“It won’t be coming out any time soon”: The lost album Noel Gallagher called his ‘Dark Side of the Moon’
Noel Gallagher had no problem putting himself among the greatest artists of all time. His whole mission in life was to be up there with the Paul McCartneys and Pete Townshends of the world, and if he managed to make a dent in the cultural conversation, if only for a few songs, that was enough for him. While Oasis gave him more than a few iconic moments throughout his career, he knew he didn’t want to repeat the same formula when they finally called things off in 2009.
After all, Noel already said that he had no intentions of looking like he was in a gang once he reached his 40s, and looking at how he and Liam sounded in their solo careers, it was always completely different. Whereas Liam was always concerned with making blistering rock and roll with pure swagger in every line, Noel was interested in creating musical soundscapes whenever he got to the studio.
That wasn’t necessarily a new thing, either. He had already served as the singer on songs for people like Chemical Brothers, and while you can easily call Be Here Now a sonic experiment, that may have been the one moment where he went too far, layering on as much as he could onto the final product to the point where everything starts to sound like white noise behind the vocal melody.
When he debuted the High Flying Birds, there was already talk of him working with other producers to get what he wanted. Although Dave Sardy is sure to send a chill up the spines of some purists based on how different an album like Who Built The Moon was, Noel had already begun working on something more atmospheric by the time he hooked up with Amorphous Androgynous.
If Noel had had his way, though, the original version of Dig Out Your Soul would have had the production duo behind the board for the whole thing. Oasis’s swan song was already leaning towards something a bit more atmospheric with the sound effects of foot stomping on a beach and the police sirens at the end of ‘The Turning’, so getting as many strange loops as they could on the record would have been their way of paying homage to their psychedelic influences.
“How we’ve envisaged it is like a modern take on Dark Side Of The Moon, with lots of texture and ambient noise on it.”
Noel Gallagher
Noel has said that a complete record with Amorphous Androgynous is officially finished, though, and that it could stand alongside another psychedelic masterpiece, saying, “I think there’s going to be about ten intense psychedelic songs and three songs that are on the High Flying Birds album but reworked by them. How we’ve envisaged it is like a modern take on Dark Side Of The Moon, with lots of texture and ambient noise on it.”
For someone who talks up their legendary moments, it’s a shame that Noel refused to release it. Despite having all of the tracks finished and ready to go, Noel said that the timing was all off for the record, telling Matt Morgan, “The masters haven’t been destroyed but it won’t be coming out any time soon. There might be more stuff in there, [but] it just wasn’t right for the time.” While ‘Shoot A Hole Into the Sun’ is the one salvo from the record, most of it will forever be in the vaults.
Then again, maybe that’s because Noel has already covered what he was working on in other tunes. There was already a Floydian sax break on ‘Riverman’ and different instrumental pieces like ‘Fort Knox’, so maybe between Chasing Yesterday and Who Built the Moon is the best version of that modern Dark Side of the Moon.
