Definitely Mayo: Hot Press recalls its close encounters with Oasis

Legendary Hot Press-er George Byrne once opined that, “Oasis are the greatest Irish band ever… after The Smiths.”

I doubt that went down too well with the folks at Comhaltas Ceolteorí Eireann, but he had a point with all of the original members eligible to play for Jack Charlton under the grandparent rule.

“It’s pretty complicated this,” Noel reflected when our paths first crossed backstage at Slane ’95 where Oasis had just comprehensively blown REM off stage. “I was born in England – and part of me is definitely English – but my parents are Irish and as a kid I went to Catholic primary and secondary schools with all the influences and pressures on me that that suggests. I wasn’t college material, so I went straight onto the building-sites and half the people alongside me were middle-aged fellows from Cork and Dublin. And because I wasn’t spoonfed the ‘we had an Empire and won two World Wars’ bullshit, I was able to see the part of the British character that’s ugly and domineering.

“We were just saying on the way down in the helicopter – oops, a bit of rock star parlance creeping in there! – that Slane is as much a ‘home’ gig for us as playing London or Birmingham. Guigsy and Bonehead’s folks both come from Northern Ireland, so you ought to ask them how they feel.”

Whilst Bonehead was preoccupied with drinking the VIP bar dry – I seem to recall that he was on pints of G&T – Guigsy volunteered that, “I was born in Manchester, me Dad’s from Belfast and I spent my holidays as a kid staying with relations on the Falls Road. From what I’d seen on the telly, I was expecting it to be like Beirut but it’s actually a nice, respectable middle-class area. It’s only when I started getting the inside story from the neighborhood kids that I realised what cunts we’d been.”

A decade later, Noel told us how closely he identified with John Lydon’s Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs memoir. “It took you back to the ‘70s and being first generation Irish in a big city, which wasn’t always welcoming of you,” he explained. “I didn’t really suffer personally, but I remember my parents would only go to Irish clubs because of the ‘fucking Paddies’ thing, which followed the IRA blowing up Manchester city centre. There weren’t groups of vigilantes going round beating Irish people up, but if you had a certain name or accent you were treated with suspicion. I was very young coming back from a six-week holiday in Ireland with an uncle of mine who had the long hair and flares, and the car got ripped to pieces. They were drastic times – people were getting killed and shot and fucking kidnapped. I’m not a political animal, but the ceasefire and the coming together of the parliament or assembly or whatever has been a beautiful thing to watch.”

In 2011, Noel admitted to fighting back the tears when Her Maj laid a peace process-endorsing wreath in the Gardens of Remembrance.

“Yeah, I saw the Queen over in Dublin and thought, ‘At fucking last, common sense has prevailed.’ It’s not something that during the dark days of the ‘70s and ‘80s you ever thought you’d see. It was very moving.” Returning to ‘95, and true to the anarchic spirit of Oasis’ early gigs, a pissed-up member of the Slane crowd nearly had his own features rearranged after aiming a stone at Liam’s head.

“My main concern before going on stage is, ‘What frame of mind is Our Kid going to be in?’” Noel admitted. “Will he get pissed off and walk which, believe me, he’s perfectly capable of doing. He was annoyed today when some cunt threw a rock at him but after threatening to kick their heads in, he got on with it. The fucker responsible was lucky because if we hadn’t been having such a good time, we’d have jumped in and put him in intensive care. We’re not the psychopaths we’re made out to be, but you don’t take shit, do you?”

Indeed, you don’t. In addition to being funny fuckers who give exceedingly good quote, the Gallaghers have always had a genuine grá for Hot Press, which means we’ve often got the inside poop denied to others.

“I like Hot Press because 1). You don’t print lies about us – you probably have, but I’ve not seen ‘em! – and 2). Me Mam’s family read you,” Noel informed me that day at Lord Henry’s. “Every time we went to Mayo as kids, we’d bring back a Hot Press, take it into school and tell our mates, ‘It’s a special magazine only for Irish people, so you can’t read it!’ It was a great bit of one-upmanship!”

We certainly got the exclusive on December 3, 1997, when mid-way through his Hot Press interview, Noel was informed by Oasis’ tour manager that Liam had pulled out of that night’s Point Theatre gig.

“He’s got a ‘sore throat’, so the cunt’s going to be sat watching telly while us fucking four idiots have to go out there and get bottled off,” Noel none too gently fumed after the news had been whispered into his ear. “I’ll probably get away with it tonight but I’m not as good a singer as he is. I’d much rather be stood in front of me amplifier doing the odd backing-vocal. I tell you what I’m tempted to do – go on stage and tell the crowd his room number so they can go round the hotel and get their money back off him.”

As it turned out, Liam was spared a lynching when Noel settled for the rather less inflammatory “my brother’s a langer” four songs into the set. Informed beforehand that Oasis would be a man short, only a handful of punters asked for their money back, but bums on seats or not, the sense of disappointment was palpable. That disappointment might very well have turned to anger if more people had clocked Gallagher Jr. arriving at The Point towards the end of the gig and, having watched his bandmates complete their encore, run across the back of the stage flicking “v” signs.

Oasis’ previous March 1996 visit to The Point had also been a stressful affair, with that nice Rupert Murdoch paying for Noel and Liam’s estranged dad, Tommy, to turn up announced and unwanted at the nearby hotel they were staying in.

“To give you the measure of the man, he took the News Of The World’s money to come to Dublin and goad Liam into throwing a punch at him,” the eldest of the Gallagher siblings, Paul, told us when he came to the capital to plug his Brothers: From Childhood To Oasis, The Real Story book. “If, as he claims, he’s so desperate for a reconciliation, why hasn’t he got in contact with me? Because I’m fucking broke, that’s why. What I resent most is that because of the disgraceful way he treated our mam, she won’t look at another man. She’s a loving, caring woman who deserves a loving, caring relationship but, nah, she’d rather be on her own than go through that again.

“It also completely turned her off religion,” he continued. “There she was being beaten black and blue and the church’s attitude was, ‘Well, you married him for better or worse, for richer or poorer, so you’ll have to put up with it’. She stuck with him for far longer than she should because of those vows but eventually she did the right thing and got shot of him.”

While yet to be spotted in the red and green of Mayo, both Gallaghers know their ash from their elbow. “I played that Gaelic football in Manchester actually, big style,” Liam enthused in 2008. “I’d have been 14 or 15 at the time. Hurling’s a tough fucking game, isn’t it? My Uncle George used to play for Kilkenny, but I was too chicken to try it.”

The spirit of Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh also lives on in Noel who treated one of his bezzies to some expert analysis whilst watching Cork and Clare’s 2013 All Ireland replay. “My mate said to me, baffled: ‘What is this?’” he told us earnestly. “I’m like, ‘They play it with fucking sticks and helmets, that’s all you need to know. Oh, and that all the guys work as butchers and fucking coal men and farmers and just do it for the love of it.’ After that he was still baffled, but impressed!” Equally adept as a football pundit, Noel was quick to give his post-Saipan support to Roy Keane despite him being “a filthy red.”

“I have to point out that this is strictly speaking as a Republic of Ireland fan,” he stressed. “When he plays for Manchester United, I wish nothing but broken limbs on the bastard. If you’re going to go training for the World Cup and there aren’t any footballs… Mick McCarthy calling that meeting so all the players could tell him what they thought of him was fucking stupid. I’m not going to say a bad word about Roy, though, in case I meet him out one afternoon. He’d kick your head in, wouldn’t he? Bonehead lives near him in Manchester and I’ve heard stories!”

Asked in 2000 whether he’d consider re-locating to Ireland with Meg and the kids, Noel deadpanned: “I can’t really see me missus mincing around the bogs of West Ireland in her Prada gear, can you? ‘Go and get some turf, Meg!’ ‘Fucking what?’

“If I was moving to Ireland, I’d go all the way and get myself a place in Charlestown,” he more recently elaborated. “I was there last week for my gran’s memorial, and needless to say was drinking till half-four in the morning with all me aunts and uncles. Never mind that I had a plane to catch at 10.30, it was, “Ah sure, why don’t you stay for another?

“The one thing that’d put me off living in Ireland is the health service. I went to see my uncle, who’s suffering from cancer, in Galway Hospital and it was an absolute disgrace. I wanted to take him with me on the fucking plane, but, y’know, he’s an old geezer and he wants to be around his family. Everything else about the country though, I love.”

Liam, who popped into J.F. Finan’s in Charlestown for a pint and a singsong last year, enthused in 2008 that: “It’s like a holiday for me playing in Ireland. It’s not like ‘a gig’ – you just go there and get fucking slaughtered with the fans, and then you wake up the next day and get slaughtered again. As soon as you get off the fucking plane, it’s: ‘Do you want a Guinness?’ and before you know it you’re having to belt out a couple of songs that they like. There’s no fucking graft in that.”

Somebody who Noel has regularly talked life, love and Clash records with is Bono.

“Before going to see U2 in Manchester recently, me and me girlfriend were saying, ‘I wonder what it is with Bono and God?’” he told us in 2008. “Anyway, we’re sat round a table after the gig and I go, ‘Explain it to me ‘cause I was brought up Catholic and it means fuck all to me.’ We had a good three-hour conversation about his religious philosophy, which is basically, ‘Go to God, tell him what all your flaws are and say, ‘Can you work with me?’ Which is completely different to the ‘Don’t drink, don’t screw, don’t take drugs and always go to church’ bollocks you get taught at school. “I didn’t think a whole lot more about it until two days later when there’s a knock on the door and the recorded delivery guy hands me two books - Searching For The Invisible God and What’s So Amazing About Grace?, which are both by Philip Yancey - that have been sent by Bono. There’s also a little note, which reads, ‘I don’t know if you were serious the other night, but here’s something that might give you a bit more of an understanding.’”

The Noel/Bono Mutual Admiration Society was still in evidence last year when the former said of the latter: “He’s been very sweet with my two lads who’ve become huge U2 fans and are having a kind of love-in across the Irish Sea with him at the minute. Bono’s sent Donovan some of his glasses and pictures and all that. Top man!’”

Liam is also an admirer of Dublin’s Fab Four.

“U2 aren’t the best band in the world ‘cos we are, but they are the biggest, which is because after all these years they still give a shit,” he proffered in 2005. “When Bono talks about them reapplying for their old job, he means it. Selling millions of records isn’t enough for him – he wants to be better than all these cunts like Franz Ferdinand and Coldplay. I thought Bono might’ve lost it a bit as a writer, but the song about his Dad on the new album, ‘Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own’, is great. Except for the middle-eight which is the same fucking one that was on ‘Electrical Storm’.”

You’d need an entire book (now there’s an idea!) to fully explore the impact Oasis’ Irish roots have had on them – and a second volume to relive the awesomeness of their August 14, 1996 visit to Páirc Uí Chaoimh and June 20, 2009’s triumphant headlining return to Slane.

Whether or not they ever share a stage again – Noel is adamant it’ll never happen, Liam is on permanent standby– Oasis have treated us to one hell of a rock ‘n’ rollercoaster ride!