“My manager asked me who the High Flying Birds are. They aren’t anyone in
particular. Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds is me and whoever is around
at the time of whatever it is that I’m doing, a loose collective kinda
thing”.
So speaks Noel Gallagher, as he embarks on the latest step of his strange,
twisting journey. Gallagher began his career in music by lugging amplifiers
on and off tour buses for The Inspiral Carpets. Then he captured the voices,
hopes and dreams of millions with Oasis, who went on to become the biggest
band of the last two decades. Now he’s fashioned a masterpiece that takes
the Noel Gallagher trademarks — melancholic verse lines, euphoric choruses, a suggestion that everything’s going to be OK when the rain clears — and thrown them out into the cosmos.
Gallagher has also made a second album with psychedelic DJ overlords
Amorphous Androgynous, who nearly drove him to insanity when they made him spend five hours and ten minutes playing the same, single guitar line, but
more of that later.
Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds takes off into directions Oasis could
never have gone. From the New Orleans ragtime stomp of “The Death Of You And Me” to the Ennio Morricone-inspired, string-laden drama of “Everybody’s On The Run” and the choral swell of “(I Wanna Live In A Dream In My) Record Machine”, it’s an ambitious, rainbow-coloured epic of an album. It’s the product of an enquiring mind, fired up by new discoveries as much as a basic, unquenchable need to get a message out to the world.
“With this album, people are going to think it was a conscious decision to
do something different,” says Gallagher. “It wasn’t like that. This is what
just came out. I won’t criticize anything about Oasis because I loved being
in that band and I was in charge of it, but there was always the feeling:
how will this go down in Wembley, with 70,000 people braying for good times? This time I didn’t have to think about that. I’ve got a guy playing wine
glasses on one song, a saw on another. This is not Oasis. I don’t know what
it is......yet."
The intricacy and craft of Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, both
musically and lyrically, puts paid to rumours that its creator entered into
a state of inertia after the end of Oasis. “There was a review of the Beady
Eye album — and fair play to Beady Eye, the reviews I’ve read have been
pretty good — that said something like: ‘while Liam’s been hard at work,
Noel’s been wandering the streets.’ It made it sound like I’ve been
stumbling around North London, going through the bins. I’ve actually spent
over a year in the studio, and it was beginning to drive me a little mad.
Now I’ve got no more recording to do until I’m well into my 70s.”
Work on the album proper began in February 2010, when Gallagher booked a session at State Of The Ark Studios in Twickenham, Middlesex with sometime Oasis engineer Paul Stacey and his identical twin brother Jeremy, a drummer. The plan was to then head out to Los Angeles for a couple of weeks to mix the tracks with producer Dave Sardy, but it didn’t quite work out that way.
“Dave said to me, "It's great but it doesn't sound like a band". "I ain't a
band" says I. "Then we have to make you sound like one” was his response.
So we set about to re-recording some drums and cutting numerous overdubs,
and as a result I ended up staying out in LA for a couple of months, all the
while thinking: “he can’t beat what I’ve done”. But sure enough, what he
came up with was amazing.”
There’s a tender sort of sadness to “If I Had A Gun…”, one of the most
emotionally direct songs Gallagher has written since “Wonderwall”, with its
theme of young lovers finding a way to be together. Then there is the
descending-chord defiance of “Soldier Boys And Jesus Freaks”.
“That was written when it was all kicking off with shock and awe in Iraq,”
he says. “I was watching the television, getting excited, when my missus
came in and said: ‘How can you be so callous? Imagine two people meeting
each other in the midst of war. What they would have to go through to be
together?’ It sparked the theme for the album: to find the melancholy in the
happiness. It’s how I write songs. “Some Might Say” by Oasis might sound
like an uplifting tune but listen to the words. It’s the Irish in me.”
These themes; searching for beauty as one tries to survive the day to day
grind, and the longing for escape, young love on the run if you like, are
not just exclusive to “Soldier Boys”, but to the album as a whole, and have
been with Gallagher for much of the last decade.
The ideal of young love also inspired “The Death Of You And Me”, one of the
most remarkable – and surprising – songs on the album, and a world away from Oasis. After a stomping beat and a melody with a touch of mid-60s Kinks to it, jazzy brass blasts in halfway though and suddenly we’re in New Orleans. “It’s the same theme, the same idea that however good things are, a bit of anything will always be shit,” Gallagher says of the song’s message. “It’s a British thing. The song has a touch of Vaudeville, but with the curtains
pulled back a little. There’s the line: ‘I see another new day dawning, it
was rising over me, with my mortality.” Yes, it’s a new day. But I’ve just
got a day older, a day closer to the end.”
A more straightforward celebration comes with “AKA… What A Life!” It edges close to being a dancefloor-filling disco classic. “It took me a while to convince myself about this one,” says Gallagher. “It sounds like something Madonna might sing. But [early house classic] Rhythim Is Rhythim by Strings Of Life, which I loved from the Hacienda days, inspired the piano part, and I
realised that the song carries the vibe no matter what that vibe is.”
As for the forthcoming, as yet unnamed album with Amorphous Androgynous, it developed after Gallagher asked Amorphous’s Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans to remix Oasis last single, “Falling Down”, and they came back with a 22-minute epic that replaced Gallagher’s vocals with Alisha Sufitt’s of 70s hippies Magic Carpet.
“Working with them was like nothing I’ve ever done before,” he says. “We
made the album at Paul Weller’s studio, and in the past I’ve always worked
hard at crafting a song before recording it. This time I would write a song,
bring it in, and [Amorphous’s avuncular front man] Gaz Cobain would say,
‘Nah, screw that, we’ll come up with something right now. Use your instincts
and don’t compare what you do to anything else.’ I was on the verge of
telling him to fuck off a few times, but the results made it all worthwhile.”
Making a solo album also forced Gallagher to do something he had,
remarkably, resisted so far: buy a computer. “I had never gone near one
before. Gem [Archer] used to load up the iPod for me so there wasn’t any
need. But then someone told me there were kids on YouTube finishing songs
that I hadn’t even written yet, because somebody had filmed me feeling them
out during soundchecks. I didn’t mind, but I decided I needed to buy a
computer and find out what was going on. It was like the moment man
discovered fire. I was staring at the thing, my tongue sticking out of the
side of my mouth as I hit it with one finger.”
Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, with its psychedelic tinges, eternal
themes of love, loss and hope, and wine glass and saw solo sections, pushes its creator towards places he has never gone before. “You’ve got to try, haven’t you? Look at The Fabs. It’s a short time between Strawberry Fields and Mr Moonlight. All the great bands stumbled on something they didn’t know was there before, and ended up doing their own thing. And ultimately, you’re searching for “it”, whatever “it” is. If you’re switched on you can find it — regularly.”
