Did anyone truly believe it was curtains for Oasis when Noel and Liam started hurling insults (and by all accounts guitar parts) at one another in Paris two years ago? For nearly 15 years, backstage punch-ups had been a semi-regular occurrence on Planet Gallagher (don’t forget that Noel had already quit the line-up in 1994, in tellingly similar circumstances). If sibling-on-sibling violence had been a make-or-break issue, Oasis would have called it a day the week ‘Shakermaker’ came out.
After Paris you suspect the Gallaghers had allowed themselves to become embroiled in a rapidly escalating game of calling one another’s bluff. With the rest of Oasis on his side, Liam founded Beady Eye: despite a deafening publicity campaign, however, their debut barely scraped into the UK top ten. Noel, meanwhile, initially appeared to be at a loss. People have been urging him to go it alone since Morning Glory, a step he had always resisted on the basis that Oasis deserved his best songs. Confronted with the solo career he’d never actually wanted, it’s hard not to feel that he initially blanched. Playing a charity show a few months after Oasis split, he performed only catalogue songs whilst in interviews he appeared, to put it mildly, incredibly ambivalent about the Noel Alone route.
He has ultimately decided, it would appear, to steer a middle course (the initial gloriously bonkers plan to collaborate with the remnants of Future Sound Of London having apparently been long fingered until 2012). Despite the ambiguous name, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds is essentially a solo project (the other ‘High Flying Birds’ being session players you’ve never head of). And yet he has never sounded less like a man on stage alone with a guitar. Rather he would appear to be on a mission to simultaneously channel as many of his favourite bands as possible. And he does it very well indeed.
Where Oasis mostly limited themselves to artful cadgings from The Beatles, Stones and Kinks, here Gallagher is far more catholic in who he’s borrowing from. There’s a languid, early Pink Floyd air to the proggy ‘Stop The Clocks’; the honest-to-goodness glam stomp of ‘Everybody’s Run’ shows that good intentions can be as important as a good idea; and ‘Dream On’ is psychedelia inching towards shoe-gaze. Given the impressive quality of these offerings, how unfortunate he chose to trailer the record with possibly the weakest track, ‘The Death Of You And Me’, which to these ears at least sounds like a sleep-deprived makeover of ‘The Importance Of Being Idle’ from Don’t Believe The Truth.
Throughout, it’s clear that Noel Gallagher is seeking to, if not quite reboot his songwriting, then at least distend it into new shapes. Swelling horns evoke Belle And Sebastian while mellotron and woozy harmonies conjure thoughts of pastoral prog – touches that make far more sense paired with Noel’s distinctive, gentle falsetto than they would serving as a backdrop to Liam’s rock singer snarl. The only real question marks hang over the lyrics. Noel will forever go down in the britpop annals for having rhymed ‘doctor’ and ‘helicopter’ but that’s Leonard Cohen compared to some of his offerings here. The least inspired is ‘Soldier Boys And Jesus Freaks’, a would-be political shout-out that would not feel out of its depth in a student debate. No matter. It’s one of the few missteps on a record that finds one of British rock’s most acclaimed voices dialling down the bombast and discovering there is life after arenas, reheated Beatles riffs and Liam.