LONDON ¨C It doesn¡¯t take much to set Noel Gallagher off. We are sat in a backstage portacabin at London¡¯s peculiarly ragbag Clapham Calling festival, and I¡¯ve just mentioned to the former Oasis songwriter that ¡°Chasing Yesterday,¡± the second solo album under his High Flying Birds banner, is the U.K.¡¯s fastest selling of the year.
¡°Is that impressive? I¡¯m not impressed by it! I¡¯d rather be the biggest selling,¡± he says. ¡°The fastest selling, what does it mean? It means that if you put my CD on a table with Muse¡¯s and Florence¡¯s, it would win in a race to the end of the table. I don¡¯t know what it means. Let me tell you ¡ª I¡¯d rather be the biggest selling.¡±
You¡¯d expect nothing less from Gallagher, Manchester¡¯s great motormouth and a man whose ambition, stretching back to Oasis¡¯ fledgling days, was always to obliterate the competition, musically and verbally, into irrelevance. He told everyone who would listen ¡ª and especially those who wouldn¡¯t ¡ª that Oasis, fronted by brother Liam, would be the biggest band in the world and he was right: In the hedonistic Britpop era, Oasis didn¡¯t as much catch the zeitgeist as set fire to it, first with its fantastic 1994 debut ¡°Definitely Maybe¡± and then with the 22 million-selling follow up ¡°(What¡¯s the Story) Morning Glory.¡± With his anthemic rock ¡®n¡¯ roll tunes, Gallagher mastered the trick of writing songs that ostensibly said nothing but meant everything, and his resolutely working-class Mancunian outlook of hope and camaraderie found a universal audience.
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