Photographed for SPIN by Alan Clarke

A beaming Noel Gallagher strolls across the floor of a North London photo studio enthusing about a new and exciting phase of his life, looking lean and reasonably healthy in every­bloke casualwear: blue checked shirt, jeans, and desert boots. It's not just that he has a seventh Oasis album, Dig Out Your Soul, ready for release or that he has spent a morning playing with his one­year­old son, Donovan, whom he describes as "an absolute diamond." It's the fact that he has started sleepwalking.

"Last night I got into bed with me missus and woke up on the middle floor of the house on the couch," he says. "Amazing! I'm 41 and I'm starting this whole new nocturnal adventure." He and his girlfriend, Sara Macdonald, were out drinking beer and tequila with British comedian Russell Brand until the early hours -- Gallagher doesn't remember anything after climbing into a rickshaw in London's Soho district and being cheered through the streets. "Maybe that counts as a drunken stupor," he muses. "Is that the same as sleepwalking?"

Dig Out Your Soul sounds like you ordered in the ingredients, and all the labels on the jars read ROCK or MORE ROCK.

I'm glad you said that. Yes, we wanted a rock'n'roll album...with grooves. Making records should be fun. I remember seeing Radiohead on the cover of a magazine in the U.K. when In Rainbows came out, and it said, RADIOHEAD: THE PAIN. And I thought, "Won't you fucking give it a rest, you bunch of moaning children?" The pain? Of making an album? I don't buy it. If you're not having a laugh, then don't do it.

Surely the whole process wasn't all fun.

Well, no, there was a problem on day one. I had seven songs I was putting forward. They weren't pop songs; they were bluesy. We had a meeting and I said, "Let's concentrate more on bass and guitars and have more keyboards and get some remixes done." Liam immediately had a tantrum in the studio and was dancing round saying, "No one told me we were making a fucking dance album! I'm not having this shit. We're a rock band." One day he saw some crew unloading keyboards into the studio and went mad: "What are those fucking keyboards doing in here? That's too many keyboards for a rock'n'roll band." How long has Liam been doing this? He has an irrational fear of keyboards. But this is the man who thought we had gone too dance when I wrote "Wonderwall" because the drums didn't go boom-boom bap, boom-boom-bap. Liam is very institutionalized by being in Oasis. He's been doing it for so long. Me, [guitarist] Gem [Archer], and [bassist] Andy [Bell] were helping him arrange his song "I'm Outta Time" and tried to ease him away from the clichés. But in the end, he can't resist them.

Liam told me he hates "Wonderwall." It's the one song he literally hates singing.

That's interesting, because he would never say that to me. Well, I hate him singing it, too. Liam doesn't sound like he did ten years ago. Your voice and your body change. We've never got it right. It's too slow or too fast. I think Ryan Adams is the only person who ever got that song right. I'd love to do the Ryan Adams version, but in front of 60,000 Oasis fans that wouldn't be possible.

Liam is finally pulling his weight in the songwriting department, isn't he? He wrote three for the new album.

Yeah, he's a good songwriter. I think he regrets not starting earlier. For years I've said, "If you're so convinced you're John Lennon, then prove it."

Why don't you ever write together?