STACK NZ Mar #60

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NOEL GALLAGHER

S pace jazz? Saxophone solos? Disco beats? Former Oasis man Noel Gallagher has certainly wrung the sonic changes for Chasing Yesterday , his second solo album with the High Flying Birds. While the self-titled 2011 debut didn’t stray too far from the familiar Oasis template, his new set sees him in a much more adventurous mood, partly because this time he also sat in the producer’s chair. With no producer to bend and shape him into any one direction, Gallagher was determined to let the High Flying Birds take flight, even if he describes the experience of being “a major pain in the arse”. “It’s not that I’ve ever had people telling me what to write or what direction to go in,” he continues. “But managing sessions from one end of the week to the other proved extremely difficult. I’m not one for taking notes, whereas producers have systems to know how to book session musicians and so on. I had all these people looking at me and saying: ‘right, what are we doing today?’ I was making the whole thing up as I went along.” Probably the most out-there track on Chasing Yesterday is The Right Stuff . “I played The Right Stuff to a mate of mine,” recalls Gallagher. “And he said: ‘finally’. I didn’t know what he meant at first, but then I realised. The Right Stuff is space jazz. We used to take the piss out of space jazz in Oasis. When people told us we

weren’t adventurous we would say, ‘what do you want, space jazz?’ And now I’ve made a track that is real, actual, spaced- out jazz. And you know what? It’s great.” A saxophone is also not something you would normally associate with Oasis, yet there it is on the opening track. Gallagher reckons it was time to make the instrument cool again.

to that saxophone, please, don’t think about the guy from Spandau Ballet. Think about a dude from New Orleans in 1963, smacked out of his head and incredibly cool, because it’s time to reclaim the saxophone.” Elsewhere on Chasing Yesterday , there are also few nods to the dancefloor, particularly on the singles In The Heat Of The Moment and Ballad Of The Mighty I , the latter featuring fellow Manc icon Johnny Marr. However, long-time fans will be pleased to know that Gallagher hasn’t lost his knack for writing hook-laden anthems and the likes of You Know We Can’t Go Back , The Dying Of The Light and Lock All The Doors wouldn’t sound out of place on an Oasis album. In fact, Lock All The Doors is actually a song that has taken Gallagher 23 years to complete. He gave a verse of an early draft of the song to the Chemical Brothers for their 1996 number one hit Setting Sun , thinking he would complete it soon afterwards, but it never came together until he had a flash of inspiration while on the visit to the supermarket in 2013. “It’s always like that: songs fall out of the sky in a moment of inspiration and you have to be ready for it,” says Gallagher, “And if that moment arrives when you’re coming out of Tesco Metro on a Sunday after [Manchester] City have just drawn one-all with Everton, that’s how it goes. I found the missing melody there and then.”

“We made a demo of Riverman and we knew it was amazing. And then I was listening to [sax-laden one-hit wonder from 1974] Pinball by Brian Protheroe and thought: Shall I? And what if I get him to play not one but two solos? I know I’m going to be accused of sax crimes but f*** it. This is not Oasis. There’s nobody to tell me not to do it. And when you listen

• Chasing Yesterday from Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds

is out on March 6

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