Oasis in '94: "We fight, yeah. Hourly. In fact, I haven’t seen Liam today, so I might ’phone him up and pick an argument with him"

'94:

Having scored increasingly big hits with their ‘Supersonic’, ‘Shakermaker’ and ‘Live Forever’ singles, Oasis bagged their first UK No. 1 album in September with Definitely Maybe. Noel Gallagher was therefore in sparkling form when he spoke to Hot Press for the first time the following month...

“You dream of being on Top Of The Pops, you dream of being in the back of posh cars, of not having to pay for anything, of loose women, and all the rest of it. That’s all come true, so you might as well enjoy it while you can, before it finishes. You’re only going to get five years out of all this.”

“Of course we’re derivative. Everyone is derivative. The Beatles were derivative of The Shirelles, The Rolling Stones of Howlin’ Wolf and Chuck Berry. We don’t go out of our way to make our records sound as if they were made in 1967. I don’t know what it is that makes our music so modern, because the album sounds as if it were recorded today, tomorrow even. It doesn’t sound retro.”

“We fight, yeah. Hourly. In fact, I haven’t seen Liam today, so I might ’phone him up and pick an argument with him. Plus, it isn’t really in-band rivalry, because he doesn’t do anything except sing. I write the songs. It’s strange, though, I don’t get excited about much. I can take all this in my stride, but I get excited about fighting with our kid sometimes.”

“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 spoon-fed this ‘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.”

“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.”

Read the full 14-page Oasis feature in the current issue of Hot Press, out now: