Saving Oasis from stasis

By STEPHEN DOWLING

Noel Gallagher had all the inspiration to strip Oasis back to basics about a year ago, in the lounge of his small mews house in Marylebone. He played Be Here Now for the first time without being on cocaine.

Back when he recorded it, the older Gallagher was more than familiar with the credit-card tapping movement required to get the creative juices flowing. Quite familiar indeed. Which is why Be Here Now sounded like the ultimate cocaine album, the brainchild of a chemically engorged ego, with its hundreds of guitars, endless solos and epic codas - and meaningless lyrics wafting over the top.

"I shouldn't have even bothered writing it," Noel Gallagher admits now, draped over a sofa in a private club that overlooks one of London's less-cluttered garden squares. "Should have had a year off. I think all the music and all the chord changes are great. But the lyrics are appalling.

"So I put it on. And two minutes into the album D'You Know What I Mean still hasn't started. At that point I was starting to look at the speakers pretty uneasily. We get to the end of D'You Know What I Mean after about half an hour. By the third song I was starting to itch and feel uncomfortable. Every time there's a word not being sung there's a guitar line. I got to five tracks in and it was [expletive] rubbish. Off it went."

The rewrite of Oasis' history has begun. Noel Gallagher has begun courting the world's press to promote the band's fifth album, Heathen Chemistry. He's looking fit and well, a classic denim jacket buttoned to the top, scarf underneath, a hundred-miles-an-hour vessel of opinions and anecdotes. He's very relaxed for a man who's had to undergo a lot of stock-taking recently.

He's sure that 2002 has ushered in a new Oasis, one that's shied away from the lighter-waving, empty-lyric anthems of the last few years. Heard this before? You might have - it was supposed to be what previous album Standing on the Shoulder of Giants delivered. But the reality was hangover lyrics and downcast songs, recorded against a backdrop of band walkouts and marital strife.

This time, however, the sting is back. Cautious record label Sony isn't letting journos hear everything yet, but the few tracks played before the interview are reassuringly good - one by Gem Archer, in particular, is stunning.

Gallagher says the two new recruits have been the salvation of Oasis, saving the band from turning into a tired old war horse. Heathen Chemistry is the first record to feature songwriting credits from new guitarist Archer (formerly of Britpop also-rans Heavy Stereo) and bassist Andy Bell (once of Ride), brought in after Paul "Bonehead" Arthurs and Paul McGuigan left the band as Standing on the Shoulder began recording.

"I got more inspiration off two seconds in the studio with Gem writing Hindu Times than I ever had in the band before that. When we did the backing track it was going to be an instrumental for ages, and Gem went, 'Are you going to write lyrics?'.

"It was always called Hindu Times, but I didn't know what I was going to write. And he said, 'It's got to sound like the most Oasis song you've written 'cos it sounds like Oasis music'.

"At that point I thought I'll write a proper Oasis lyric. Oasis at the start was all about 'I'm getting out of this shithole, I'm [expletive] moving away to the scene, and I'm having it [expletive] rotten'. He said I should out-Oasis myself."

It may seem peculiar that Oasis have recovered a hard edge just as their lives are all baby-raising and domestic bliss - Noel is living with girlfriend Sara McDonald, while brother Liam is with ex-All Saint Nicole Appleton.

Noel Gallagher's marriage to Meg Mathews ended in 2000, after she had given birth to their daughter Anais. The breakup wasn't easy, and there are reports that a divorce settlement still hasn't been thrashed out.

Gallagher's pragmatic about his new role as part-time dad. "I don't sit down and analyse it too much. That sort of thing happens to thousands of families every day - it's something that me and little Anais are left to deal with.

"In many ways it's shit - when she gets her first cut on her knee I won't be there for her, I wasn't there to see her walk for the first time or hear her speak for the first time. But balance that out - at least she won't see me in bad mood, which I would have been most of the time, surrounded by idiots. Why is Dad always pissed off, sitting in his room playing his guitar?

"When I see her I get her for myself, she's mine for the weekend, there's not a load of strangers prancing round the garden, she comes to see me. It's good at the moment. Sara loves her to bits, and vice versa."

The tantrums that regularly affected his relationship with his brother also seem to have stopped (well, at least for the moment). Liam Gallagher now no longer turns up at Oasis recording sessions to record vocals and head for the nearest bottle of Jack Daniels - he has three tracks on the new record, after contributing Little James to the previous album. Gallagher snr is amazed at the turnaround.

"Today he's in the studio on his own, remixing one of the tracks 'cos he doesn't like how it sounds. He told me last night, 'I don't like the bottom end of one of my tracks, I'll just go in tomorrow and fix it.' I had to check - I rang the studio up and said, 'Is Liam there?' And I thought, I bet he's in the pub, it's just some ruse to get away from the kid and Nick." He laughs.

Wonders never cease. And Noel Gallagher seems to have been taking a torch to his own high-life of late. Never mind the decision to go drug-free, he's also decamped from the kind of huge country house Britain demands of its rock aristocrats to a small house in the centre of London.

He admits, a little glumly, that he took so many drugs on the way up that he can't remember many of the highlights. He can't recollect, for instance, a single day of recording What's the Story, or of the band's 1996 Knebworth gigs, playing to a quarter of a million people in a weekend.

Recently, one of the band's longtime management team left to go back to the United States. She cleaned out a lot of odds and ends from her flat, memorabilia and clippings, and presented them to Noel. He might have lost some of the memories himself, but suddenly they were there, larger than life: all those interviews and pictures of a gang of young Mancunians leaving behind anonymous jobs and the drizzly north for superstardom.

"There was this other quote from Liam, right at the start, 'Within three years we'll be the biggest [expletive] band in the world', and it actually came true. That's proper [expletive] foresight, mate. And I wondered what people must have thought, turning off the tape recorder after the interview: 'Great to meet you knobhead. You'll be playing Camden Monarch in six months."'

And now? Steering Oasis back on course, getting to know the two newish faces, getting back, just maybe, to the great rock'n'roll band that Oasis once was.

"I've got a good feeling about this year. I'm up for it this year, the only reservation I had was that it would be just my luck that I'd be up for having it this year and Liam would go, 'I was up for last year, I'm not this year'. But everyone's up for it.

"I would have never stayed up till three in the morning on a video shoot ever. But last night we finished at two, and then usually we'd pile off in our cars, but this time we hung round and had a drink in the dressing room, talking rubbish."

* Heathen Chemistry is released on July 1. The album's first single, Hindu Times, is out now. Oasis are rumoured to be touring New Zealand and Australia in October.