Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds – Oasis chords without the fight

After Oasis: Sour Mash Records, anthems, and a band that tours without the fight

In August 2009, Noel Gallagher left Oasis backstage at the Rock en Seine festival in Paris. He did not return to the band. Two years later he released the first Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds album on his own label, Sour Mash Records. The question at the time was whether the songwriter in one of Britain’s biggest bands needed the fights more than the songs needed the band. The first High Flying Birds album answered with finished songs and no Liam Gallagher at the microphone.

Gallagher grew up in Burnage, Manchester, a council estate neighbourhood where he borrowed his first guitar from his older brother Paul and spent the early 1980s absorbing The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, T. Rex, and the emerging Britpop orbit before Britpop had a name. He joined Oasis in 1991 as chief songwriter and a reluctant co-frontman, wrote « Live Forever, » « Champagne Supernova, » « Don’t Look Back in Anger, » and enough other songs to keep a full catalogue well into the later Oasis years. His influences were never hidden: open-chorded Rickenbacker lines from The Beatles, chord-heavy ballads from George Harrison, arena scale from U2, and a Rolling Stones push underneath.

The debut album (2011) opens with « Everybody’s on the Run, » a slow-building, string-laden piano song written for outdoor stages. « The Death of You and Me » arrives with a Salvation Army brass section and a bright music-hall feel that the Oasis sound had always carried at its edges but rarely brought to the foreground. « If I Had a Gun » strips the craft to its simplest form: a chord sequence, a clear melody, a lyric that does not overstay its welcome. The production, handled largely by Gallagher himself and David Holmes, stays warm and wide without crowding the arrangements.

Chasing Yesterday (2015) leaned further into 1960s psychedelia: sitar on « Riverman, » acid-touched guitar on « Lock All the Doors. » The record showed ambitions beyond an Oasis sound played more quietly. Who Built the Moon? (2017), produced by David Holmes, moved toward a bigger, fuller production: orchestral drops, grooves close to disco, and a looser form that divided listeners. Holmes’s production is the furthest these records move from an Oasis template. The catalogue was not standing still. Council Skies (2023), the fourth studio album, pulled back toward direct melodies, and the title track is one of the clearer late-career statements he has released.

Some Oasis habits stayed with the High Flying Birds, and some did not. The harmony is the same: major chords, capo’d guitars, anthemic resolutions. The tempo is slower on average. Noel’s voice is mid-range, conversational, and accurate. Liam’s was a sneer in a higher register, and the difference is not only cosmetic. Songs written for Noel’s delivery leave more space inside the track and push forward less hard. The arrangements have room that Oasis records rarely left.

The contrast with Liam Gallagher’s parallel post-Oasis records is immediate. Liam kept trading on the Oasis sound and the persona. Noel moved toward a wider set of styles and toward confidence in the craft. Paul Weller shifted into soul and funk. Damon Albarn kept changing genres. Gallagher stays closer to the melody and the guitar. That is the limit of the project, and it is also where the songs are strongest.

Live, the High Flying Birds tend to play the songs rather than stretch them into stadium workouts. The band around Gallagher includes Jeremy Stacey, on drums or keys depending on the configuration, and it fills the anthems without covering them. Arena shows built on the solo material, plus the inevitable Oasis section, have been among the better-attended British rock concerts of the past decade.

For a listener coming in, « Everybody’s on the Run, » « The Death of You and Me, » « Dream On, » and « Lock All the Doors » sketch the range. Then play the debut in order. It runs about forty minutes. It is the cleanest way to hear the split, song by song, before the later experiments, and it shows why leaving Oasis was a songwriting decision, not only a convenient exit.

The High Flying Birds continue the melodic writing Gallagher was already doing. He was still writing melodies on major chords and open guitar shapes. He stopped sharing the songwriting credit, and he no longer had a co-frontman fighting him for the microphone or pulling the vocal into a sneer. The songs come out cleaner, warmer, and more varied than the Oasis-era story had suggested.

À lire aussi

• Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds – You Know We Can’t Go Back
• Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds – First flight after the Oasis split
• Chasing Yesterday – Warmer mid-tempo, Johnny Marr on guitar
• Who Built The Moon? – David Holmes, samples, third UK No. 1
• Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds – Do the Damage