.....Instead he (Noel Gallagher) spent much of the time with his new best mate, Robbie Williams, at that time still with Take That. The two hit it off immediately and Robbie was photographed drinking and smoking a spliff. It was to prove both his undoing and salvation.
The gig itself should have been a glorious summer celebration of a band at their very peak playing their biggest gig of their lives. Instead it was largely a scrappy reminder that the band were as capable as anyone else of right royal cock-ups. Two songs in and Liam invited everyone present (all 100 000 of them) up for a fight. One disaffected punter insisted on lobbing two dozen eggs at the stage, although none hit the target. The new songs got caught up in the wind, never delivered with any of the impact that they later'd prove to have. That the whole thing was live on Channel 4 didn't help much. The band did manage to turn it round a bit by the end of the set, particularly after Robbie had jumped on stage to dance along.
'When Liam asked him on stage, that was his spiritual calling,' Tim Abbott was reported as saying. 'The puppet strings were cut the day he went on stage.'
'I got my picture in the papers,' says Robbie, 'and when I went to see the others in Take That a few days later, they said they'd had a meeting and they didn't think my behaviour was how someone in the band should behave. that's when they sacked me. I'm glad I did it, though. Meeting Oasis completely changed my attitude to what I was doing and what i wanted to be. It freed me from a lot of things.'
(..................)
As I got out of the lift, Noel and his girlfriend Meg, Robbie Williams and their friend, the singer Lisa Moorish, were standing by the doors.
'Turn right and keep on walking,' said Noel as we headed towards the back door to the kitchens. A couple of seconds later there was a commotion by the hotel entrance and suddenly we were being chased by a couple of hundred teenage kids who'd all found out that Robbie was in town. Out past the kitchens, over a wall and into a waiting cab, I got to experience just how scary such adulation must be. As we drove off with girls climbing all over the taxi I looked over at Noel. he was grinning.
'Brilliant, isn't is?' He said.
(.................)
After we'd forced Noel to play the tape of the album a dozen times, Robbie and I headed down to the bar. He opened up about his frustration with Take That, admitting that he'd been writing poems an lyrics of his own for years. I dumbly expected sixth-form demonstrations of deficiency, but when he started reciting some of his words, I was blown away. Few of the lyrics he revealed that night will ever be incorporated into any of his songs, primarily because many of them were fuelled by a bitterness and insecurity directly related to his recent exit from Take That, but they were packed with smart, surprisingly memorable lines that belied his teenypop image. They seemed far more suited to the kind of music being made by Oasis and their contemporaries. I told him as much in the corridor outside the hotel room and drunkenly threatened to recite as much as I could remember to Noel once we staggered back inside.
'You can't,' protested Robbie. 'He's a proper songwriter and everything. what if he thinks what I've written is a load of shit?'
Inside, I said to Noel, 'You should hear Robbie's lyrics. They're brilliant. There is one that goes.....'
'OK,' said Robbie, and he read out half a dozen of his 'songs'.
When he'd finished, Noel stayed quiet. I started to wonder whether he was too far gone to have even taken in anything Robbie had said. Or whether I'd been wrong and it had all been a load of old bollocks.
'If you don't put those out in a year' said Noel, 'I'm having them. They're fucking great, man.'
Back at my hotel, Robbie, Noel, Lisa and Meg kept the party going. As we'd got in the lift up to the room, a girl who couldn't have been more than thirteen had burst through the security cordon. She stood in front of Robbie and said, 'You betrayed the band, you cunt. You're dead.' It was one of the most disorientating disturbing moments of my life, a snapshot of success turned inside out and squeezed into a nasty new weapon.
Robbie Williams, now very much ex-Take That, gave her the finger.
A couple of hours later, our sigarette-smoke-filled room triggered off fire alarms all over the hotel, causing everyone else to be evacuated. the manager came into the room, clocked Robbie, unscrewed the smoke alarm, told him it was OK and apologised for causing any convenience. The pop-star perks seemed to just about make up for the wrath of disgruntled fans delivering pubescent death treaths.
At one point Robbie was talking about how he hadn't had a day off since he was sixteen. Five years of people telling him what he was supposed to do. Now he'd been kicked out of Take That, he felt robbed of confidence, convinced that everyone who'd ever rated him would soon forget that he'd ever existed. The Daily star sanctimonious, hypocritical 'revelations' about Robbie's lifestyle and his behaviour at T In The Park only contributed to his lack of self-confidence.
I told him he should start enjoying himself, asking him how much money he had in the bank.
'I don't know exactly,' he said to me. 'Gary has got loads more than the rest of us. I think, in the bank, I've got about a million.'
'Shit,' said Noel, the man who'd done nothing but enjoying himself for the last couple of years. 'I haven't even got a tenth of that.'
Within a year, a costly court case would leave Robbie almost penniless. And Noel would have more millions than fingers. Pop 'n' roll shifts faster that you could ever imagine.
'The court case cost a lot of money,' says Robbie, 'but I'm glad I'm doing what I'm doing now. I was dead scared the first time I met Oasis and when I was at T In The Park. I thought all the indie bands would think I was just some superficial plastic pop star. I needed to get some confidence back and I got it that weekend. Then and at Glastonbury, I got the chance to have a good time and to realise what I wanted to do. After Take That I'd been told that I was nothing, and I'd begun to believe it. You hang around Noel and Liam, though, and they're really supportive. They were the ones that made me think, yeah, fuck it, I can do something. Have they been an inspiration? Of course they have.'
'He's a nice bloke,' says Noel, describing Robbie. 'And he's got the right attitude. But he's not joining the band, no matter what rumours you might hear. Top geezer, though.'