Terry Kirkbride: The one musician Noel Gallagher said was too crazy for Oasis
It takes a certain type of musician to be able to jump into the fray with Oasis.
Although Noel Gallagher was always the de facto boss of the group ever since they started, being able to party with someone like Liam Gallagher back in the day would have meant testing the limit of your liver every single time you hit the pub. They were never known to mess around whenever they started the after-show activities, but even when working on their later projects, Noel felt that there were some people who could never have worked with the band because of their own antics.
If you take a wider look at the band’s history, Noel was always considered the most responsible one in the group. That might sound insane considering he was the one with the quote about drugs being like having a cup of tea in the morning, but whenever a show mattered, he was always the one trying to be responsible while everyone else was off their faces. But after their botched show at the Whisky-A-Go-Go, something definitely felt different. The temperature had changed, and if you weren’t on Noel’s good side, you were probably going home.
Which probably explains why some of their later albums meant the band fracturing. Bonehead wasn’t about to slow down because of Noel cleaning up, and even though he wasn’t exactly the same party animal he was during the Be Here Now, apparently, his boozing wasn’t quite balanced enough for Noel when making Standing on the Shoulder of Giants. While that album was still decent, though, you didn’t truly feel the band’s second incarnation until Heathen Chemistry came out.
The album wasn’t poor by any stretch, but Noel seemed to take his foot off the gas a little bit. The band could be a democracy if it wanted to, but after Alan White left the fold, it felt like the band had the next best thing in Zak Starkey. A band of the biggest Beatles fanatics getting Ringo Starr’s son was almost too easy a choice for Don’t Believe the Truth, but there was a good chance that Terry Kirkbride could have joined the fold as well.
After all, the beginnings of the band’s fifth album were all about going back to their old stomping grounds and working with Death In Vegas, but from the moment they started work, the vibe just didn’t feel right. Kirkbride wasn’t a poor drummer by any means, but when talking about the sessions afterwards, Noel felt that the drummer was way too antsy to even come close to what Oasis were capable of.
They hadn’t mellowed out just yet, but compared to every other member focusing on the songs, Noel felt that Kirkbride would succumb to the rock and roll lifestyle way too quickly, saying, “We had another friend of ours called Terry Kirkbride who actually drums on ‘Mucky Fingers’ on the record. He drummed on all the stuff, but we already asked Zak if he would do the tour. We love [Terry] to bits, but he’s a fairly chaotic character. Not that he’s unreliable, but he’s the kind of guy that would probably get lost on tour. He would get lost in Brazil and you’d never see him again.”
Even though that sounds like a bona fide party animal, the fact that Noel did use Kirkbride on some of his solo gigs around the same time tells a bit of a different story. There’s no telling what he does in his downtime, but the fact that he was mellow enough to play the drums on the all-acoustic show Sittin’ Here in Silence is a good sign that he knew when to tone things down when the time came.
Still, the fact that Kirkbride ended up partying his way out of Oasis before playing a single show is almost funny compared to where they had been. No one in their right mind would have called the Be Here Now era level-headed by any stretch, but the fact that the band had enough wits about them to leave their drummer friend behind says a lot about who they were working with.
