“So far the High Flying Birds project has been a solo project. This is the first album where the band plays and is involved in the studio. It is the start of a new cycle». Noel Gallagher presents it like this «Council Skies», fourth album of his career without his brother Liam, a new step in the post-Oasis.
There are rumors that for the 30th anniversary of “Definitely Maybe”, your debut, and after years of remote insults, in 2024 there will be a reunion…
“In the Sony archives we found tapes from those sessions. We thought they were lost, but they were just mislabelled. They are amazing… There are some wonderful versions of those songs, some in acoustic versions. But there won’t be a tour, we won’t come back to play them together».
HHave you thought of retracing those years and his life with a theatrical show or an autobiography like Bono or Sprinsgteen?
«Bono has a great show. I was there with my son Donovan who is 16 and when Bono started dancing on the table he said “is he outside?”. It takes time to write a book, a couple of years at least. If I ever did that I wouldn’t want to have a ghost writer and in that interval of time I’d rather write another record».
«Easy Now», one of the new singles, brings back to the sound of Oasis. The whole album looks to rock, abandoning the self-defined psychedelic “cosmic pop” experiments of the previous one.
«That record wasn’t played in the studio with all the musicians together, it was born as a collage. These songs, on the other hand, were all born with the acoustic guitar. I would like to take them all on tour even if I will have to choose only a few because many songs from the past cannot be missing and I don’t want to become like Springsteen who plays for four hours in a row».
On the record he again hosts guitar legend Johnny Marr, ex Smiths.
‘Who doesn’t need to have Johnny on a record? I have his cell phone and I told him that if he still doesn’t answer, I’ll keep calling him. In the studio he is always enthusiastic but never tries to dominate, he is always respectful of the songs he intervenes on ».
Does he know MÃ¥neskin?
«Eurovision is a super stuff… They are the ones with the type that was done live, right?».
In truth, the leader Damiano has denied…
“I don’t have their music in mind, really.”
Do you remember when you wrote «Live Forever»?
‘We were nobody. I was in an apartment in Manchester on a Tuesday afternoon. I took it to band rehearsal and Bonehead said “you didn’t write that”. I understood that it would be a classic and that things would no longer be the same for us».
The atmospheres of the record are often dark. On the album cover, a black and white shot, there are the instruments for a concert placed on a rotunda. There is not a soul alive, did you want to evoke the lockdown?
‘I don’t like having faces on covers. The idea of the tools comes from the back cover of Ummagumma of Pink Floyd. I wrote all the songs in the months of the pandemic, but that’s not what the lyrics are about. Which instead I would define reflective, a word I would use to describe the whole disc. and as far as the dark soul is concerned, I believe that things that happened in his private life also influenced him (he separated from his wife Sara MacDonald after 22 years, ndr), but even in the most melancholic songs there is always a hope»
You are a symbol of Brit rock: will you play at the coronation of King Charles?
‘They didn’t ask me and I wouldn’t do it anyway. Many refused to participate. My generation doesn’t care about the royal family. We loved the queen who was already there when we were children, but the rest is stuff for American tourists».