Noel in black shirt with white lace trim and Liam in Ray-Bans and black roll-neck jumper in colour on the front cover; inside are more colour pictures of Noel and Liam in Noel's fish tank room at Supernova Heights

by Adrian Green.

If it's half-one in the afternoon at Supernova Heights, the Italians will be here.

"It's half-one," says Noel Gallagher. "The Italians will be here."

The Italians, it seems, are exchange students. Once their classes are over, they routinely troupe along to Noel Gallagher's house and then proceed to stand outside. As afternoon recreation goes, it's hardly action-packed. If Noel's going out, they'll get to see him walk down the path, out of the front gate and into a waiting car. If he isn't, they'll have to make do with a fleeting glimpse of the man who writes the songs in Oasis should he come down to make a coffee, perhaps, or maybe tend to the desires of Benson and Hedges, the two conspicuously well-fed cats who slink around the business areas of what must constitute feline heaven: a large garden, lots of comfy furniture, plus a huge fish tank built into one of the living room walls. "I've tried writing songs in there," Noel nods, "but it doesn't work. I just end up spending hours starring at the fish."

All of which assumes Noel's at home in the first place. It's not as if this five storey property on an unremarkable, if obviously well-heeled, Primrose Hill street is his only residence. There's the Home Counties country mansion - infamously complete with five-a-side football pitch - and then the most recent addition to the Gallagher real estate profile, a cosy wee castle in Spain. Except it isn't a castle.

"You may have read about it in The Sun," the owner smiles, "but I can assure you it's not a castle. It's just a house."

A house with it's own swimming pool, mind, paid for by the bonus royalties accruing from Rod Stewart's cover of "Cigarettes & Alcohol". The recipient is suitably appreciative.

"I'd like to say now - thanks for the swimming pool, Rod."

Noel rummages in the fridge for some milk. He hasn't been around Supernova Heights much lately, isn't sure what's available by way of refreshments. Eventually some instant coffee is rustled up and he leads the way to the top floor which, as well as affording the statutory impressive views of central London, houses a fully-fledged recording studio. It's here that Noel's been working on the demos for the next Oasis album.

"Thing is," he chuckles, gesturing towards the various gizmos, "I don't really know how any of it works. I have to get mates around to show me."

This stymies one element of our quest. We are here to discuss "The Masterplan", the new Oasis album of old Oasis songs, the compilation of B-sides oft discussed in misty-eyed, hypothetical terms in pubs across the land, invariably upon utterance of the immortal words: "Anyway, "Acquiesce" should have been the A-side." The initial premise was to listen to each track, consider their merits (or otherwise), then revel in whatever memories they evoke. But unfortunately, Noel hasn't got a tape deck in his recording studio - or at least, one he knows how to work.

So we're falling back on the Gallagher memory bank, which by the host's own admission is impressive in scope but prone to get things mixed up. As regards the existence of the album itself, Noel is ambivalent.

"I'm not really sure if it's the right thing to do, because sometimes when I see these things I think it looks a bit of a con."

To soothe any lingering pangs of conscience, Oasis fans were invited to vote for their favourite B-sides on the Internet, and the most popular selections would comprise the tracklisting (as far as Noel can recall, the top three punters' choices were "Acquiesce". "I Am The Walrus" and "The Masterplan"). T o these were added some of the band's preferences - "Stay Young" is on the LP only because Liam rang up Noel in a strop after it was initially excluded; "The Swamp Song" got nul points from the kids but the bloke who wrote it reckons it's top, so there it is - and the de rigeur pretentious sleeve artwork to complete a nice little Christmas present for Alan McGee and a handy money-saver for Americans forced to hunt down UK singles on import, not to mention a heady romp down memory lane for everyone else.

"I don't believe people can go into a studio and record B-sides," Noel ponders. "It's either a good song or a bad song. And I never intend to write a bad song! The only time I've really sat down to write a B-side I wrote "Cast No Shadow", which was supposed to be a B-side but it ended up really good. There's a bit at the end of "Cast No Shadow" when someone says down the mic really quietly, 'Tha'll do for a B-side'. So we had to take that out when it came to put it on the album."

So "Cast No Shadow" isn't on "The Masterplan". Nor, strangely, is "Round Are Way". But "The Masterplan" is, along with 13 others. Noel has his non-furry Benson & Hedges at the ready and his brow furrowed at the prospect of an old-skool track-by-track run-down of his Greatest Hits That Weren't. We begin, with impeccable logic, at the beginning of Side One...

Acquiesce

(B-side of "Some Might Say", released April 24, 1995. Held by many to be superior to the A-side, Oasis' first Number One. The first and, as yet, only Liam/Noel duet.)

"I was on the train travelling up to meet the rest of the band (at Loco Studios in Wales), 'cos I was the only one living in Lodon at the time. And the train stopped, I think it might have been in the Severn Tunnel, leaf on the track or something. I had my guitar with me, and I just picked it up and started strumming away on the train. These are the days before we were travelling first class, of course! I remember it being pretty late at night, and I was sat in the smoking section. Maybe about another five people on the train. I got to the chorus and I was progressively getting louder and by the time we'd been sitting in this tunnel for about 40 minutes people were starting to go: 'Tut! Do you mind?! We're getting bored here, can you stop playing?'"

"But by the time I'd got there I'd worked out the arrangement. We went to the studio and I made the lyrics up on the spot, really. We went back to America, and I got a call from McGee, seven in the morning, and he's going (adopts not wholly authentic Glaswegian accent), 'Och Noel, I've just heard "Acquiesce", it's got to be a single'. And I'm going, 'F*****g not now mate, I've got a really bad head, not now'. He went into this big rant about it and sand it down the phone, really badly. And I'm thinking, 'F*****g hell - it sounds shit!' So we had this argument. I'm going, 'Well, I think "Some Might Say" is a better song', and he's going, 'Well, I think "Acquiesce" is'. But I suppose I was just being a stubborn c**t, ' cos he's from the record company and I'm from the band and if he wanted it then I was gonna do the opposite."

"Liam couldn't sing the chorus for some reason. I think he was drunk or something, but he couldn't get the high notes. So I decided to sing it. When the record came out everyone was going, 'It's a song about Liam', and that I was saying that we need each other, we believe in one another - which was total f****g bullshit. It wasn't about that, but 'cos he was singing the verses and I was singing the choruses people were like: 'Oh God man, the two brothers are, like, sharing their love for each other, even though they hate each other. It's just like, wow, they're bonding on record'. Haha! So we went along with that for ages!"

For a couple of years, "Acquiesce" was the first song in every Oasis set, enhancing its mythical status no end.

"It was weird when we first started doing pretty big gigs in America. There'd be an uproar when we came on, then we go into this song and everyone would go: 'What the f***'s that?!' 'Cos you're supposed to do your big song first. Liam comes on and just goes, "Acquiesce"! (Adopts highly convincing stoned American dude voice) 'Hey man, the guy just said "Acquiesce"...'Looking back, it should've been a single."

The title apparently derives from a question Noel was asked during an interview.

"I didn't know what it meant. The person described as when the Pied Piper took all the kids out of the city, playing his flute like the geezer out of Jethro Tull, all the kids were experiencing acquiesce. And I was like, 'That's ridiculous, I thought it was the drink!' But it was good, 'cos it confused Liam. Hahaha! 'What's a f*****g acquiesce?' 'It's a new car by Volkswagen. F*****g great, you wanna get yourself one'."

It's become a big song, hasn't it?

"We had to drop singles (from the live set) in order to keep that one in, just because the place would go f*****g ballistic when we played it. I think it's one of the better songs. If I had my way again I'd rerecord it ' cos it sounds really thin to me and I'd don't like the guitar sounds. And of course, the drumming's not much cop. Allegedly. Your honour. But, yeah, a good way to open the album."

Underneath The Sky

(B-side of "Don't Look Back In Anger", released February 19, 1996. Distinctive guitar sound created by playing through a Leslie cabinet. Opening line: "Underneath a sky of red there's a storyteller sleeping alone")

"When you go in those bookshops at airports they have these little books, like 'The Tiny Book Of Wisdom', and there was a book of travellers' quotes, and most of the lines are adapted, that's adapted, from one of them. Not stolen! Poems by travellers, by people who travelled the world. And as we were travelling around the world at the time..."

"It's one of my favourite songs. There's a piano solo in there, and Bonehead's playing the top half and I'm playing the bottom half. And of course, we're both pissed. It must have been the longest take for a piano solo ever, ' cos the pair of us are sat on this stool together, and we're slipping off all over the place. I think it might be slightly out of time as well. I only play two notes but because I'm in charge I had to have the lion's share of the stool! 'Listen mate, I'm having at least 60 per cent of this stool, and you're getting your rhythm guitarists's 40 per cent...'!"

Talk Tonight

(B-side of "Some Might Say". Noel's account of his notorious Vegas-to-'Frisco-with-all-the-drugs AWOL experience during Oasis' first American tour. Famously loathed by Liam.)

"It's a true story, really. Liam f*****g hated it at first, and I remember him saying in an interview that I was singing it with an American accent. Which just shows you how strung out on drugs he was at the time. I went to San Francisco, 'cos I'd left the band at that point and I was, well, I don't know what I was doing. I was just off me f****g head. And I met this chick and she sorted me head out, really. Actually, she ended up grassing me up to the record company, 'cos they were all looking for me, so she told them where I was and they came to get me!"

"Then we recorded it in f*****g Texas of all places. Two takes. The bits I like are where I take me watch off at the beginning and start coughing - it sounds really honest. It's quite a sad song but it's quite uplifting as well."

It seems unlikely now that an Oasis fan could hand out with you long enough to invite you back to their place for a soft drink. This seems quite a reclusive life.

"The reason why I don't live here so much is because sometimes it really becomes unbearable. We've been burgled here twice. We nearly got cleaned out one day. We've had the windows put in. It's usually every time I'm on live radio or live television, drunk, and I say something about summat or another. The last time it happened was when I was on 'Fantasy Football', and I said summat about Romanians. Little did I know that there's a load of Romanians living in the block of flats up the road."

"Some of the fans are alright, some of them just wanna come and get your autograph and have a chat. And that's cool, but you get the ones who think you've got the answers to all their problems, the ones that have run away from home and all that. And you feel sorry for them, but what can you f****g do? I can't help everybody. And if you help one person I suppose you've got tot help them all."

"Then you get the ones about two or three in the morning as they're coming back from the pub. 'Alright Noel, mad for it!' 'Are you?' 'Yeah, mad for it!' They come round with beer, going, 'We've just come round for a beer...' 'Oh, just come in!' D'you wanna stay?! D'you wanna bacon sandwich?!' I always used to read people moaning about the fans and I always thought, 'You moaning c**t, what's up with you? Just get on with it'. But I sort of understabd now. I was recording in here last week and the amount of times I walked down the f*****g stairs. I mean, people had been there for hours in the pissing rain and you feel obliged to go and sign their albums. A mate was going, 'Why don't you just ignore the door?' And I'm going, 'Well frankly, it would be hard to play without the equipment they paid for!'"

Don't you regret making yourself so visible then? This is the house, after all, with a sign over the front door proclaiming itself Supernova Heights.

"Oh, that's drugs again for you, mate. I shall have the biggest house in Primrose Hill! I've calmed down now, kicked it on the head, it got too much and it's too boring for me now. But last year and the year before it was just f*****g mental. We were going to have a flag on top of the house, we were going to have it at half-mast when we weren't here, shit like that. Our manager would go, 'Just calm down, you don't know what you're letting yourself in for'. Naming your house is basically just out of being into drugs. I was actually going to get a blue plaque put up as well: Noel Gallagher Lives Here Now! Instead of having one when I'm dead. Actually they'll probably have one outside the off-licence round the corner."

Going Nowhere

(B-side of "Stand By Me", released September 27, 1997. Significantly, one of only two "Be Here Now"-era inclusions. Another Noel lead vocal.)

"That one's off "Stand By Me", isn't it? The other two, "(I Got)The Fever" and, er, thingy (he means "My Sister Lover"), they're the ones I like the least. That was when we were like, 'Oh f**k, gotta write some B-sides'. They were just f*****g bashed together, couple of chords and a chord change. Which I hate doing, because it's selling yourself short, really, and it's not fair on the people who buy the records. But "Going Nowhere" is one of the better ones out of that period of time. It's actually a very, very old song, from when I was heavily into Burt Bacharach. I wrote that just after we got the record deal. I was going down to ondon to see McGee - me, Liam and Bonehead, I think actually, I'm not sure if they helped out on the lyrics of that. They might have done, I can't remember."

Careful.

"Yeah. No, they didn't. They definitely didn't. I remember now! It was all me! If it is about anything, it's just about what we were going to do when we were all millionaires. "Gonna get me a motor car..." And cleverly rhymed with the word 'Jaguar'! I used that in "Step Out" as well. Will anyone notice? Nah, will they f**k! Then we binned it for ages."

Any particular reason why Liam doesn't sing it?

"I don't think we were getting on really well. He came down to do the backing vocals, and I didn't like what he was doing and then he subsequently called me a c**t, and then I called him a c**t, and then he walked out of the studio, and that was it. So I said, 'Right, we're taking them off for a start!' I'm not sure whether he likes the song or not. He probably doesn't, that's why he doesn't sing it. If Liam doesn't like it, he doesn't sing it, it's as simple as that. Or if there's something more important going on, like a pub crawl, then he won't do it. Bless him. Lager before music."

Fade Away

(B-side of "Cigarettes & Alcohol", released October 10, 1994. A highlight of early British tours. Mystifyingly, did not appear on "Definitely Maybe". Melody allegedly bears a passing resemblance to "Freedom" by Wham!)

"That was a real, real early one from the days when we rehearsed down at the Boardwalk. I think people got on the line, "While we're living the dreams we have as children fade away". Which is quite true, really. It was a live thing in the studio and Liam just overdubbed his vocals, and these are the days before I turned into Jimmy Page and tried to do a guitar solo over every bit where there's no singing. So there's no guitar solo on it, which is cool. Sounds great when Liam sings it. It used to be f*****g amazing live."

"People were, I wouldn't say pissed off, but pretty surprised when it wasn't on the first album. I don't know why it never made it. I was listening back to it the other day and it's a pretty raucous song. It would be nice to put it back in the set, actually, but because most of the people that come to the gigs now, well they just wanna hear "Wonderwall", we'd be playing it in silence to a load of people going to the bar."

The Swamp Song

(B-side of "Wonderwall", released October 30, 1995. Born out of rehearsals with new drummer Alan White, a jam on a riff sounding not too dissimilar to Canned Heat's "On The Road Again")

"At the beginning you can hear a crowd noise, and "Swamp Song" was the first track we played at Glastonbury. So we took the drums from the Glastonbury performance, 'cos it was the right pace, and then we just overdubbed all the guitars. I think I played bass. And the guitar on it is by Paul Weller. He'd come down to play the solo on "Champagne Supernova". So we thought, 'Might as well get our money's worth out of him'. And he plays the mouth organ as wello. It's one of my favouries, actually, but everyone was dead against putting it on this album."

"It's just a jam, really. It was called, for ages, "The Jam". Totally inspired title. So then when Paul played on it, we thought, 'We'd better change that'. So when we changed it he said, 'How come you've changed the title?' I said, 'I thought it would sound a bit corny'. And he went, 'No, I really liked that title!' For the life of me, I don't know why we called it "The Swamp Song"..."

I Am The Walrus [live Glasgow Cathouse, June 1994]

(B-side of "Cigarettes & Alcohol". Perennial set-closer back when Oasis didn't do encores, then subsequently an encore itself. Not, in fact, recorded at Glasgow Cathouse in June 1994, or indeed, at any other time)

"Well now. I'll tell you what happened with this, and nobody knows this story. We went up to do the Gleaneagles Hotel Sony Seminar. It's one of them shit things where all the twats in suits get together and they roll on the new signings."

To entertain them...

"And oh f**k me, did we entertain them! So we were doing the soundcheck, and we did "I Am The Walrus". There was no-one there, it was empty. So that song was actually recorded at a soundcheck in Gleneagles, right? And I'm going to get in trouble for saying this, but the crowd noise was taken from a Faces bootleg album! Because it would look shit if you put 'Live at Sony Seminar in Gleneagles'! We had a version of it from the Cathouse in Glasgow, which sounded quite similar but it was f*****g rubbish. So we thought, 'F**k it, no-one'll f*****g know'. But I always meant to set the record straight one day. Sorry to anyone who bought it on the premise of being at that gig."

"It was an absolutely empty hall. At the beginning Our Kid's going, 'Doesn't matter if it's out of tune, because you're cool'. I was pissed as an arse. It was ten in the morning when we got there and I had to do these interviews with all these Sony people from around the world going, 'So how does it feel being signed to Sony?' And we were going, 'But we're not, we're signed to Creation, aren't we?' And then, of course, it dawned on us that somebody hadn't bothered to tell us, 'Well, no, actually you're signed to Sony but you're licensed to Creation'. We were going, 'But you f*****g told us we were signed to Creation!' And McGee's going, 'But it's the same thing!' And we're going, 'It's not. Does it we get more money?' 'Probably' 'Oh well, that's fine then.'"

"But it used to be great playing it, because Liam would walk off first, then I'd put my guitar down and leave all the effects on, saying to the rest of the band, 'Keep it going for as long as possible'. Just so me and Our Kid could drink the two bottles of champagne we used to get on our rider! By the time the band would get back me and him would be sat there f*****g pissed as arseholes. They'd say, 'Where's the champagne, mate?@, and we're hiccuping! 'We've f*****g drunk it, haven't we!' Bonehead would be well pissed off. So what used to happen at subsequent gigs was it'd be arace to see who could finish first. I'd put my guitar down, then Bonehead would play a chord and put his guitar down, so it would leave the drummer and the bass player. And because the drummer and bass player were a f*****g useless pair of c***s at that time they could never nod when to finish it properly. So it used to go on for f*****g ages! The we started getting three bottles of champagne on the rider and Bonehead would have one. The three of us sitting there, slaughtered, going, 'Come on now lads, keep it going for another two minutes and maybe the drugs'll have turned up and they'll be gone as well'. Hahaha!"

What was the longest you ever played it?

"I think there's a 19-minute version somewhere. We done a festival in Belgium. We'd all been out the night before, and we were on before Simple Minds. Simple Minds. Yes. There was a catwalk for Jim Kerr to walk up and down on, as he does. And it was just a really shit vibe, so we done four songs and a 19-minute version of "I Am The Walrus" and got off, 'cos we all had shit hangovers. We just said to them, 'Whatever you do don't finish until the 40-minute time limit'. I think Paul Weller might have come into the dressing room and siad, 'Your band's onstage, playing'. And I goes, 'Too f*****g right they are mate! D'you wanna drink?! Have some champagne!'"

Go to Part 2

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c 1998 Andrew Turner

aturner@interalpha.co.uk

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