Gaz in the Guardian

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Ross
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Gaz in the Guardian

Post by Ross »

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/m ... o-be-weird

We first began talking about working with Noel on a solo album years ago. We had remixed the 2009 Oasis single Falling Down and turned it into a 22-minute odyssey, which he loved, and then he invited me to DJ at the afterparty for one of Oasis’s Wembley Arena gigs that October. That’s when we began talking about a solo record.

It started out promisingly. When Noel first came round to my house with a bunch of demos, he was strangely subdued and insecure. Oasis were past their sell-by date. I saw a guy with a guitar who needed something exciting. We were all over the press with our new vision of psychedelia and he leaned very heavily on us. He went into it with all the right intentions.

Between 2009 and 2011, I was obsessed with Noel Gallagher. During that period, we spent four weeks in the studio with him. The rest of the time it was just Brian [Dougans, the other half of AA] and me, in control of the budgets, all the music and the musicians. We got in Gary Lucas from Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band and Virgil Howe, son of Steve Howe of Yes, to give an idea of how far-out we were going.

The first day, a lorry arrived with 87 guitars and 200 effects pedals, and I looked at Brian and said: “Wow, this is gonna be fun!” And yet within a week there were reports that Noel was considering dropping the album because we’d asked him to play the same guitar solo for five hours. Actually, all that happened was I thought he’d like to experiment with an idea we had, but after 30 minutes he was lost and angry that we weren’t telling him exactly what to do. We assumed he would want to let loose – after all, George Harrison spent 12 hours doing the backwards guitar solo for I’m Only Sleeping.

The studio wasn’t disharmonious, but I did have to work around his limitations and it quickly became apparent that rather than singing and playing differently, he wanted to do things exactly the same as ever as ever. He did the same vocal take five times. I said: “Imagine yourself as a voice actor.” He said: “Don’t ever fucking talk to me about being a voice actor!” I knew it wasn’t going to be easy.

We were just finishing off the mixing of the album when we were invited to the press conference on 6 July 2011. I watched it online. That’s when he announced that there would be two albums: the one that became High Flying Birds, and our one. High Flying Birds had the same running order as the album we’d been working on, even if the tracks themselves were a lot straighter. At the press conference you could see he felt trepidatious about High Flying Birds. He seemed more interested in ours. He said it would be an 18-track album ranging from vaudeville to “space jazz” to krautrock, and as out-there as The Dark Side of the Moon. That album is the holy grail to me, and I was embarrassed by these proclamations. They put me in a real quandary because there was no way, with respect, that his songs were anything like Dark Side.

It’s odd because Noel loves the Beatles, the masters of experimentation. But Oasis thought they just needed to sing lyrics of love – it was all surface and no depth. To me, psychedelia isn’t just tasteful songs about the sun and phased guitars; it’s a radical form.

In August 2012, Noel said he was considering scrapping the collaboration because he was not completely satisfied with the mixes – by that time only one of our tracks had come out, the B-side Shoot a Hole into the Sun. But this wouldn’t have been an album of remixes. It would have been his first solo album proper, under the name Noel Gallagher, possibly with “Amorphous Androgynous” in the title. It wouldn’t have been High Flying Birds.

Noel is loved by middle England. Would I turn his four-minute songs into prog-psych music? No, I was prepared to meet him halfway. My mandate was to do the most difficult thing: bring my psych and prog influences to bear on pop songs. It was never going to be as way out as Pink Floyd. But I did think I could make his songs as free as Cosmic Dancer by T Rex.

We tried to force him to write new material. But he dragged his heels and failed to stretch himself. Eventually, we came up with two new backing tracks for The Right Stuff and The Mexican to justify it being “like Pink Floyd”, the two songs that ended up on Chasing Yesterday. We spent six months on them. Now people are citing The Right Stuff as one of the best things he has done, and proof of how good he can be when he explores.

There’s not much colour on his two albums; it’s just the same old Noel. He has tried to send out this message that he’s pushed himself, but it’s just the same generic stuff. We had kids’ choirs, harpsichords, mandolins. We really went to town with orchestras and all sorts of crazy instrumentation. He just needed to cut the pie to suit Noel the solo artist – we left some excess pastry on it so he could trim a bit off.

I believe ours is the album people wanted him to make – a liberated, exploratory Noel Gallagher, cutting loose from Oasis, enjoying his freedom; the Noel who name-drops our Monstrous Bubble albums and krautrock, and who had hits with the Chemical Brothers. He obviously loves that kind of music, but has no idea how to make it.

We still talk. But he has been asked about our album a lot, and his rebuttal of it is a disgrace. It’s doing me a lot of damage. He became too afraid to be weird. But, still, when Noel is ready to collaborate, I’m here.

Garry Cobain was talking to Paul Lester
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Re: Gaz in the Guardian

Post by Pandemonium »

Well, I don't see how Noel would EVER return to collaborate with the guys after all these talks.
- If he does, and all goes well, it will be in some parallel universe where he discovered the value in music as art and all that s...tuff...
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Re: Gaz in the Guardian

Post by dubmasta »

After all that I dont even want the boys to collaborate with this guy, HE IS NOT JOHN LENNON that he believes he is, and I bet my head John would be fkn humble if the case, he is faaaaar from that level and from the level of FSOL, and I dont say as a lover of FSOL but as a musician. He can shove his bloody arrogance up his tiny...
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Re: Gaz in the Guardian

Post by Ross »

To be fair, it's Liam who thinks he's John Lennon (completely modelling his look on him.) Noel has said in interviews many times that he's always surprised when Oasis albums make it into 'best albums' lists - I remember once him saying he didn't deserve to be up there with The Kinks and The Beatles.
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Re: Gaz in the Guardian

Post by Pandemonium »

He says a lot of things... sometimes he even makes sense - by coincidence :)
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Re: Gaz in the Guardian

Post by leonb2273 »

Gaz commented on the Guardian website on the article...
Gaz Cobain ( hi folks ! ) but alas . .call the cops . . where to start with this 'pig's ear' , ..It seems the moral of the story is ' don't talk to journalists who only have a ten minute deadline to submit the article' especially when they're already failing to grasp even the simpler facts of what is ( by its very nature ) a COMPLEX story of many twists and turns since it chronicles the process of making an album which took over 2 years of my life !
I 'tried' to convey some of this detail in the 'interview' mistakenly believing that we were striving to document our ( AA ) side of the exhaustive process of those 2 years & knowing that when told people would find it very interesting, not only from an artistic and emotional standpoint but also factually wanting more than Noel's account ,especially since we have spoken very little about our side of what unravelled during those two years. Sadly this appears to have been the wrong outlet for it since , sorry to say but Paul Lester was seemingly too flustered by the fast approaching deadline and the limited number of words afforded the article to really get to grips with the detail and consequently he ( or his editor ) has thus made an absolute hatchet of this.... all sorts of mismatched stories and 'quotes' cobbled together from different parts of our conversation to create yet another ( snooze ) ' Noel feud' when .... the real story ( yes with detail cos i still hold out for ' journalism ' ) is far and beyond more interesting and er...effortlessly rock n roll ( if that's the fix ?)
Factually the 'quotes 'attributed to me are also often highly erroneous ........simple facts like Virgil Howe didn't in fact play a single note on the album but apparently his inclusion shows' how far out we were going' ..hmmm.......well clearly the retelling of the subtle complex emotional goings-on of those 2 years was in peril here if even these relatively straightforward facts cant even be quoted correctly ? Even where i recognize my words ( in part ) they've either been edited together in ways i wouldnt say them or resolved with words NOT MY OWN to make a simpler ' narrative ' ..... Jesus wept .
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Re: Gaz in the Guardian

Post by seedy »

looooool!
what an utter shitshow :P

no matter what version is the truth i know that it speaks to noel being a mouthy douchebag :D

hmmm....nowadays we can be our own media via our facebooks etc.
idk why gaz just doesn't put "the story" on there in his every words and be done with it


anyway - it would be nice if that album got leaked some day *cough coughaz* :mrgreen:
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Re: Gaz in the Guardian

Post by Dennis »

It´s really astonishing, when "Chasing Yesterday" came out with the two AA-produced songs on there,
and Gaz was posting on FB about how he thinks to write a book or say nothing I was sure he´s kind of angry or upset with NG, and now it really is obvious there seems no bad blood at all from his side towards Noel rather than towards journalists who seem to be unwilling or incapable to simply report what Gaz is trying to say about this all and instead permanently try to customize a story about stupid Rock-Star-Ego-Jealousy-bullshit. Would really LOVE to hear/read the whole story from Gaz, find all this about Noel being "insecure" & "subdued" and how he could be more if he wasn´t limiting himself a very interesting insight far beyond simple "wrong"-or-"right"-Ego-war-patterns.

Gaz really should write a book about it all (including everything else that has happened since ´90 :-) )
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Re: Gaz in the Guardian

Post by Ross »

From Gaz's recent interview with that Australian radio station for those who missed it...


He posted a slightly longer response to the article on Facebook which was mostly similar, but added this interesting section at the end:
oh for starters... THAT headline... i actually said ' he's too feared to be weird' smile emoticon
evidently i needed to be' rewritten' from the get-go.....
oh and any OASIS fans reading ' yes yes i'm a talented nobody..Noel is god..I'm middle class ( not a working class hero )..yes I'm jealous..yes I'm milking it.....AA are shit . . .FSOL are shit....fuck red ripe tomatoes..fuck animals....fuck religion....oh and by the way..something for you to consider before you go... whatever I am i don't EVER steal tracks off collaborators and use constant dismissal of them or work with them as a decoy to mask this.... oh and i actually know him and rather like him ..oh and by the way we were remixing the whole of CHASING YESTERDAY before we realized what was happening with the Right Stuff and the Mexican......not quite so clear cut now is it ?
Now if the press are continually misquoting Gaz to make the whole thing into a AA vs. Noel argument, then there's no reason they haven't done similar with Noel. That they were involved in doing some remixes for the new album suggests that they're on pretty good terms. Gaz has said they both like Noel's songwriting and him as a person, so a lot of the anger directed towards the guy from fans seems a little unreasonable - much like the Oasis/Noel fans who shout down AA/FSOL.
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Re: Gaz in the Guardian

Post by Ross »

The Quietus give Gaz the chance to talk more openly... this is a very interesting one!
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Re: Gaz in the Guardian

Post by seedy »

i didn't really see anything in there different from what we've already been told
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Re: Gaz in the Guardian

Post by Pandemonium »

Well, it not VERY different, but I can see why Gaz was pissed about the previous two "interviews".
- As I said, I really don't see them coming to terms and working with Noel, ever... and that's probably a good thing.
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Re: Gaz in the Guardian

Post by Tito Lozano »

I prefer to put a veil about all this ...time will tell
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Re: Gaz in the Guardian

Post by seedy »

yep....just lay low and stay quiet for another 12 months and WHOOOPS there's a leak

darn faucet ;p
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Re: Gaz in the Guardian

Post by dell1972 »

Seems he's unhappy with the Quietus version of events as well, he was sounding off on twitter early this morning too. To be honest though, the bridges are burnt and I don't think it'll ever come out unless it gets leaked, and it just confirmed that Noel's all talk but ultimately too scared to step out of the shadow of Oasis. If his first solo album had bombed it would have been his fall back option I'm sure.

They also got a mention in an article on Weller. It sounds like a similar story of lack of imagination:

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2 ... ize-1.html

'Weller’s first stab at reinventing his music came when he invited the duo of Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans, known alternately as Amorphous Androgynous and the Future Sound of London, to remix two tracks from his 2010 album, Wake Up the Nation. That went so well that Weller went into the studio with the duo and recorded at least eight tracks, but the singer decided not to release the results. He did salvage one track, “White Sky,” which was remixed and released as the first single from Saturns Pattern.

Weller then returned to the studio with Jan “Stan” Kybert, who had co-produced Weller’s 2005 album, As Is Now, as well as mixed Weller’s 2012 album, Sonik Kicks. An engineer for Oasis and the Verve, Kybert knew how to take shapeless improvisation and transform it into pop music.

“He took all of our jamming, all my piano and guitar tracks, cut it up and came back with a groove,” Weller explains. “Once we had that, I would put in the chorus parts, the chord changes and the words. All of this happens on the spot; I never study how we do it.... "'

blah blah blah, you get the picture.
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