Getting High (15 page)

Liam says something which causes Noel to throw his brother a withering look, and say, ‘No, it's not, it's “Champagne Supernova”.'

The crowd momentarily stop, a little confused. Is it going to go off? No, it's not. The faithful who follow Oasis know the score when they see a disturbed sun light up behind Whitey's kit.

Noel opens with the song's delicate chords and the crowd turn to look at him, but he is deep into his playing, totally unreachable. Liam starts singing and the band join in. Of course, they play it too fast, but then they always do.

Live, they have little chance of repeating the subtleties this song achieves on record. Instead, they concentrate on finding its unstoppable momentum and turning that fully on to the audience. It is a majestic song, brilliantly arranged with different melodies and riffs piled upon each other and a set of lyrics that are ambiguous but good enough for everyone to read their own meaning into them.

In a decade where drugs are the norm and the authorities helpless to stop them, never has a crowd been more delighted than when they get to sing the ‘Where were you while we were getting high?' refrain.

As the band head into the last third of the song and the crowd hold up their lighters, Noel now escapes into his playing. This is the nearest Oasis get to jazz, in that Noel now truly uses his guitar and not his pen to communicate with people. His guitar sounds angry, determined, focused yet utterly loose. Again, he brings forth that remarkable tension as you wonder where he's going with these notes, how he is going to pull it off. It's a tension further heightened by his on-stage demeanour, which is totally motionless. There is no emotion on his face. Nor any sweat. He is still, yet his music is wild, urgent.

Then he brings the mood down and Alan White kicks in the soft military beat that ends the song in such a wistful manner. Noel hits the last chord and turns away. The lights dim to thousands cheering, and the rest of the band take off their instruments and walk off.

You would be forgiven for thinking that the gig has ended. No way. Now we are into phase two, the place where Noel displays his other sides, other moods. He calmly goes over to the stool Jason has just placed on-stage and sits down.

Noel adjusts the mike and says, ‘This one's for a mate of mine. His name is Johnny and this is “Wonderwall”.' After the radio show, Noel had met up with Johnny Marr, the former guitarist with The Smiths who had truly inspired him.

Noel hits those distinctive chords and opens his mouth to sing. He needn't have bothered. The whole of Manchester beats him to it.

‘Today is gonna be the day that they're gonna throw it back at you / By now you should have somehow / Realised what you gotta do / I don't believe that anybody feels the way I do / About you now.' And everyone in the arena sings the last two lines to Noel and to Oasis. This is true community music, a binding together of people through words and sound that somehow mix to touch all the right nerves, tug all the right strings, inside of us all.

Years ago, across town, Noel heard a similar sound every time he went to Maine Road. He stood amongst the people as they sang together, united as one. Now, through his own music, he had repeated the magic.

In this part of the show, Noel is not the hard, cool rock star but the town healer. It's here that his voice comes into its own. Strong, plaintive and soulful.

At the song's conclusion, Noel says, ‘Thanks for sticking by us this year,' and as they thank him back, he goes into ‘Cast No Shadow', his elegy to songwriters.

Again, the crowd take the burden off him, and buoyed by their reaction, he changes the final wording to ‘They can take
our
souls/ But they can't take
our
pride'.

The lights extinguish and when they come up again Noel says, ‘This is a song about being young and having it large every night, the way you do. This is “Morning Glory”.'

Played slower on acoustic, and bereft now of its almost thrashlike treatment on record, the song takes on greater depths of meaning.

Noel always wrings more meaning from his songs when he plays them acoustically, his sad-tinged voice throwing a different light on lines such as 'All your dreams are made / When they're chained to the mirror and the razor blade'. On record those words sound like a celebration. Here, they sound like a lament.

The song ends, the lights dim and Noel Gallagher, with only his guitar by his side, becomes a silhouette, briefly trapped in his own isolation. The lights rise and the band, minus Liam, walk back on as Jason takes away the stool and Noel pulls on his electric guitar.

‘Anyone here called Sally?' Noel asks. There's a shout from the front row. Noel peers over at the people. ‘You're not Sally, you're a geezer.'

He kicks up the ringing chords to ‘Don't Look Back In Anger'. Again, he changes the words: ‘Take me to Maine Road / Where the Blues play,' he sings, a line of deliberate provocation. There are many United supporters and some players here tonight.

The crowd miss the reference. They're too busy in their own rapture to notice.

‘I Am The Walrus' is next but the horn section have missed their cue, they're late coming on-stage.

As Maggie desperately runs to locate them, Noel has to improvise. ‘See City are doing well,' he tells the crowd. There are some cheers but many jeers. ‘So are United,' he concedes. He looks behind him as the horn players finally arrive.

‘I've been waiting for you lot,' he half shouts. ‘Where the fuck you been?'

In compensation, they play their hearts out as Oasis deliver a gigantic version of ‘Walrus'. Bolstered by the horns, the band's playing here is manic, mesmerising and relentless.

As on the opener, ‘Swamp Song', Noel attacks his guitar, wrenching out all kinds of feedback and howling distortion to counteract the rhythm section's circular dynamics.

Liam stalks the stage. Noel goes and kneels by his amp, lost in music once more. At its fiery conclusion, Manchester stands in appreciation, their noise reverberating around the arena. The enthusiasm is such you believe the applause will never stop.

Oasis rarely encore. But tonight they clear the stage of the horn players and then the five of them tear into ‘Rock ‘n' Roll Star', the song that, according to its writer, says everything he ever wanted to say in a song. And, of course, Liam gets to sing the word ‘Suun-shii-ine' again. The gig ends now, with Liam sauntering off-stage and being spat at by United fans. He should care. There are 20,000 people here and the music has swept them away, allowed them to taste freedom.

Freedom. This decade is about freedom. Freedom to take drugs, hold raves, protect the environment. Freedom to think differently from those before and those above, freedom to live how you see fit. Freedom is in short supply these days. But not at Oasis concerts. Their words are about freedom, their music breathes it.

An exhausted Noel Gallagher sits once more in the production office. ‘I've escaped,' he says.

It had to happen. Just had to.

In truth, there could be no other way. For the last few years, the Gallagher boys had remonstrated with their mother. Leave him, they'd say. He's no good to you or to us. Fuck it, let's go, come on. Of course, Peggy wanted to leave but one thing held her in check: her Catholic religion.

For Peggy to divorce or leave her husband would mean excommunication from the Church and, ultimately, that would lead her into hell. It was unthinkable for her to even consider placing her very soul in peril.

But Ma, the boys would argue, what kind of church is it that allows this to happen? I can't do it, she would reply, and for evermore the Gallagher boys would despise the church, and music would become their religion. Placed in this impossible situation, Peggy often tried to remonstrate with her husband.

‘Why do you do such terrible things?' she would desperately ask of her husband.

‘Because everyone else does,' he would chillingly reply.

‘I don't care what everybody else is doing,' she would sadly say. But her words were no use. Now, only action was the answer.

She went to the council and she begged them to move her and her sons. She would sit in grey offices, tears streaming down her face, pleading for a new house so that the family could escape. Finally, the council relented.

Typically, Liam was against moving house. They should throw Dad out. Why should they have
their
lives disrupted? He was the one who should move. Why should they have to start from scratch again?

The stress got to Liam. Peggy recalls watching him in the dinner queue at school, nervous, biting his nails, so unhappy.

But move they did. One night, with Thomas out, Peggy Gallagher and her sons packed their bags and moved to a new council house in Burnage.

On the night they arrived, the boys chose their bedrooms – Liam and Noel sharing, Paul in another room – and then they finally slept.

In the early hours of the morning Peggy, who now weighed just seven and a half stone, sat down in the empty sitting-room and looked at the bare walls and uncarpeted floor. Then she asked herself, How on earth will this family survive? They had nothing to their name except the clothes on their backs. There was little money coming in. What on earth were they to do?

It was then that the uncontrollable tears burst through and Peggy wept like she had never wept before. Yet even in the midst of her weeping, she was careful not to wake her sons. It would never do for her boys to see her like this. For them she would always be strong.

Of course, Peggy's family pitched in. Her brothers and sisters gave her items to help make the house liveable. Soon, Thomas tracked them down. But he wouldn't come in. He'd stand at the front-door shouting, but that was the extent of it. No longer could he beat them. Noel was now the head of the family.

A few weeks after moving in, the local priest came to visit Peggy. He had heard what had happened. Peggy invited him in and gave him a cup of tea.

But when the priest started insinuating that she should perhaps consider returning to her husband, Peggy put down her cup and firmly told him to leave.

‘Which is one of the reasons why I love her so much,' Noel proudly says.

Noel's violent side also manifested itself outside the home. The main example was at football matches. He never instigated fights and, as is so often the case, there was a lot of shouting and running down streets with very few punches thrown. But if it did kick off, Noel could more than handle himself. Guigsy remembers him once battering someone in a Nottingham pub, ‘giving him a proper seeing-to'.

Noel actively enjoyed travelling away to matches. There would be hundreds of them and their sheer number precluded the police enforcing the law in any kind of meaningful way. Noel and all his mates, defiant to the last, would be shepherded on to trains, for which they never bought a ticket. They would openly take drugs, get drunk, and then Noel and a few others would get off a stop early, walk into town and shoplift whatever they could.

The fights they had, Noel says, were usually sparked off by the opposing fans. Even when languishing in the Second Division, Manchester City still commanded a formidable following. The City fans' massive presence alone always ensured that there was immediate tension upon their arrival.

‘We called ourselves the Young Guvnors,' Noel recalls, ‘and then it got changed to the Cool Cats which was a really stupid name because we weren't cool and we certainly weren't cats. It was mainly two years spent just running up and down the streets. It was like those scenes from
Quadrophenia
. You'd go up a street and then the cops would come.

‘Someone would launch a brick through a window and then they would chase us. It was a good laugh, but then I started getting more into music and that was the end of it.'

The music Noel refers to centred mainly around The Smiths. If anything, he has played down a little their appeal for him.

The band's melodic instincts, hewn from Johnny Marr's love of 1960s girl groups and quality pop, the fact that a major British band now hailed from Manchester (so starting a line that exists to this day with the later arrival of The Stone Roses and then Oasis), Morrissey's undoubted skill as a lyricist (especially in his song titles), all struck a major chord with Noel.

Later on, when working with The Inspiral Carpets, Noel sported a quiff in honour of Johnny Marr whose guitar playing and songwriting he so admired.

The haircut made his hirsute eyebrows even more prominent and the Inspirals were quick to nickname him Monobrow. They also nicknamed their manager, Antony Bodgiano, Binsy Smith after a character in a children's TV show, and on the spine of the sleeve for their single ‘Find Out Why' they wrote ‘Binsy Smith meets Monobrow'.

Another major influence on Noel was U2, especially, says Graham Lambert, The Inspiral Carpets' guitarist who Noel would roadie for, the album
Achtung Baby
, which Noel repeatedly listened to while on tour.

At home, Liam also recalls some Billy Bragg records in Noel's collection. Certainly, his older brother had a distinct penchant for guitar music, although it was somewhat after the event, Liam asserts, that Noel fell for The Jam.

This passion for music not only started to shape Noel's future, but it began to alienate him from his hooligan friends. They simply weren't interested in music. But for Noel, with anything that interested him he fully committed himself to it, a direct result of his Irish blood and a Catholic upbringing which demands full and utter dedication.

Music was now a major passion and, as ever, it was all or nothing.

Take Noel's twenty-first birthday, one of the few significant birthdays in any person's life.

‘What are you doing?' his mates asked.

‘Well, I wouldn't mind going to see The Stone Roses and James at the International Two.'

‘Ah, fuck off mate. Let's go down the pub.'