He’s on the rooftop deck of the Mondrian Hotel in SoHo, Noel Gallagher and a hundred of his favourite strangers, goggling at the staggering 270-degree view of – everything, really: skyscrapers, bridges, Manhattan’s eyrie.
It’s an Oasis album cover, a view worthy of High Flying Birds – and as his debut solo album blasts on the sound system, and Gallagher sips wine with media and fans pressing in with their umpteenth questions, even the rock star is a little overwhelmed.
“I’d never done anything like that before, ever,” he says the next day in a different swish downtown hotel. “My wife [Sara MacDonald] was going, ‘I don’t know how you do it.’ But in the end, I think the best way is just to get drunk.”
And did you?
“Oh, yeah.”
Well, there’s a legacy to uphold – without the usual suspects. At 44, he’s relaxed and self-deprecating, laughing and peppering his speech with cheerily sardonic F-bombs the way people salt French fries, and why not? Having powered Britpop sensation Oasis to 70 million in worldwide sales in the guitar nineties, he’s launching Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds solo, with the North American leg of the tour opening Nov. 7 at Massey Hall in Toronto.
But, sometimes, being your brother’s keeper is the devil you know. The guitarist and songwriter left Oasis in 2009, after a final rumble with younger brother Liam.
“Initially, it wasn’t a relief. It was a pain in the ass. But now I’m in it, I thought ‘Why not? I don’t have to worry about band politics.’ ”
That’s one way to put it: politics. In the Middle Eastern sense. Only the Kinks’ Davies waged brotherhood like Oasis’s Gallaghers did, brawling their way through a decade and a half of hits and punches. But Noel plays down his role in the mythology.
“You know, I never started a fight with a single person on this planet,” he says. “The only person I ever argued with about anything was Liam. And we don’t need to go into why. I’m not an aggressive person. I argue with my wife.”
The album came after a year off to reassess and recharge. But songwriting is what he does in his spare time. “And I’m really lucky that people are interested in what I do in my spare time.”
With the interest come expectations. “Everybody expects you to come back with the direct … anthem. And I was like, I wanna come back with a whisper. I wanna tap people on the shoulder and say, ‘Come over here a minute, there’s … trumpets on this!’ ”
Yes, on one or two. Otherwise, High Flying Birds is supersonic, a series of full-hearted anthems. “I’m a sucker for a chorus. My biggest influence are the Beatles. Obviously that’s not me putting myself up there, but that’s how I learned to write songs. And their songs have a beginning, a middle and an end, and they’re all very uplifting.”
He’s always been a classicist, and a torchbearer for rock, even when slagging off half the bands playing it. On one side, Oasis, unapologetically proud of “being a big stadium band ’cause that’s … the trip.” On the other, contemporaries Radiohead, who poked at stardom like it was a dead skunk and famously dropped Creep from its set list.
“Rock ’n’ roll … You certainly don’t hear it on the radio. Rock music is going underground. It’ll never go away, though. The story, whatever that is, will keep needing to be retold as generations go by.
“But then again, Neil Young says it better than me. Well, he says it better than anybody.”
