[Interview & Photo] 2017.06 The Times Saturday Review

Interview

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/liam-gallagher-noel-took-the-route-of-being-macca-i-took-the-route-of-being-keith-moon-gvdtn9vx2

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Liam Gallagher: ‘You have to commit to a rock’n’roll life’

The singer’s next stop after One Love Manchester is Glastonbury. He tells Will Hodgkinson about his dark years, saying sorry to Chris Martin and the chances of an Oasis reunion

Will Hodgkinson

June 24 2017, 12:01am, The Times

Liam Gallagher in Waterlow Park, London

NEALE HAYNES FOR THE TIMES

Now that Liam Gallagher is back after three years in the wilderness to reclaim his title of the last great rock’n’roll star, it seems only right to ask him which other rock stars have impressed him. As we sit over orange juice and water in a café near his home in north London he reels off names like Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Ronnie Wood and his fellow Highgate resident Ray Davies, but the only person he has been starstruck by, he says, is Yoko Ono. In 2009 Gallagher got a call to visit Ono at the Dakota Building, the apartment block in New York where she lived with John Lennon from 1973 until Lennon was shot, outside the building, in 1980.

“It was eight in the morning and I thought, ‘F*** this, man. I don’t know if I can go up there,’ ” says Gallagher, who once claimed to be the reincarnation of John Lennon, despite being aged eight when Lennon died. “But I had a couple of drinks, went down, and the geezer at the door goes, ‘Who are you?’ ‘Liam Gallagher, mate.’ I go to the ninth floor, flat 72, and who’s standing there? F***ing Yoko Ono.”

Gallagher at the One Love Manchester concert

GETTY IMAGES

Gallagher, 44, describes declining Ono’s invitation to have a tinkle on Lennon’s piano (“because I can’t f***ing play the thing”) before taking up her offer of a cup of tea and rich tea biscuits, only to drop an entire biscuit into his drink by mistake. Ono expressed concern that Gallagher’s son Lennon might get a hard time from the other kids at school, but Liam reassured her that Lennon Gallagher is a top name and he would be fine. Then he noticed the Japanese writing on the cornices.

“I asked her what it meant and she said, ‘Funny you should mention that. John saw it at my parents’ house and liked it so I put it round our gaff,’ ” he recalls, perhaps not using Ono’s exact words. “It means, ‘While I’ve been hibernating I’ve been gathering my wings.’ So now I’ve put it in a new tune of mine called All I Need. Been trying for years to use that line and then — bingo.”

Gallagher has indeed been gathering his wings. When Oasis came to a messy end in 2009 after Liam launched a plum — then, more painfully, a guitar — at his brother Noel’s head before a gig in Paris, Liam looked like the one who might come off worse. Noel used his songwriting chops to launch a successful solo career while Beady Eye, the band Liam formed with the rest of Oasis, suffered from a distinct lack of killer anthems of the type that Noel is famous for. Then came three years of silence bar the odd jibe on Twitter, most of which involved Liam comparing Noel to a potato. And then Liam returned. There was a triumphant Manchester homecoming gig in May, a surprising duet of the Oasis classic Live Forever with Chris Martin of Coldplay at Ariana Grande’s One Love concert in June, and a just-announced Glastonbury slot that is already the talk of the festival.

“I’m steaming for Glastonbury,” says Gallagher, looking toned in a black T-shirt, cropped hair and jeans; we are meeting at 11 in the morning and he has already been for a seven-mile run on Hampstead Heath. “Now is the right time. We’ve had enough of politician rock’n’rollers who say all the right things before going back to their nice houses. I’m the truth juice, man. I’m a little aggy bastard and that’s what it’s all about. ”

I remind him that last time we met, in 2011, he derided Glastonbury as an inferno of “celebrities walking around in their famous wellingtons”, an apt if damning summation of the festival’s backstage scene. “Yeah, but there are dickheads everywhere, aren’t there? I certainly won’t be hanging around with any celebrities. I’ll be holding it down in my own little spot. And my kids [Lennon, 17, and Gene, 15] are coming for the first time, so I won’t be taking mushrooms either. Not in front of them, anyway.”

What if Lennon and Gene try expanding their minds in illegal ways? “Not happening, mate. I haven’t got a leg to stand on, but they won’t be doing it in front of me. Because I’ll be doing it all. There’ll be none left.”

While looking forward to living in his own Glastonbury bubble for the weekend, Gallagher draws the line at actually going to see any bands. “No way, man. I don’t like big gatherings. And then there’s the mud. I’m not ruining me clothes for no one.”

We’ve had enough of rockers who say all the right things. I’m the truth juice, man

Gallagher’s return comes after a difficult time. Beady Eye ended in 2014 after the band were told they could not afford to tour America; a bitter pill to swallow for a man who fronted it out with Oasis before 250,000 people at Knebworth in 1996. His marriage to Nicole Appleton ended in 2013 amid accusations of infidelity, with an American writer, Liza Ghorbani, filing for child support for a daughter Gallagher fathered.

“After that I sat around the house and drank, moaned, drank a bit more, moaned, and spent a lot of time in court,” says Gallagher of his dark years of the soul. “I weren’t seeing my kids, which is understandable; I f***ed up. If I came out of the house it was Oasis this and Oasis that and I felt like a shadow of my former self, so I was going to f*** off to Spain, get a little castle, buy a pair of gold trunks and let it all hang out. But then I got pulled back and started writing songs again. My missus, Debbie [Gwyther, his former assistant], said they were all right, so we met a geezer from Warners and he signed us on the spot.”

Since returning to the fray, Gallagher has noticed some changes in the world of music. “A lot of bands are claiming to be here to save guitar music, but you have to plug the f***ing thing in first, do you know what I mean? It’s like in the Nineties when the pop world got on to it that guitar music was cooking, so they would get some pretty boys and whack guitars round their necks. F*** that, man. I can only do one genre and it’s rock’n’roll. That’s my shit: the Pistols, the Who, Oasis, the Stones. I can’t be dealing with the rest of it.”

What about the Beatles? “Anyone who doesn’t like the Beatles are dark people,” he says, adding ominously: “Demons. But the Beatles were more like . . . what’s the word for those orchestra people?” Composers? He nods. “They were composers. Or maybe even wizards.”

I cannot help but wonder, when he complains about politician rock’n’rollers and pop bands posing with guitars, if Gallagher isn’t thinking about Coldplay. After all, he has variously called Chris Martin a vicar, a geography teacher and a plant pot. It might have made Gallagher and Martin’s duet at the Manchester One Love concert a touch awkward.

Liam Gallagher with his brother, Noel, left, in 1994

GETTY IMAGES

“I did say, after we rehearsed Live Forever in the toilets, sorry to him for that,” Gallagher says. “But [Martin] said, ‘No, no, carry on, we love it!’ So I was like, ‘OK, what’s that you’re wearing?’ They know it’s in jest. We’re all different. Not everyone can be as cool as me.”

Gallagher played his forthcoming single, Wall of Glass, at the One Love concert, a strange choice given that the audience was made up mostly of teenage girls who were more in the mood to sing along to pop bangers than contemplate the qualities of a song they had never heard before by that bloke from the band their dad liked. “I didn’t want to play it!” he protests. “I knew I’d only get it in the neck for doing a new song, but the organisers wanted it. They wanted me to do Imagine as well but I said, ‘No, man. That’s the Holy Grail.’ ”

Gallagher was not happy about Noel’s failure to perform at One Love, even though Noel, who was on holiday, donated royalties from Don’t Look Back in Anger to the Manchester relief fund and gave his blessing to a performance of the song by Chris Martin and Ariana Grande. I put it to Liam that two Gallaghers on one stage would count as an Oasis reunion, and that an Ariana Grande-led charity concert was not the place for that momentous event.

“You know what it’s like — whenever anything goes down there’s talk of Oasis getting back together,” says Liam, who at Glastonbury runs the risk of bumping into his brother, who will be there to introduce a screening of the Oasis documentary Supersonic. “He’s made it clear that a reunion is not at the top of his priorities and right now it’s not the top of mine. I would prefer it if I was in Oasis, but that’s not what the Manchester concert was about. He could have got up and done Don’t Look Back in Anger and never even had to see me.”

A reunion is not at the top of Noel’s priorities. I would prefer to be in Oasis

Noel has said he was never asked to play. “Are you telling me that if Noel Gallagher rocked up with his guitar and knocked on the door they would say, ‘You’re not invited, mate’?” Liam retorts. “So he can f*** off on that one. I don’t care if he was in the Amalfi Coast or wherever, it lacked sympathy on his behalf. We have family and friends in Manchester and me mam’s still there, and it would have been nice to do it for his people. End of.”

Liam was only 19 when Oasis took off, propelling him into a jetset lifestyle that was a world away from the streets where he grew up. He went straight from his mother Peggy’s terraced house in Burnage, Manchester, to living with Patsy Kensit in Primrose Hill, northwest London. “It happened at exactly the right time,” he says. “I spent the first 19 years of my life going: ‘What is this shit? It’s raining all the time, there’s no air in the football, the mushrooms have all been picked.’ I was digging holes in the street, thinking: I’d rather have the shakes from rock’n’roll than from a pneumatic drill. And you know what? It turned out great. There’s been no drink or drugs problems. I f***ed up on the personal front, but don’t we all?”

What would he be doing now if it hadn’t happened for him? “I’d be in Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester, smoking spice with the other zombies, pissing my pants and dribbling out of my ears.”

I suggest that working-class bands are suited to rock’n’roll because they see it all as a bonus while middle-class bands, suffering from guilt that they didn’t do something more useful with their lives, are the ones who end up in rehab.

With Yoko Ono in 2005

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“I was thinking about that on me run this morning,” he says. “When working-class people get money, fame, horses and nice holidays, it’s all new. With them upstairs, they’ve already been on private jets. They’ve already stayed in villas on Barbados. If it’s not fought for it’s not worth it, so what do they do? They go mad. I feel sorry for them, actually.”

An Oasis reunion feels like more a case of if than when. Both Gallaghers have solo albums out in the autumn, but the lure of having 150,000 people sing Wonderwall or Rock’n’Roll Star back at them on the Pyramid Stage must surely be too strong to resist for ever. I would put it at 2019.

“Mate, it’s not up to me, is it?” says Liam. “It’s in the hands of Noel. He’s got the biggest power and that’s what pisses me off. It will depend on how his solo records go because his ego is out of control and he won’t be able to handle it if it dwindles, but he’s obviously got a massive problem with me. As far as I’m concerned, it was a minor argument that broke up Oasis. We’ve had worse. I heard talk about him doing a solo career five years before, so he used it to jump ship. Right now I can’t give a shit about Oasis, Noel or his shit fans.”

When we head down to Waterlow Park in Highgate for the photo shoot, Gallagher, in an age when boy-next-door types such as Ed Sheeran have taken over the charts and the main stage at Glastonbury, still looks and acts every inch the rock star. Teenagers walking past ask him for his autograph. He boasts about the photographs of cancerous lungs on cigarette packets failing to scare him off his nicotine habit. Never before has a man been able to imbue the wearing of an oversized blue and yellow anorak with such menace.

“It’s a good life, rock’n’roll,” he says philosophically, as we walk back up Highgate Hill. “But you have to commit to it. There’s a lot more to being in a band than writing songs, you know. There’s always something that needs throwing out of the window, someone who needs flicking on the nose, and that line’s not going to snort itself. While Noel took the route of being Macca, I took the route of being Keith Moon and I’m very proud of that. And I did a bit of singing. Do you know what I mean?”

He looks at me, before nodding in agreement with himself. “You know what I mean.”

Liam Gallagher plays Glastonbury Festival on June 24. His solo album, As You Were, is released in the autumn