Today’s journey through Noel Gallagher‘s mind palace doesn’t entail him roasting his brother Liam, for once. While appearing speaking to Zane Lowe on Apple Music’s Beats 1, the Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds frontman longed for the opportunity to just be a hired gun guitar player in a band, rather than carry the burden of being a frontman and songwriter.
“I would love to be in a band and just be a guitarist for a while,” Noel told Lowe. Although he specified “not that band,” referring to Oasis and his blood feud with his brother/ex-bandmate, he did express a desire to join The Smiths should the original lineup ever reconcile, including the estranged songwriting duo Johnny Marr and Morrissey. Yeah, join the club, pal.
“I would love, and it’s never gonna happen. It’s a thing in a parallel universe, if The Smiths got back together,” Gallagher admitted. “I’m Craig Gannon and I’d go to Johnny [Marr] and say, ‘Don’t get another guitarist mate – I’m your man.’”
Gannon is the second guitar player who joined The Smiths in 1986 and played with the band until October of that same year. The Smiths officially split up in 1987.
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In an interview with Radio X in May, Gallagher also name-checked The Smiths as the ultimate fantasy reunion show he’d like to see.
“I’m not into reunions and all that,” Gallagher told host Johnny Vaughan. “But if there was one … if I was God for a day … if you could make it happen and they’d all be happy about it happening, I would love to see The Smiths again.”
When Vaughan volunteered that he’d love to see reunions of The Smiths, The Jam, and Oasis, Gallagher joked, “I’d have two of those three!”
While an honest to God Smiths reunion is unlikely to ever happen, a bizarre truncated version of a reunion called “Classically Smiths” imploded almost immediately after its announcement in January 2018. The event was billed as an evening with original Smiths rhythm section, Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce—along with Gannon—playing Smiths songs while backed by an orchestra. Absent were Marr and Morrissey, the two guys who wrote the songs.
“I heard about it when everybody else heard about it, which tells you all you need to know, really,” Marr told SPIN of the “Classically Smiths” disaster in 2018. “It was particularly disrespectful that I wasn’t consulted, and I kind of feel it was a farce in the way it went down, really. I thought about it how I imagine everybody else thought about it, that it was really kind of sketchy. That is disappointing to me, that the band gets chained to that kind of sketchiness. It’s a good thing those guys weren’t organizing the gigs when we were together, otherwise we would’ve never gone on the stage.”
Yeah, maybe don’t expect these guys to get back together anytime soon.
