Johnny Marr calls Noel Gallagher “one of the most dedicated people I’ve ever come across”
The former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr has opened up about his decades-long friendship with Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher in a new interview.
“In all honesty, when I first met Noel, I liked him a lot,” Marr stated in an interview with Forbes. “I saw a young kid. I didn’t make too much of a big deal of it at the time, but the fact that his background is quite similar to mine, that Mancunian-Irish thing, I think makes us understand each other quite well. We really clicked. I had no idea, no one had any idea that they were going to be as big as they went on to be. Not even himself—maybe himself—but they hadn’t even made a record! They played maybe four little shows.”
Gallagher first met Marr before Oasis officially got signed to Creation Records. Marr was an instigating force in propelling Oasis to stardom, with Marr giving Gallagher a black 1978 Gibson Les Paul Custom before the band recorded their debut LP Definitely Maybe.
“I couldn’t give him something crappy,” Marr says. “That was my logic. I better give him something he’s going to really buzz off. Oasis could have been never heard of. It could have just been a guy, and I still would’ve given it to him. It turned out so well for everybody.”
Continuing, he adds: “I don’t need those guitars back from Noel. When I saw him playing it, he just looked right. It’s his guitar, Marr added. “And then our careers and lives got so intertwined, and in some ways still are. Now, we play together more than ever on record.”
The pair’s friendship has lasted a number of years since that fateful encounter. Marr and Gallagher have now logged more than a few on-record collaborations, something that Marr says he’s always happy to do for the former Oasis songwriter.
“Noel is interesting in many ways,” Marr explains. “The thing about Noel is that because he’s so unpretentious and genuinely down to earth, people think they know him. And because he’s so outspoken—which a lot of that is because he knows it’s funny, right? But in a way, I’m going to blow his cover a little bit now. But it’s almost like to cover up the fact that he’s really deadly serious about what he does, and that he puts a lot of thought and work into it.”
Waxing lyrical about the musician, he adds: “That guy is one of the most dedicated people I’ve ever come across in any line of work. He’s extremely disciplined, much more than people give him credit for. And like a lot of people genuinely who are great, he makes it look like he just rolled out of bed in the morning and went, okay, I just knocked out this song.”
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