Noel Gallagher talked about Oasis reforming and the Knebworth documentary during an interview on The Johnathon Ross Show.
Responding to Liam’s claims last year that he’d turned down £100m for a comeback tour…
“Why do you say “it’s not necessarily untrue” – because it is untrue. There isn’t £100m in the music business between all of us. If anybody wants to offer me £100m now, I’ll say it now, I’ll do it. I’ll do it for £100m. Ludicrous. What is funny though is that I think Liam actually believes it, which is the funny thing.”
“It was all wrapped up in youth and camaraderie and all that. Once that has gone you cannot put that genie back in the bottle. It would just be for showbiz and for a mere paltry £100m”
He also discussed that he thinks it’s a shame there’s not a new band like Oasis for younger music fans to support…
“I find it a bit sad that there’s a whole generation of kids, working class kids, who have got nothing of their own to buy into and they’re projecting all that onto a couple of 50-year-old fellas. Where’s the new Oasis? Where’s that? The thing about bands is, they’re hard work. It’s hard work to do, what we did is hard work. It’s graft. You’ve got to graft it out. Now it’s easy to buy a laptop and make it in your bedroom.”
On the Oasis Knebworth documentary…
“It’s actually quite emotional watching it. That amount of people, pre-internet with no phones, nothing, the fans in the moment with the band. I can see what all the fuss was about now. You’re so close to it [at the time]. I [couldn’t] perceive it like other people. But yesterday listening to it – Liam was at his absolute peak and the band was. I was like watching it thinking we were amazing, we really were. It’s something I don’t think of on a day-to-day basis. When I was watching it yesterday I was like, it really is amazing.”
On record labels…
“Record labels trot out this thing about that they’re desperately looking for the ‘real deal’. If we were to come along now with our band, the record company would split me and Liam from the band. They’d say, “Bald fella, don’t need him, don’t need the other three” and they’d build it around that and because of the way the music business is, you’d be grateful for them. Back when we started, the record companies used to work for us. Now the artist works for the record company.”
On his ‘Back The Way We Came Vol 1. (2011 – 2021)’ album…
“In lockdown scrabbling around for things to do. 10 years since I went solo. I thought let’s do a best of for the first 10 years. I’ve been married 10 years this year. 10 years going solo, it’s a significant milestone.”
“I’d had songs that I’d never quite finished off. They came out great. I didn’t want to do it if I didn’t have new music on it.'”
On the collaboration with Dizee Rascal…
“We did a tune, yeah. I have no idea [what happened to it]. He got in touch during lockdown, and said, ‘Shall we do something?’ Sent me a beat and I sent something back… I sent it to him and he loved it and I haven’t heard from him since… it was great. It is a great tune. I think what he was rapping about was lockdown. So it wouldn’t be that interesting now. It was right in the middle of the first deep one. I think the moment might have passed now.’
On paying his band and crew during lockdown…
“We had some festivals lined up for the summer [in 2020]. All got blown out. I got messages off all my crew – 30 of them – saying, ‘Thanks, that’s a great gesture’. I called my manager, he said, ‘What we’ve done is we’ve paid them all for summer gigs’. Who is we? We? We haven’t paid anybody, I’ve paid them.”
“‘I just said to them, ‘I will claw that back, bit by bit over the next 10 years.’ It was nice to do that for them. You’re nothing without the crew.'”
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