Don't Look Back At Noel In Anger

The biggest Oasis fan I know recently took up golf and last week bought a scarily professional-looking lawn mower. This kind of prepared me for the shock of Noel Gallagher, on May 29, turning 40.

Whatever happened to those years between 1997 - when Be Here Now was Britain's fastest-selling album - and now? Whatever happened to Oasis because that third elpee really was the beginning of the end for them? Ah well...

One of the few papers to give the full-page treatment to Noel's birthday bash was the good old Daily Record. In other lives, Scott (of the golf and the mower) and I worked for the paper. When Oasis were the biggest band on the planet, we were among the five-man team detailed to shadow their every move between their Loch Lomond concert-site and Glasgow's Hilton.

That's right, five. Tragically for us, Oasis didn't trash the hotel. Noel and "our kid" Liam sat quietly in the bar until 2am. We followed them to their rooms and then crashed in our room, singular. (I slept on the floor and was woken by the photographer standing astride me in a black thong, blow-drying his hair into his favoured Jon Bon Jovi style.)

The Record went big on Oasis -they were exciting and Noel gave great quote, just like his hero John Lennon. Keen to mirror that famous photo of Harold Wilson with the Beatles, Blair got himself snapped alongside Noel when the Gallaghers were invited to No 10. Tone and Noel, what hope they promised.

You wonder whether Gordon Brown will repeat Blair's pop party and which bands might be on the guest-list. Oasis-influenced the View? Too Scottish, perhaps, for a PM who would not want to be accused of jockrock bias. You hope for his sake that Brown doesn't bother, especially after that desperate namecheck for Arctic Monkeys, another band who probably wouldn't Be Here Now without Oasis's influence.

Britpop was a marketing campaign, nothing more. Very quickly, Blair must have realised the folly of aligning himself with a bunch of chancers who claimed to be, according to a subsequent album of bombastic, bad-rhyming rock, Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants (sic). And shortly after that, Noel must have wished he'd never accepted pineapple and cheese on a stick from a politician who would not have regarded that title as too grand for his memoirs.

Those were crazy days, hanging onto Noel's every word. When one of the brothers' infamous scraps caused the cancellation of their first big American tour, every editorial conference for a week echoed to the same question: "What can we say about Oasis today?"

Lots. Psychologists were wheeled in and so was Pat Kane, who knew a thing or two about sibling rivalry in rock. We squeezed the story dry. Well, it was the Gallaghers' biggest scrap since their mother asked: "Right, who wants the top bunk?"

Noel may not match Lennon as a songwriter but he's his equal with the gags and definitely the funniest rock star I've ever met. It's a pity he didn't follow through with his threat to attend his own bash dressed as Stalin but on Sky's Soccer AM recently he came out with a cracker.

Unwrapping his gift from the presenters, a round object we all thought would be a football, he quipped: "Is it the head of James Blunt?"

Source: www.scotsman.com