With Oasis back in Australia it seemed like a good time to rummage through our archive and pull out this interview from 2005 with band that was done for the release of the album, Don’t Believe The Truth.
OASIS
by Mitchell Peters and Nick Coppack
Noel Gallagher predicted a rash of studio activity for Oasis in 2002. Heathen Chemistry had been released and the plan was to record another album almost immediately. But he never guessed that sessions with Death In Vegas, installed as their production team, would be a disaster.
Old songs were shelved and new songs were written. After skipping the odd band meeting, drummer Alan White was sacked and Zak Starkey, on sabbatical from The Who, took his place.
Wafting between studios for months on end, the group finally decided to enlist the help of American production whiz Dave Sardy, the man recently behind the sonic muscle of Jet. The hard work paid off and new album Don’t Believe The Truth is… wait for it… the best Oasis album since 1995’s (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?.
Noel encouraged each member of the band to contribute songs, with guitarist Andy Bell coming up trumps with rousing album opener Turn Up The Sun.
“Originally that was going to be the title of the album,” Noel says. “It’s a brilliant title. It’s got that glam thing going on, but also the intro and the outro are also quite Scouse too. It instantly sounds like Oasis, which is bizarre [considering Andy wrote it].”
A member of seminal early 90s shoegazers Ride, Andy Bell, today staying in a Notting Hill guesthouse and preparing for a day’s work on a video set, accepts he’s now playing in another stratosphere. In the UK, anticipation for the new album has been intense. First single Lyla has already locked down the coveted number one spot on the singles chart.
“It’s somewhere down the list in terms of [being] the best song on the album,” Bell admits of Lyla. “But it’s an ideal first single because it’s kind of immediate. It’s immediate and it’s a grower — that’s a pretty difficult thing to achieve. It’s grown on me though, that’s for sure.”
Noel is particularly enamoured with the tune. Echoing The Rolling Stones’ Street Fighting Man, Gallagher sees the track more in the realms of “Swedish band The Soundtrack Of Our Lives doing The Who on Skol, in a psychedelic city in the sky”. He says it’s the poppiest Oasis track since Roll With It and “annoyingly catchy”.
Lyla began life in May 2004, but almost didn’t make the album at all. With Sardy’s involvement, the band were forced out of their comfort zone and sessions took place on both sides of the Atlantic. Lyla was the final song to be recorded.
“We were in between the Death In Vegas and Dave Sardy sessions,” Andy Bell continues. “We were about to give Dave Sardy some stuff from our own studio to mix — that’s how he first came into our lives. And… what were we doing? I think Liam and Gem were about to go off to LA to hear some mixes and Noel and I were going to stay behind.
‘Lyla was the song we were working on that day, and in all the confusion of everyone leaving the studio we didn’t think about it anymore for months. We went off to America, did the album and came back before we remembered it. And then we flew Dave over to England again and put the final touches on it.”
Noel contributes five songs to Don’t Believe The Truth, including The Velvet Underground homage Mucky Fingers, flag-waving closer Let There Be Love and his best tune this decade, Part Of The Queue. The song was inspired by one of life’s more mundane challenges.
“I only went out for a fucking pint of milk,” Noel deadpans. “I got so fucking irate at the queue. There were like ten fucking checkouts and two little old ladies. And, I don’t know if there’s a rush hour for buying food, but it was the rush hour, and I kinda stood at the back with this pint of milk and I thought, I’m going to fucking steal this if nobody takes the money off me right fucking now.”
Bassist Gem Archer chimes in with A Bell Will Ring, which, according to the band, is Ringo Starr’s favourite. “It’s as close anybody has ever got to sounding like Revolver,” Noel says.
Meanwhile, frontman Liam Gallagher hasn’t been resting on his laurels either. After the horror of Little James from Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants, many wrote him off altogether. But he proved the world wrong with Heathen Chemistry’s Songbird and here he contributes Love Like A Bomb, The Meaning Of Soul and Guess God Thinks I’m Abel.
“Songbird blew my head off when I first heard it,” Noel says, “because it was that fucking simple and that direct. But when Liam plays you a song he wants you to instantly fucking drop dead on the spot and then, when you come around, stab yourself in the heart and be in awe of the fucking sonic ability of the man.”
It’s no surprise that one of Dave Sardy’s gigs on the album was to keep the peace.
“He’s a good referee,” Noel jokes, “which is always the main criteria for anybody getting involved [with Oasis]. Someone’s got to referee: Gem and Andy are a right pair in the fucking studio. They’re always at it. ‘Look, I’m playing the fucking bass!’”
“All I can say is that he enabled us to get the magic down on tape,” Bell says of Sardy’s contribution. “I don’t know why or how. The magic is something we played — it was just that he was a good translator of that magic.”