally understood Noel’s deliberate nonsensical but funny images in the lyrics, and concluded by calling Oasis, ‘Simply a great rock ‘n’ roll band.’ Peter Paphides in the Melody Maker totally disagreed. He told his readers that the single sounded like Blur four years ago, a comment which would have seriously angered Liam.

  Blur, at this point, were about to regain some of the ground they had lost after being initially touted as the band most likely to break big. Their album Modern Life Is Rubbish was set to lay the ground for the following year’s Parklife, an album which would sell in huge quantities. Oasis dismissed most of their contemporaries as casually as you would flick dust from your coat, but Blur, with their mix of mock cockney songs and student backgrounds, badly riled Oasis, especially Liam. He smelt fakery, and that always upset him.

  In mid May, on a night out on the booze, he would get his chance to express his disgust at them when he and Noel met Blur’s guitarist, Graham Cox, at the Good Mixer pub in Camden. It was well known that Blur often frequented these premises so Liam had insisted on visiting the pub. Much to his delight, he spotted Graham straightaway and the brothers Gallagher went straight over to him. After roughly introducing themselves, they then started insulting his clothes and then his band.