It’s been 14 years since Definitely Maybe, doesn’t it surprise you that there hasn’t been another British band as popular since?
No it doesn’t. I remember saying back at the time that I thought we’d be the last great British rock ‘n’ roll band. I don’t mean in terms of music, I mean we came along at the end of the era. We were pre-internet, pre-everybody having a computer, we were pre-everybody having a mobile phone with a camera. That tiny little thing means so much in the evolution of Oasis, because if you wanted to see it, you had to be there. If you wanted to hear it, you had to buy the records. If you wanted to be part of it, you had to read the magazines. Whereas now, everyone’s inter-connected all around the world. There was no burning, there was no downloading, people had to queue up for records. It was an event. That key little thing is for today’s modern bands starting off. I know the MySpace thing and all that nonsense obviously has massive benefits, but it takes away the mystery of the thing. That’s why I think we were the last greatest, because it was the end of a social movement.
Speaking of the internet, have you seen the video of you getting decked at your gig in Canada on YouTube yet?
Not yet. It was funny – not funny ‘ha, ha.’ We always have this saying in the band, ‘F***, I bet it never happened to Bono.’ It’s one of those. We used to say this all the time when we were the biggest band in the world, and we’d be stuck outside our hotel room with the wrong key, [mimes knocking on door] and head down to reception [mumbling under breath] ‘I bet this never happens to Bono.’ ‘Hello, yeah me key doesn’t work.’
The new album’s going well – are you sick of people describing it as ‘groove-based’ yet?
Well, until somebody comes up with a better word for that, it will always come across like Austin Powers. I’m afraid the word ‘groove’ is the only one. I said it in the first couple of interviews, and then I thought, surely there must be a better word for this? But there’s no other way of putting it, I’m afraid. We have far better songs, we consider, that we could put out, but we decided to go with a certain feel. Not as a career move, but it was like, we’ve managed to find a producer that we like for the first time ever, and we had about 10 or 11 songs going in, and seven of them were gonna form the basis of a record, and out of those, none have made it in. Well, actually, there were three: ‘Waiting For The Rapture’, ‘The Turning’ and ‘Bag It Up’, and those three were in amongst all the usual Kinksy, Beatlesy, Stonesy kind of tunes… I wrote ‘Shock Of The Lightning’ in one night, and ‘Falling Down’ in another night, and then Gem [Archer, Oasis guitarist] found an old demo with some other stuff on… it was all happy accidents in the studio. It was quite an exciting time.
So what are you going to do with the songs you left off the album which you reckon are better?
I don’t know. As we were mixing the album, me and Gem were recording these other songs in another room. They’re all based around the same five or six chords, it’s quite bluesy. Not in a Muddy Waters sense, it’s like modern psychedelic blues. But I don’t know what will happen. You know, you read other band’s interviews where they say, Oh we’ve got two album’s worth of stuff ready to go – well we actually have.
It’s been three years since the last album – is that why?
Time just flies. You see bands like ourselves and U2 and Coldplay, they fall into this cycle of an album every three to four years because we’re one of the lucky ones that can see the world. If you’re in a medium-size indie band in England, you do a few gigs in England, a few in Europe, a few in America, you’re done and dusted in eight months. It’s a year and eight months for us. So it feels like we’re lazy f******, but we’ve literally got too many songs than we know what to do with.
Dig Out Your Soul sounds more cohesive than other albums you’ve done – was this planned?
I think people don’t make albums like this any more. They’re just a collection of songs hung around three singles. There’s a conscious decision by myself to make all the tracks fade into one another. So when people pick and choose them off iTunes, they’ll get one second of the previous track and two seconds of the next one. And it’ll just annoy ’em, for the rest of their lives. Because I don’t see how you can download ‘Falling Down’ without all the tracks that come before it, because to get there you’ve gotta buy the album.
Gem said he’d never seen you write songs as fast as you did on this album, but you used to back in the early days…
It’s nice that people aren’t expecting anything of us; we haven’t got a record deal, we’re paying for this stuff ourselves. It’s our label, we can do what we want with it. And maybe throw off the shackles… because we had meetings about what we were gonna do with the Oasis record, what we were gonna do with this, how do we proceed – it was almost like back to the beginning, like back to being on Creation. The producer has to take a lot of credit for facilitating that. He was like, well, look, if you don’t finish it, we don’t put it out. And we were like, that’s a point… Sometimes we finished albums because a tour was booked, and if we didn’t put out our album in that particular week then Mariah Carey puts hers out, and then Celine Dion, and we’ve got to go to the back of the queue, because we we’re all on the same label. So it’s kind of like, ‘Ah, these songs’ll have to do,’ you know what I mean? So we’re kinda free from all that now.
Your new ‘more democratic’ incarnation seems to be bearing up pretty well…
It wasn’t a conscious decision. I did say to Gem and Andy [Bell, bass guitarist] when they joined, feel free to chip in if you’ve got any ideas. For the first year, that was quite difficult, because I think they were going away and writing ‘Oasis songs’. And they were coming back and I was going, don’t write like I write, write for yourself. Don’t try and rewrite ‘Roll With It’. But when we got to Don’t Believe The Truth they’d got out of that habit, and they were just writing for themselves. They’d send me demos and I’d be like, that’s really good, we should do it. It doesn’t really matter what other people think about it, I like what they do. And I like what Liam does. It’s nice for me to have certain parts of a record that I can listen to and enjoy them for what they are.
I don’t sit and listen to Morning Glory or Definitely Maybe, but particularly Morning Glory, when I hear songs off that record – it was recorded so quick, 12 days in and out, no messing… If I was re-recording ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ tomorrow it’d be immense, it’d be so colossal, and if we were doing ‘Wonderwall’ it’d be less frantic and more bluesy, ’cause we’d have taken our time. So now when I listen to records when Gem or Andy or Liam’s songs come on, I can listen to the records and not bother listening to the bass drum. I can just listen to it, and enjoy Oasis music like everyone else. Whereas when I’m listening to my stuff, I’m like, hey, well that should be louder.
People are interested because you pretty much wrote the book on operating bands as a dictatorship.
I think that comes with being young and feeling invincible. When you’re all in your twenties, you can all order each other around like the Lord Of The Flies, you know. But when you’re all grown men with kids, you can’t really go into a studio and go, ‘Here you are, you’re not playing it like that…’ I wouldn’t speak to Gem or Andy the way I used to speak to everybody else. I was mad then [laughs]!
What do you think when you look back on those times?
I think it was an excuse for a lot of people to go mad. Which was great, we were more than ready to facilitate that. But I feel very proud looking back on those days. On the odd times I’m forced to sit and reminisce about these kind of things in situations such as this – it’s usually for foreign journalists – I often think, well if you think about the 60s, who defined the 60s? Well, the Beatles. Who defined the 70s? Well, you go, no one really defined the 70s. You could say David Bowie, but if you say that, you’re gonna go whoah! What about the Sex Pistols? Who defined the 80s? No one. But we definitely defined the 90s. It’s a real great position – if you want to know about 90s music, that’s it.
Oasis’s new album Dig Out Your Soul is available now
