The song that challenged Noel Gallagher the most: “That’s as high as I’ve ever sang in my life”
His brother Liam may have been the lead vocalist in Oasis, but Noel Gallagher occasionally stepped into the spotlight to sing some of their iconic songs like ‘Half the World Away’, ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ and ‘The Importance of Being Idle’.
When the brothers split and formed their own new bands in 2009 – Beady Eye for Liam and the High Flying Birds for Noel – he took on the role of lead vocalist full-time. As well as writing the songs and playing the guitar, he became the sole frontman in his new group.
In truth, there is not much to differentiate the music on Oasis’ last album, Dig Out Your Soul from 2008, and Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds’ 2011 eponymous debut. Both are pretty standard-fare rock records, with plenty of mid-tempo tracks featuring a slight psychedelic edge, some with occasional cinematic aspirations or sweeping strings and others with a more straightahead, driving feel. Across both the albums, the vocals are buried deep in the mix of the band.
Noel Gallagher’s vocals do differentiate the High Flying Birds from Oasis, though. His voice is deeper and earthier than his brother Liam’s more nasal, higher-pitched twang. Noel has more range in his tone, too, and seems to have more emotional depth in his vocal stylings, especially as the pair have gotten older.
The first two High Flying Birds records adhered to this tried-and-tested formula of songs—and for good reason, each went to number one in the album charts—but by the third album, 2017’s Who Built the Moon?, Gallagher was starting to experiment with the group’s sound a little more.
‘Holy Mountain’ is just about the most fun song the group has recorded yet; full of bouncing brass and flutes, the track rollicks along like a runaway train. ‘It’s a Beautiful World’ is a throwback to a 1990s sound that Oasis nearly drowned out entirely – more like a U2 trip-hop-inspired track than anything else they’d done before. The title piece ‘Who Built the Moon?’ is a sprawling, disorienting western epic with more soundtrack than album tracks, which transforms the group from a rock band into an orchestra.
On the third song, ‘Keep on Reaching’, Gallagher is trying something new with the vocals. Inspired by listening to recordings of Sly and the Family Stone’s 1970 Isle of Wight performance, ‘Keep on Reaching’ is a blend of soul, rock, and funky rhythms that features an almost Liam Gallagher-esque vocal from Noel, which borders on falsetto at times.
“Usually, if I’ve written a song, and it’s not in my key, I pull it down,” he later said of the song. “That’s as high as I’ve ever sang in my life and I can tell you we won’t be doing it in that key live!”
It seems that he has kept on reaching for those higher notes in concert, though, including during a 2019 performance of the song at the very same festival on the Isle of Wight where Sly and The Family Stone had played almost 50 years before, and inspired him to write it in the first place.
