Noel Gallagher on Spontaneous Inspiration in the Studio

Noel Gallagher could have taken the easy route in recording his new album. He had played a batch of demos for Belfast-based film composer and producer David Holmes, who said that there wasn’t much he could do for the former Oasis guitarist as the tracks sounded finished. Any other musician would have simply released those recordings as they were, but Gallagher was intrigued when Holmes suggested an alternative idea: How about the two of them start from scratch and see what happens?

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“It was the harder way to go, but it felt like the right kind of challenge,” says Gallagher. “David said, ‘Don’t bring any songs into the studio.’ So I went in cold—no songs, no ideas, no nothing. Just one guitar, me, and David. The first session, we sat around listening to records. David played all of this French psychedelic pop and avant-garde German music from the ’60s. ‘What do you think of this?’ ‘Shall we do something like that?’ I had never worked like that before. It was great.”

The resulting album, Who Built the Moon? [Sony], is billed as Noel Gallagher’s High-Flying Birds, but like the guitarist’s two previous solo outings, it’s not really a band effort. Only current keyboardist Mikey Rowe and former drummer Jeremy Stacey appear on the record, alongside a host of session players and a couple of noted guest stars (Johnny Marr and Paul Weller). Bursting with spacey, psychedelic grooves and thunderous, hip-hop-inspired beats, the record is a dramatic departure from the roaring Britrock gestalt of Oasis, and it’s also a clear break from the earnest singer-songwriter persona he established