Getting High (25 page)

They had with them a plentiful supply of cocaine, speed and Ecstasy. By the time they got on-stage, they were seriously gone. Bonehead played with three cigarettes in his mouth, Noel was E'd up, Guigsy fell off the stage and McCarroll forgot to tighten the nuts on his cymbals so when he first hit them, his drum kit half-collapsed.

So much for the band handling their drink and drugs.

Meanwhile, in the audience, the Manchester friends kicked off a fight with some students. Later on, some of the offices were raised and money that the students had collected for their traditional rag week was stolen. The band and their friends had to fight their way out of the college and into their cars.

Guigsy was in no condition to drive so by the time they reached a service station on the motorway, he pulled over and he, Liam and McCarroll went to sleep. They were awoken in the morning by a copper banging on their window.

They explained that they had got drunk and wanted to sleep off their hangovers. The policeman accepted their story and walked off, failing to notice the rather huge spliff that was in Guigsy's ashtray. Top night out, then.

Noel had now informed the Carpets that he was in a band. In fact to everyone he met he told the same thing.

‘I'm in a band, we're called Oasis and we're playing at such and such place. Come down if you want to check it out.' Then he left it at that.

At the Hippodrome in Oldham, Graham Lambert witnessed his first Oasis gig when the band supported The Revenge. He later saw them again.

‘When Noel asked me what I thought I told him that I thought the music was still a bit unfocused,' he recalls.

But the interesting thing, according to Graham, was Noel's obvious prolific nature. Then, just as now, Noel wrote most days of the week. Once he got on a roll there was no stopping him. He would show up at rehearsals with a whole new batch of songs which would then take precedence over the ‘older' material.

During this period, Noel astonished the band with the quality and maturity of his songs. He had now come up with songs such as ‘Whatever' and a real band favourite, ‘All Around The World'. There was also ‘She's Electric', (Noel recalling his primary school days and blatantly lifting part of the melody from the kids TV show
Me And You
) and ‘Hello', which were demoed at Mark Coyle's house at 388 Mauldeth Road West, although they wouldn't see the light of day until October 1985 when Oasis's second album was released.

‘They never played the same set twice,' Graham recalls. ‘Within six weeks they had a new set-list which I told Noel wasn't good for getting record companies interested. But he never seemed that bothered. I also remember Bonehead playing acoustic guitar at a few of the gigs.'

By now, the band had moved into a new rehearsal space. This was at the Boardwalk in Manchester. They were given a room downstairs where they rehearsed maybe two or three nights a week, depending on their finances. Then they came to an arrangement with another group, Sister Lovers, to share the cost. Once that was done, Oasis were in there every night of the week, starting at five in the evening and finishing by ten o'clock at night.

The rehearsals would start off with any new songs Noel might have. These would have included ‘Blue', a song that Liam says was Noel's first-ever epic.

Then the band would rehearse the songs they knew, maybe breaking off round about seven-thirty for a beer or a spliff. Then it would be back to playing until ten.

The room was small and sometimes there were pools of water on the floor. To liven the place up, Bonehead brought in some paint and they would sporadically paint the back wall in the colours of the Union Jack.

Noel had even written a song called ‘The Red, White and Blue', and their fascination with the British flag caused a little consternation among some onlookers. One of these was the group they shared the room with, Sister Lovers.

In November 1992 one of the group's members, Debbie Turner saw Creation boss Alan McGee at a Bob Mould gig at the Boardwalk. Afterwards, she invited him down to their rehearsal room for a spliff.

McGee entered the room where the most important band he would ever sign rehearsed and noted the flag. He was told that it was the work of this lads' band, Oasis, and there were various mutterings about the band's politics. McGee made a mental note to steer clear of them.

For the group, their interest in the flag had been prompted by bands such as The Who, who early in their career had used the flag in an ironic pop-art fashion.

‘But because we were lads who liked drinking beer and going to football,' Noel explains, ‘no one thought we would be into art or anything. It was like this song I had, “The Red, White and Blue”. That song came about because one day I had gone down to Johnny Roadhouse to get some equipment. As I came out, there was some march going on. I'm standing there and this guy comes over and starts ranting at me for not taking any interest in his cause.

‘I'm like, I'm arsed about your cause. All I want to do, mate, is be in a band. If this is your thing, then fine, I haven't got a problem with it, live and let live. But leave me out of it.

‘He just went on and on, so I wrote this song about how if you look a certain way you instantly get labelled and I called it “Red, White and Blue”, which was also about how things like the Union Jack get hijacked and if you use it people automatically think you're part of something you're not.'

The song was based around a riff not that dissimilar to Isaac Hayes's song ‘Shaft', with Noel utilising his wah-wah pedal to maximum effect. But he soon shelved the song.

‘All the band really liked it but I knew if we played it, it would cause more trouble than it was worth, which is why it got sacked.'

Because they were regular users of the rehearsal space, the Boardwalk would occasionally put the group on upstairs. This was probably done in some vain attempt to get the rent paid.

The band often missed payments. Buying equipment proved to be expensive and although everyone but Liam worked, the cost of maintaining themselves and Oasis consistently left them short of cash.

At the end of each rehearsal, the band would down their instruments and bolt for the door. The last one out had to hand the keys back which always meant making up some kind of excuse to the owners about paying tomorrow. Sometimes Noel would pay by a cheque that he knew would bounce higher than a kangaroo. Other times they would offer ten quid and solemnly promise to pay the rest the next night.

What bugged everyone was that they thought the place was a right dump. First off it was cold and leaked water, which was highly dangerous with all the electrical gear. It was also small and dark.

‘Well before U2's Zooropa tour,' Guigsy says, ‘Noel came up with this idea of turning off all the lights, getting a load of broken down TVs in and then just switching them on to light the room up.'

If you were to have seen the band practise at this time, you would have opened the door and, looking clockwise, found to your left-hand side, Noel playing his guitar. Guigsy would be in the far corner to Noel's left and Bonehead was placed in the right-hand corner, playing next to McCarroll's drums which had been set up against the wall. Liam stood in the middle of the room.

When the band jammed on an instrumental bit, Liam would sit cross-legged on the floor, spliff in hand, close his eyes and check the music.

If Coyley was taping a session there would be a mike placed over one of the pipes that ran above their heads. It was his job to set up the equipment and again the boys were initially impressed with his knowledge as he ran around checking amps and levels. It was only when equipment failed to work and Coyley's eloquent response was to try to kick it into life, that they realised they had a fellow chancer on board.

There was some graffiti on the door and further down the corridor, Liam had drawn a plane and written a remark under it about being careful when you land on runways, a biting comment aimed at all United supporters. But still it was here that the unique Oasis sound first started to surface. It happened through volume. The band always played loudly. Noel would put his switch right up to ten and then hammer the shit out of his guitar, venting all his frustrations. Bonehead did the same.

It was at some point here that Noel realised that if Bonehead kept playing barré chords, his fingers covering all the strings, all of the time, that then allowed Noel the freedom to pick out melodies, riffs and guitar lines. Align that with a very basic, almost punk-like rhythm section provided by McCarroll and Guigsy and the sheer volume they played at, and the Oasis sound starts to take shape.

The only missing element at this point is Liam's voice which was yet to take on the strength and character it now has. But that, with time, would come.

In their idle moments, the group would go and play tricks on other bands rehearsing. They would carefully open the doors to other rehearsal rooms and switch off all the lights as someone rehearsed. At other times, they would play knock-down ginger, banging on a band's door and then running back to their room.

If anyone complained, well, there's five of us here and you want to talk about it outside, mate? None of them ever did. But if anyone knew what the outside felt like, it was Liam. Every Friday night, after rehearsing, he would go upstairs to the Boardwalk's Friday club night.

He would stroll in, skin up and stand there blatantly puffing on his spliff. The bouncers would then come over and ask him to put it out. He'd tell them to fuck off. They would then grab him, push him through the backdoors, down the stairs and out of the club on to the street. He would curse like mad, and then do precisely the same thing the next Friday night.

‘I went down those stairs so many times,' he recalls, ‘it was ridiculous.'

His shenanigans were so regular that the Boardwalk management even wrote to the band saying that if Liam didn't stop then the whole group would be banned from the premises. The next Friday, there was Liam, spliff in hand.

He didn't care because he knew something that only four other people knew in Manchester. Oasis were going to be huge. It was just a fact. The songs that were rushing out of Noel were simply head and shoulders above everything else. And that fascinated Liam.

Here was his brother, this seemingly normal, restrained character, who loved nothing more than getting out of it or standing in the Kippax Stand urging on his beloved Manchester City team, suddenly unveiling these songs which contained in their words and sound, a torrent of emotions.

Their melodies were so simple yet so right, and the arrangements were just naturally crafted. There was no hint of the songs being calculated. It was just amazing. Oasis, with Noel Gallagher on their side, just could not fail.

Guigsy remembers how most nights after rehearsing, he and Liam would go back to his house and up to his room. There they would play Hendrix, Kinks and Who records and just tell each other how successful they were going to become.

‘It's going to be fucking top,' Liam would. say, settling back with a spliff in his hand and a contented smile on his face. Yet not even Liam, or anyone connected with Oasis for that matter, had any idea just how top it would turn out to be.

It is obvious then that this self belief, coupled with an innate suspicion of outsiders and a thriving arrogance, turned Oasis, with the exception of Tony McCarroll, into a tight-knit gang. The drummer was different. He never displayed a passion for anything.

Take music, Bonehead says. ‘I wouldn't have minded if he had five records that he said were the best ever and that was it. But he didn't even have that. I don't think he owned any records or even a stereo.'

But Noel, Liam, Guigsy and Bonehead held tight. They would arrive at gigs and totally ignore everyone there. If anybody said anything, they were more than happy to kick off a fight, whether it be with the other bands or promoters. It didn't matter to them. ‘Proper angry young men,' is Guigsy's curt description.

On-stage, they said nothing. They came on, played a short set, never moved, never communicated and then walked off. That was it.

Their attitude was, this music is great and to be honest we really don't think you deserve it. But here we are, here it is, and if you like it then that's how it should be. And if you don't, that just proves our point. Dickheads.

It was Oasis against the world, a feeling that all the best bands or solo artists are full of in their early days, and that year, 1992, the feeling was paraded at the Club 57 in Oldham where they supported The Ya's Ya's (whose bass player was one Scott Mcleod), three more times at the Boardwalk, and once at the Playback Roadshow on 22 June 1992.

This was an event that formed part of a nationwide drive to raise money for various charities. Martin, Bonehead's brother, knew the organiser and persuaded him to let Oasis play the daylong festival, which also featured acts such as Opus 3 and The Utah Saints.

After performing, Oasis handed over a tape to be auctioned of ‘Take Me', featuring two mixes. They also autographed the cassette cover.

Their next prestigious gig would be in two months time on 13 September, an appearance at the Venue as part of Manchester's In The City season.

This was a scheme partly organised by Tony Wilson to rival the Music Seminar in New York which takes place every summer. It was also an attempt to drag the music scene away from its London centre, provide a chance for labels to display their bands and to allow A&R men to check out new talent. No one, it seemed, bothered with Oasis.

Yet for Liam Gallagher, such gigs aside, this was the time when Oasis should have been recorded.

‘That's when we were really rocking,' he firmly states. ‘I wish we could have made an album then.'

Marcus Russell lay in his sickbed and hard as he tried, he couldn't shake off the thought of impending doom that seemed to permeate his whole being. He was twenty-nine years old and he felt as if his life was going nowhere.