5-10-15-20 features artists talking about the songs and albums that made an impact on them throughout their lives, five years at a time.
Noel Gallagher is taking a piss when I walk into his corner room at Manhattan's Bowery Hotel. He washes his hands, walks out of the bathroom, and sits down on the couch. He's relaxed, if a bit weary. There is a small, stuffed leather pig in the room, and he seems slightly amused by it. We're used to Gallagher (figuratively) pissing on other bands (or his brother), but, at 44, the onetime Oasis songwriter, guitarist, and singer has mellowed-- though that doesn't stop him from dropping roughly 50 f-bombs during our 30-minute interview. Gallagher's humor comes naturally to him, and he's not really trying to be funny when he flows through expletives with casual finesse.
But he is funny, even if his legendary world-beating days-- the ones where he claimed to be a superhero and said bands like Coldplay were akin to "bland, faceless fucking trainee police officers"-- are in the past. In fact, he likes Coldplay. "When I heard 'Yellow' for the first time, I immediately picked up the guitar and went, 'Fucking bastards, why didn't I write that?'," he says now. "I feel that way about a lot of their songs."
After quitting his old band two years ago, Gallagher released his solo debut, Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds, this week Europe (it's out November 8 in North America). We spoke about the music he's loved over the past four decades, and he only mentioned the Beatles twice.
Age 5
Led Zeppelin: Led Zeppelin II
Is anybody seriously into music at five? No five year old can say with any fucking degree of truth that they were listening to anything. But what was big in England in 1972? Probably a lot of English glam rock, T. Rex or David Bowie. As a kid, I always loved flamboyant rock stars like Ziggy Stardust, Marc Bolan, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles. Just put Led Zeppelin down, [sarcastically] "Yeah I was a massive fan-- I got Led Zeppelin II for my fifth birthday off my mother."
I don't come from a musical family. I was the first musician. But my dad was a country-western DJ who would play at people's weddings. It wasn't earth-shattering like, "Fuckin' wow! He's fuckin' playing Dark Side of the Moon at a wedding!" I come from an Irish background, and all they listened to was country-western music.
10
Sex Pistols: Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols
I remember punk vividly, though I was too young to understand it. But I knew kids on the High Street started dressing really fucking weird. And the rumor was that there was this album that had a swear word in the title, and there was a track on it with swearing. And I was like, "Really? Fuck me!" There was plenty of swearing in my household growing up, but when you actually hear a record and they're saying "fuck" this and "fuck" that it's like, "Shit!" It seems so tame these days, but even the name-- Sex Pistols-- what the fuck?!
I only really got onto the politics of it much later, when I was a teenager. At the time, I didn't know what "Pretty Vacant" and "God Save the Queen" were about. I wasn't interested. I was just interested in the swearing. When you're 10, your antennae are going up but you're not sure what the message is that you're receiving.
Punk was everything at the time, and it all goes back to the Sex Pistols. Before them, there was nothing. That thing that started with Elvis had gone to prog-rock, and it was fucked up. And then punk happened. It started in New York with the New York Dolls and the Ramones, but what happened next is what always happens: We get hold of it in England and sold it back and somehow made it a little bit better. Take a great American art form, like the blues or rock'n'roll or jazz, put a British spin on it, and everyone goes, "Oh yeah, that's fucking amazing."
15
The Jam: Sound Affects
I was into the Jam and the Specials-- all that ska stuff. The Jam came out of the back end of punk. They weren't doing the rock star thing. They were quite stiff, angry young men with shit to say about social values and youth problems and all that.
I had a guitar at 15, though I wasn't very good at it. I wasn't sure what its purpose was. But, for some reason, there was a guitar in our house even though nobody ever fucking played it. I don't know where it came from or where it is to this day. But you get to a certain age and you see music on the telly and think, "Oh, that's one of those things." It instantly felt natural. I still have never taken a music lesson in my life, I just thought it was a nice thing to pass the time away. Back then, I probably would have been able to play "House of the Rising Sun", but I had not harbored any great ambitions to be a rock star. Where I come from, people didn't become rock stars. That happened to other people.
I wasn't a troublesome kid, though my parents would probably disagree. I wasn't like a master criminal, but I was forever getting into silly bits of trouble: petty fucking shoplifting, petty drug taking, not being at school when I should have been, getting found passed-out at the park.
I didn't dislike school, but I didn't like it. It was like, "I'm no good at this shit, and they know I'm no good at this shit. Why do I have to be here? Why can't I pick fucking magic mushrooms on the golf course and get fucking high? Can I just do that for a living?" Looking back on it now, I understand why people say they're the best days of your life because you don't have any responsibilities. You get fed and clothed by your parents, and you're not required to do anything apart from being a child. In that sense, it's great. But when you're living it, it's a bit of a pain in the ass.
20
The Smiths: Meat Is Murder
Manchester was an old, decaying, Victorian city that had seen better days, and there was a lot of unemployment. I was unemployed for years. And I did fucking shit jobs. I used make fish tanks-- not very well, I might add. My life was completely spent smoking pot, listening to music, living for the weekend, the usual. It's a very British thing-- a lot of British kids would understand that way of life. I look back on those times, between the ages of 20 and 25, as probably the best days of my life.
Music was an obsession, it was the only thing that brought me out of the place I was in. For that five minutes of listening to a song I was somewhere else, wondering, "What the fuck is Morrissey going on about? Does he really not like meat? He must like sausages. Everybody likes fucking sausages."
The Smiths had a swagger, even if it was a feminine swagger. They were quite cocky and confident. Fuckin' hell, Morrissey is as arrogant as they come! Even to this day, he thinks we're all beneath him. And Johnny Marr believed he was the best because he is the best.
What we did after that was in no way as musically accomplished. I'm no Johnny Marr, Liam is no Morrissey, and we were no fucking Smiths. But what we had was primal. The Smiths made music for the brain-- you thought about what Morrissey was singing, and it was very intricate. Our appeal was more direct. It went straight into your heart. We were a band of 23 year olds, and we fucking did it. We didn't have a Morrissey whose view on the world dominated the band. Our manifesto was simple: We fucking live for the weekend, we still want to get fucked up. Girls, drugs, money. Who can't relate to that? I'll tell you who: idiots!
25
The way Kurt Cobain turned pop songs into pop-rock songs influenced me a lot. I didn't realize it at the time but Definitely Maybe and Nevermind are kind of of the same thing: pop songs with distorted guitars, though their album is heavier.
At 25, I would have been preparing to dominate the world like the emperor in Star Wars: "I'll take this world by storm, see if I don't." I just started what would become Definitely Maybe-- not that I knew I was writing an album. I was just writing songs we could play at gigs and make a bit of money. I remember someone saying, "Why do you think you're a songwriter?" And I was like, "Because I say that I am; because I write songs." Kids today say to me, "I'm not a songwriter like you." And I'm like, "Do you write songs? Yes? Then you fucking are! Be it! And if it's meant to happen, it'll happen."
At the beginning, we were just another band, but what turned it on its head for me was when I wrote "Columbia" one afternoon and thought it was really fucking good. It didn't really mean a great deal, but it had great hooks on it, great guitar. Then I wrote "Up in the Sky". Then I wrote "Live Forever". After writing those three songs over the course of a month I was like, "This is it, man." After you've written "Live Forever", that's the mark, and everything has got to be better than that. That's when I started to think this was the one shot we've got at getting out of this fucking place and living like kings.
30
Oasis: Be Here Now
Thirty seems to pass in a haze of fucking partying. What year was that? '97? Fuck me! I was taking so much drugs then. It was like when I was five: I have no fucking idea what was going on. I was immersed in Oasis. We were the biggest band in the world. It was like, "Other people's music? Dumb shit."
35
Coldplay: Parachutes
Those were euphoric times for me-- getting divorced is always a fucking cause for celebration. And I had just met my current wife, who was then my girlfriend. We loved Parachutes, and I still think it's a great album. Liam fucking hates Coldplay, which made me love them a little bit more. I could appreciate the songwriting. When I heard "Yellow" for the first time, I immediately picked up the guitar and went, "Fucking bastards, why didn't I write that?" I feel that way about a lot of their songs. And, secretly, [Chris Martin] thinks that about a lot of mine, but he never says it in public.
40
Arctic Monkeys: Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
It's funny because back in the 90s there was like a fucking hundred bands coming out of Britain each week, and they were all just OK. Now, there seems to be a lot fewer, but the quality is better. Arctic Monkeys are one of the few bands in the last six years that were any good, but they've been really fucking good.
When we became successful, I thought, in my own naivety, that a hundred bands would reform the next week and they'd all be in the charts, and we'd live in some fucking Beatles-derived nirvana. But it took 10 years for the Libertines, Razorlight, Arctic Monkeys, and Kasabian to all come out and all go, "The first album we ever got was Definitely Maybe," or, "The first song we ever played was 'Talk Tonight'." That made me feel really proud. And what made me feel prouder still was that I really fucking liked all those bands-- apart from Razorlight. And they couldn't be more diverse. They weren't aping what we did as much as they were just taking the spirit, like, "If they can do it, we can do it." If I'm proud of anything that is left behind from Oasis, it's the fact that we influenced five or six great bands.
