The songs that helped Noel Gallagher overcome addiction: “Trying to get to a different level”
Historically, Noel Gallagher and drugs went together like Keith Richards and drugs. Or Pete Doherty and drugs. They were rarely found apart from each other and if they were, it sure as hell wasn’t for long. After all, this is a band who have a defining early hit whose chorus hollers, “You might as well do the white line” for lack of anything better to do. Unlike the other two examples however, the moment that Oasis started doing lines with the regularity that others do the dishes was when their output started tanking spectacularly.
After their first two records established Noel and Liam Gallagher as two of the most famous people in the UK and their band as the biggest in the country, the hype for their third album was the kind that people who weren’t there can barely understand. Imagine if Spider-Man: Far From Home was a rock record. Imagine the Game Of Thrones finale if last few seasons had been good. Imagine if we knew GNX was finished, and we were just counting down the days to it. Even then, that only sort of covers just what a furore there was about Be Here Now.
Then the album came out. If you haven’t heard Be Here Now, imagine playing one of those terrible John Lennon solo albums at half speed while pressing your ear up against an active washing machine. Yet somehow much, much worse than that. Noel himself has credited his band coining the musical term for jumping the shark with two things. First, a near catatonic state of writer’s block where, in the six months after his band’s triumphant Knebworth shows, he wrote precisely one riff. The second? You guessed it, drugs.
Come the new millennium, and with a fourth album, 2000s Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants, on the horizon, Noel, in particular, was keen to stress that he’d kicked the coke habit that fuelled their previous folly. He meant it, too, as the process of getting clean for the sake of his newborn daughter Anais had actually inspired a number of the songs on the record. When asked in an interview with Mojo in 2000 about the lyrical content of the record, Noel went into unusual detail about this.
He said: “I was writing about what I’d experienced. ‘Where Did It All Go Wrong?’ and ‘Gas Panic!’, were about trying get to a different level in my life, trying to get off the drugs. Before, more often than not I’d just get off me head, get a few good phrases then fill in the gaps. Now I’ve had two years off to get me shit together, and I think 80 per cent of the album is quite good in that respect. Next time, we’ll take it to another level.”
For a man as adept at interviews as he is to damn his own work with praise that faint is a bold move. That said, it was an Oasis album. If anyone needs to do much work actually “promoting” one of those things, something’s gone terribly wrong. Less charitably, he also knew that Our Kid had written ‘Little James’ for the album. A song that not even the legendary hubris of Gallagher sr. could talk up as anything other than unintentionally hilarious.
