The SPIN Interview: Noel Gallagher

Photographed for SPIN by Alan Clarke

We don't see each other very often. And I like writing on my own. Me and Paul Weller first said, "Let's write a song together," in 1993, but it took 15 years for it to happen. [Gallagher and Weller cowrote "Echoes Round the Sun" for Weller's latest album, 22 Dreams.] A few times [Weller and I] made an appointment to meet at so-and-so studio at 11, and it's painful. We sit there looking blankly at each other. And then we go down to the pub. With Liam, I wouldn't know where to start.

You quit drugs in the late '90s. "Bag It Up" sounds quite psychedelic. Are you back on mood-altering substances?

No, "Bag It Up" is my little artistic statement. Not in the Coldplay sense. In fact, it's an anti-artistic statement. I spend a lot of time with Serge Pizzorno from Kasabian getting fucking pissed, and he sent me a CD of stuff he was listening to. There was a track by the Pretty Things called "Baron Saturday." I became obsessed by that pounding rhythm, and I decided to write about acid trips I used to have. Running around being a mad cunt on magic mushrooms was my inspiration for them lyrics. I don't want people to think it's art, though.

What do you mean?

Well, Coldplay and Radiohead -- they're artists, aren't they? Damon Albarn, he's an artist. They make art. That's what I keep getting told, anyway. I do like those bands, but they're all posh boys who went to art school. [Oasis] come off a council estate [public housing]. It comes out of here. [Thumps his heart with a clenched fist] "Bag It Up" is anti-that. It's a mongrel.

Your old rival Albarn has done Blur, an album in Mali, the virtual band Gorillaz, the Good, the Bad & the Queen, and now a Chinese opera. Does a part of you think, "I wish I'd taken more risks"?

The only thing I've got left to try to do is a solo album with a narrative running through it. Something like Greendale, by Neil Young. That would be as near art as I get. But even if I wanted to, how would I go about writing an opera?

Well, you already have the passionate central relationship, the tragic fallings-out --

I don't think two blokes having the same fucking argument for 16 years over and over is the stuff of opera. Oasis: The Opera would be very short. The fat lady would refuse to sing it. But I say this with no irony: It must be very nice to be able to turn your hand to anything. I'm not that driven. To go from Britpop and write a Chinese opera about a monkey, hats off to the guy. I couldn't do it. And it got good reviews, although how you assess whether a Chinese opera about a monkey is any good is beyond me. But in my own defense, Damon isn't actually in Blur, Gorillaz, or the Good, the Bad & the Queen, is he? He's got time on his hands. That's when an opera comes to you.

You said you wanted the new Oasis album to have grooves. And yet you came out and said Jay-Z headlining Glastonbury was "wrong."

Well, I never said those words. You need verbatim quotes here. I've been doing interviews with American magazines, and the way it's played itself out is that I said Jay-Z had no right to play Glastonbury, which is a crock of horseshit. I got off a plane and someone asked me about the fact that Glastonbury hadn't sold out for the first time in years, and if it was because of Jay-Z. I innocently mused that that was probably right. From there it grew into this crap that I was standing on an orange crate at Speakers' Corner saying, "Gather round, brothers and sisters. Have you heard what's happening at Glastonbury this year?"

But still, you sounded reactionary and old-fashioned.