Music

How was your first show back in the saddle?
'It was really great in places, I’m still not sure about the setlist, though. I think it’s too long, Liam doesn’t think it’s long enough, that kind of thing. But it was good though. I flagged a bit in the middle, but then it’s long. It’s the longest we’ve ever played. But it took us four months to get the setlist right last time, by which time we’d played most of the gigs in England, so it’s not unusual for us to be tinkering with it a little bit. In Canada, it was brilliant. Because the album hadn’t come out, we weren’t playing for that long, we were only playing for about an hour and a half. But that extra ten minutes is crucial, what you play – like, "We’ve gotta play that, then we’ve gotta play that. Fuckin’ hell, you can’t not play that if you’re playing that." It like a Rubik’s Cube, you think you’ve got there and then... so in my opinion it’s two songs too much. But the two songs we’ve gotta drop are fuckin’ brilliant.'

You must have to think about what the crowd want to hear as well
'I’ve never really bothered what the crowd want, to be honest. We’re not playing "Live Forever" on this tour, and no one’s mentioned it yet. Which is fuckin’… that’s a lot to be said for a band to come out and not play what’s commonly regarded as the great song of the ‘90s. Not one person’s mentioned it yet, so it must be pretty good.' Feature continues

Are you feeling all right after your on-stange assault mishap?
'Oh yeah yeah. Painkillers are only fun when you’re not supposed to be taking them. When you are supposed to be taking ’em it’s a major fuckin’ pain in the arse. But hopefully I’ll have a few left over for a few nights out on the tour. I’ve had four weeks off, which is a major pain the arse, but it was good to get back out there last night. I was glad it was an English show to come back with last night and not a lower-key show somewhere else. The first 40 minutes was like whoosh. It starts off quite ’avin’ it. You could actually almost feel it, like getting on a rollercoaster last night.

'Every band in Liverpool was here last night apart from The Beatles and the La’s. Saying that, we’ve got one of the La’s playing drums. But the first night of British tours you just kinda scratch it of and hope you do your best, because they’re much more like a social event. Tonight’ll be better, in a technical sense. But last night was like, fucking wow man, you live for nights like that where they’re not even gigs, y’know. We had some people come over from America from our new record label, who’ve never seen us outside of America, and they couldn’t make head or tail of it at all. They were like: "What is that?" Because in America, it’s all seated, and they come along and listen to the songs and they’re into it and all that, but this is like a fucking football match. And I said, we don’t really have fans, we have supporters.'

You’ve said before that people come to see Oasis to be at a gig with other Oasis fans…
'Yeah, I think really, Oasis is at its best in an arena or a stadium, playing live with 60,000 other Oasis fans. That to me is its essence. The records – particularly the early records where we didn’t really have much money to record them and they’re great recordings, the first two or three albums – you’re better off hearing "Live Forever" in a stadium than sitting listening to it at home. Oasis has always been about the shared experience. Whereas Radiohead I suppose – or Blur for that matter – or Coldplay, when I shut my eyes I think of people at home listening to it alone, you know, reading and having it on. But Oasis is something you listen to with your mates, usually when you get in or you’re going out. You kind of get derided for that by the kind of Church Of England middle-class fuckin’ broadsheet music press. It’s almost kind of seen as, I don’t know, beneath, music.'

Like a Roman circus?
'Yeah yeah, definitely. Which I kind of like, because it gives us something that no other band has got.'

You addressed that sort of crowd union in ‘D’you Know what I Mean’
'It meant everything and nothing. That whole period, of "Be Here Now", it was a big question mark with an exclamation mark beside it, because it was like, fucking hell! What people don’t realise is that album come out in 1997 – I’d only signed off four years before. I signed off the dole four years previous to that album, and in that time, we recorded what would go on to be the two most definitive albums of the decade, the three most definite albums of the decade, and go from being on the dole to like fuckin’… well, no one’s ever been there. And that’s what it was like. And everyone’s like, "Oh fuckin what!?" "Morning Glory" just blew up, we didn’t expect it. And it wasn’t just in the UK, it was all around the world.

'We had more money and drugs and all that kind of shit that you could deal with, and for some people, that kind of level of fame can hit you really fuckin’ hard. I’m not having a go at her, but the likes of Amy Winehouse have been wiped out by that. Whether people would care to admit it or not, that’s fame that’s done that. That’s somebody who’d gone, I can’t fucking deal with this. On the other hand, we couldn’t fuckin’ get enough of it. It was like come on, man! The days weren’t long enough! Every time we had to go to bed it was like, "I don’t wanna go to bed! This is fucking brilliant!" And in the middle of it you’re trying to make music, so you’re not thinking what somebody from the Guardian might think of it, or someone from the Observer, you’re thinking: Let’s make a record, because that’s what we do. That’s it. There would be other times for sitting down and pondering what the fuck life is all about. That year-and-a-half cycle was all about ‘avin’ it. Just looking at the world and thinking: Right you fucking bastard, come on.'

It must have been hard to do that and not turn into a twat
'Some people would say... it depends how you perceive it, dunnit? It’s very kind of you to say that your perception of it is that I didn’t turn into a twat, and I wouldn’t like to think that I had, but you’d probably find someone who’d say, "Yeah, but you don’t really know him," d’you know what I mean? I’ve always been in it, I feel, for the right reasons. I love making records and I love going out on the road, and I feel I’m worthy of everything I’ve got. I don’t sit down and think somebody else made me. Nobody else made me – the press didn’t make me, Alan McGee didn’t make me. I made them, know what I mean? I know who I am, and I know my limitations. You won’t find anybody who takes it less seriously than I do. No one’s ever written a line in a review of one of my records that I didn’t think first. But then sometimes I think maybe I’m too close to it and I can’t judge it. I guess I’m a fan of music – if I wasn’t in Oasis, I’d be at the gigs. It’s like last night for instance, it was a privilege to be there. And it’s not about being on stage, it’s about being there. Being onstage is almost secondary. Bits of last night you kind of switch off, and you’re just in the room. There’s not this thing of them and us – and I don’t mean that in a Libertines way – you're just like "Wow, this fucking thing is happening." It can be quite mad. But I guess I’m not an idiot.'

You’ve said you wish you could pull off a big stadium rock stage production like U2 – how come you don’t just do it?
'We’re not... we’re larger than life in other ways. On "Be Here Now", we tried it with the ig telephone box and all that kind of shit. And that’s only because I felt like that’s what one does. Because my template for it all was U2. So when I see U2 go from "The Joshua Tree" to the "Achtung! Baby" tour where these are big fuckin’ supergigs, and we got to be as big as them, bigger than them – it’s like: Right, that’s what you do. But instead of getting a fucking professional stage set designer, I done it, round a table, with a load of fuckin’ guys, doing loads of charlie. We were just going, "Right, let’s have a big red telephone box!" and nobody was going, "Er, hang on a minute", everyone was going, "Yeah man! Fucking hell!" And it was at that point where everything I done turned to gold, and I could casually knock off a tune with the Chemical Brothers in under 50 minutes, and it go to Number One selling a fucking 150,000 copies.

'So nobody was in the position to tell me what not to do. And really, looking back on it, I could have done with somebody to go, "You might want to go and have a lie down for half an hour". But everyone was going, "Yeah man!" And I was like, "We’ll have this and this, and you go away and design it," and they’d come back with this thing and you’d go, "It’s fucking brilliant!" Until you get to the first gig and you just go, [adopts undertone] "It just looks fucking stupid, but we’ve paid for it now so we might as well go for it." But we spent that year inside that telephone box listening to "Subterranean Homesick Blues", which was the tune they played before we came on. And we’d have to walk up these little steps into the back of the big telephone box, and it’s pitch black until someone opens the door, and there’s this sea of people, all over the world. That’s what I thought you had to do. That’s what I thought the biggest band in the world did. Now really, we should have just got a few more lights and a few more effects pedals and been a bit mysterious, but we kind of embraced the lunacy of it all.'

There has to be a part of you that enjoyed that though…
'You’ve gotta go there. There’s no point living your life and getting fucking cancer at the age of 65 and thinking, "I should’ve fucking ‘ad it, y’know?" When I go, I wanna know I’ve fucking lived, y’know? They were crazy, crazy times. That whole tour was the most enjoyable two and a half years of my whole life, because whatever you wanted, you could get two of, anywhere in the world. If you had a whim, somebody would fulfil it for you. Fucking more drugs than you could fucking possibly begin to imagine your body could take, all there, all the time. Touring as the biggest band in the world, and the biggest fucking freakshow in the world. Staying up all night, doing gigs. Everybody I meet who’s been to those tours says, "Oh fucking hell, yeah, I saw you in ’97 in Hong Kong", and you’re like, "Wow, how shit was that?" and they’re like, "Yeah, it wasn’t the best." But for all our deficiencies as a group, we solved them all with volume. Because it got to the point where, [original bassist] Paul McGuigan was not meant to be in the biggest band in the world. Neither was [original rhythm guitarist] Bonehead. Mentally, they weren’t cut out for it. Musically, they weren’t cut out for it. So to hide a multitude of everybody’s sins, we’d just turn it up so no-one could hear us. But it was great fun.

'I think it was an excuse for a lot of people to go mad. Which was great, we were more than ready to facilitate that. But I feel very proud looking back on those days. On the odd times I’m forced to sit and reminisce about these kind of things in situations such as this, it’s usually for foreign journalists, I often think: Well if you think about the ’60s, who defined the ’60s? Well, The Beatles. Who defined the ’70s? Well, you go, no one really defined the ’70s. You could say David Bowie, but if you say that, you’re gonna go "Whoah, what about the Sex Pistols?" Who defined the ’80s? No one. But we definitely fucking defined the ’90s. It’s a real fucking great position – if you wanna know about ’90s music, that’s it.'

And you’re not yet looking retro, eight years into the next decade
'Yeah, check how many kids there are out there tonight, who couldn’t have been five when "Definitely Maybe" came out.'

The Arctic Monkeys have cited you as an influence – how old could Alex Turner have been?
'Nine. The night I first met him was in Japan. I’d heard of them, but I’d never heard any of their music. And they all came in, looking like little tiny fucking schoolkids, and we were chatting, and they were like, "Oh yeah, ‘Definitely Maybe’." And I said, "How old were you when that came out?" And he said, "Oh I remember being at primary school" What? "Yeah, I was nine." And I suddenly caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, as an old man talking to this small nine-year-old child. Singing "Columbia". Thinking: Fucking hell, that’s stupid. But we go there tonight, and all the first people we see are teenagers. So I think the albums are starting to be passed down by big brothers and big sisters. These kids are coming to see people from a different era, a different decade. So it’s stuff that’s been passed down from a different generation, it’s like the Sex Pistols. I don’t think people’ll be passing Suede records down the line in 20 years.'

Doesn’t it surprise you there hasn’t been another Oasis-level band since?
'No it doesn’t. I remember saying back at the time that I thought we’d be the last great British rock ‘n’ roll band. I don’t mean in terms of music, I mean we came along at the end of the era. We were pre-internet, pre-everybody having a computer, we were pre-everybody having a mobile phone with a camera. That tiny little thing means so much in the evolution of Oasis, because if you wanted to see it, you had to be there. If you wanted to hear it, you had to buy the records. If you wanted to be part of it, you had to read the magazines. Whereas now, everyone’s interconnected all around the world. There was no burning, there was no downloading, people had to queue up for records and all that kind of shit. It was an event.

'That key little thing is for today’s modern bands starting off – I know the MySpace thing and all that nonsense, it obviously has massive, massive benefits – but it kind of takes away the mystery of the thing. You’re immediately connecting with someone on the net, who is famous. And it goes back to the quote from Andy Warhol, who incidentally was misquoted when he said "Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes" – he actually said "Every 15 minutes, someone will be famous". But one of your profession, as they always do, ran away with it and by the time they got home wrote that quote. But it has come to pass. With the turn of every new day, with YouTube and MySpace and all that fucking bollocks, it’s kind of become. It’s a very prophetic statement. And I think, if you take that into account – there was that girl who had that Number One single, Sandi Thom, all that thing had come from the internet. That’s why I think we were the last greatest, because it was a social movement.

'We were the last great band to come from "Top Of The Pops". It’s such an important thing. I was talking about it last night, saying, and this is gonna sound quite mad, you can see where they’re going on about "Broken Britain" and all that shit, it’s because "Top of The Pops" isn’t on any more. Because people don’t have that shared experience of pop music, and it being their own. So people start getting into weird shit, like knifing each other. But not just once, like 50 fucking times they stab each other in the head and all that kind of shit. And the important thing about "Top Of The Pops" was you got to see what people look like. You got to see what other people were wearing.

'Now I might be looking back on it through rose-tinted glasses, because "TOTP" was fascinating for me. And the Top 40 rundown – if you were on last on "Top Of The Pops", that was it , you hadn’t made it. If you were on first on "TOTP", you were like, "Fucking get in." That’s gone now. It’s like when the singles chart come out, and there’s a song that’s been in the chart for 87 weeks, but it’s still Number 26. I just can’t comprehend how that might happen. Or a song’s at Number 11 in the charts, but it’s not come out yet. It’s too fucking mad. It was very easy the way it was – Chart Show, Sunday, Number One, Top Of The Pops, Thursday night, got to see what they look like. Went out, bought it Saturday afternoon.'

And you learned what other people's favourite bands looked like as well, not just yours
'Totally. There was always the one-hit wonders as well. There won’t be any of them any more. The quirky kind of stuff, like, Who’s that? So we’re the last great band from that tradition of "Top Of The Pops", Sunday rundowns, got straight in at Number One.'

The internet played a big part in the Arctic Monkeys’ success as well, and they haven’t become the same tabloid characters as Oasis did, despite their hugeness
'We shouldn’t really expect everybody to come along and be like us. They’re not that kind of lads. They’re very awkward with the fame thing and all that. But they’re a product of their time, you know what I mean? Shy boys from the internet. But yeah, he could do with cheering up though, couldn’t he, Mr Turner? He’s a miserable little fucker.'

They always look very happy when they’re just soundchecking or nerding out with their instruments. It’s only when they’re the centre off attention that the shutters seem to come down
'I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s not deliberate, and they’re just shitting it a bit. Some people are very self-conscious about that. Liam’s a bit like that. He’s a normal kid when he’s not in front of journalists. And then once the cameras are rolling, he turns into Liam Gallagher. "Ask me a question, I’ll give you one sentence" – almost like Prince, you now? And usually that sentence involves something quite psychedelic, so you go, "Wow, that’s mysterious". Whereas I’m like, "Fuck, I was born to be in front of a fucking camera." Not in the Billy Elliot sense, but I should be running the country. Live from an office, saying, "That’s all bollocks man, you should do this." I’ve got too many opinions, on too many fucking subjects. I don’t how I’ve opinions on ‘em, but they’re all brilliant."

Have you seen the video of you getting decked on YouTube?
'Not yet. It was funny – not funny ha ha. We always have this saying in the band, "Fuck, I bet it never happened to Bono". It’s one of those. We used to say this all the time when we were the biggest band in the world, and we’d be stuck outside our hotel room with the fucking wrong key, [mimes knocking on door] and head down to reception [mumbles under breath] "I bet this never happens to Bono". "Hello, yeah me key doesn’t work." Or you’d be getting to a gig by speedboat or the guy had forgotten what island he was supposed to drop you off at, so you’d be driving round the Philippines or summat, going, "I bet this never happens to Bono." '

Your new album’s doing very well – are you sick of people describing it as ‘groove-based’ yet?
'Well, until somebody comes up with a better word for that, it will always come across like Austin Powers. I’m afraid the word "groove" is the only one. I said it in the first couple of interviews, and then I thought: Surely there must be a better fuckin’ word for this? But there’s no other way of putting it I’m afraid. We have far better songs, we consider, that we could put out, but we decided to go with a certain feel. Not as a career move, but it was like, we’ve managed to find a producer that we like for the first time ever, and we had about ten or 11 songs going in, and seven of them were gonna form the basis of a record, and out of those, none have made it in. Well, two have made it on the album. Actually, there were three, "Waiting For The Rapture", "The Turning" and "Bag It Up", and those three were in amongst all the usual Kinksy, Beatlesy, Stonesy kind of tunes. The producer picked out those three ‘cause we said, "Well come on you’re the producer, earn your fucking money." And he said, "Well, if I’m being asked what my opinion is, I think you should take these three and try this kind of thing." And all the songs fell out of the air. I wrote "Shock Of The Lightning" in one night, and "Falling Down" in another night and then Gem found an old demo with some other stuff on... it was all happy accidents in the studio. It was quite an exciting time, actually.'

It’s the first record that sounds like a cohesive album rather than a collection of separate tracks
'I think people don’t make albums like this any more. They’re just a collection of songs hung around three singles. There’s a conscious decision by myself to make all the tracks fade into one another. So when people pick and choose them off iTunes, they’ll get one second of the previous track and two seconds of the next one. And it’ll just annoy ‘em, for the rest of their lives. Because I don’t see how you can download "Falling Down" without all the tracks that come before it, because to get there you’ve gotta buy the album.

'When I was doing all the little crossfades in the studio, I was like, "People should be discouraged from doing that kind of thing." But again, that kind of thing is only a product of people putting out shit albums. People have twigged, "Hang on a minute, these aren’t albums any more, not like ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ or Led Zep ‘IV’ or 'The White Album', these are a collection of songs hung around four singles." And the internet and iTunes and all that only exist for a reason – because there’s a demand for it. But we did consciously decide to make an album'.

Gem said he’s never seen you write songs as fast as you did on this album, although you used to back in the early days…
'I guess… subconsciously, completing our deal with a major record company and saying goodbye, was a major milestone for us. Getting the Brits thing, or finally accepting it, that was a major milestone for us. Putting out the Best Of, that’s that fucking done. And we find it quite amusing in the aftermath of the Brits that everyone was saying, "Well that’s it now, really. They’re all in their forties, they’re all dads, that’s as much as you’re gonna get." We weren’t sitting around thinking, "Yeah, we’re gonna show you", as Paul McCartney claims to have been doing while writing "Sgt Peppers". We were just like, "Actually, it’s nice to be written off again. It’s nice that people aren’t expecting anything of us, we haven’t got a record deal, we’re paying for this stuff ourselves, it’s our label, we can do what the fuck we want with it." It’s just well, we’ll see.

'And maybe throwing off the shackles… because we had a worldwide record deal with meetings – "What we gonna do with the Oasis record, what we gonna do with this, how do we proceed?" – it was almost like back to beginning, like back to being on Creation. But I think that might have a lot to do with it. And the producer has to take a lot of credit for facilitating that. He was like, "Well, look, if you don’t finish it, we don’t put it out." And we were like, "That’s a point. Sony don’t depend on it, it’s only about us. If we don’t’ finish it, we don’t have to put it out, we don’t have to go on tour, it’s all about us now." Sometimes we finished albums because a tour was booked, and if we didn’t put out our album in that particular week, then Mariah Carey puts hers out, and then Celine Dion, and we’ve got to go to the back of the queue, because we were all on the same label. So it’s kind of like, "Ah, these songs’ll have to do", you know what I mean? So we’re kinda free from all that now, and it’s like, "You know what, if we don’t finish it, fuck it, it don’t matter. We’ll do it next year. No one gives a fuck anyway ha ha!" '

What are you going to do with the songs you left off the album which you reckon are better?
'I don’t know. As we were mixing the album, me and Gem were recording these other songs in another room. I remember having a sit down with our producer Dave and he said we should stop what we were doing and sit down and record these songs now as a group, and we were just doing little demos. I was like, "Hang on a minute." They’re nothing like this, but they’re really great. It’s all based around the same five or six chords, it’s quite blues-y. Not in a Muddy Waters sense, it’s like modern psychedelic blues. But I don’t know what will happen. You know, you read other band’s interviews saying, Oh we’ve got two album’s worth of stuff ready to go – well we actually have. At all times. I don’t know what we’ll do.

'The thing about being in a band this size is, I sometimes envy Paul Weller. Cause he can do whatever he wants. He only has to please Paul Weller. For us to do anything, the meeting will take 24 hours to set up and then you sit there going, "I wanna do this, I wanna do that." Then by the time we’ve finished this tour and then had some time off to see my family, and by the time we have another meeting about whether we should do another album or do solo projects, it’ll be five fucking years. Time just flies. So that’s why you see bands like ourselves and U2 and Coldplay, they fall into this cycle of an album every three to four years, because we’re one of the lucky ones that can see the world. If you’re in a medium-sized indie band in England, you do a few gigs in England, a few in Europe, a few in America, you’re done and dusted in fucking eight months. It’s a year and eight months for us. So it feels like we’re lazy fuckers, but we’ve literally got too many songs than we know what to do with.'

Your new ‘more democratic’ incarnation seems to be bearing up pretty well…
'It’s only been mentioned this time. The songwriting credits were split the same amount last time, and the album before, it seems to have been an issue this time. But it wasn’t a conscious decision. I did say to Gem and Andy when they joined, "Feel free to chip in if you’ve got any ideas." For the first year, that was quite difficult, because I think they were going away and writing “Oasis songs”. And they were coming back and I was going, "Don’t write like I write, write for yourself. Don’t try and rewrite ‘Roll With It’ you fucking daft cunt." But when we got to "Don’t Believe The Truth" they’d got out of that habit, and they were just writing for themselves. They’d send me demos and I was like, "That’s really good, we should do it." It doesn’t really matter what other people think about it, I like what they do. And I like what Liam does.

'It’s nice for me to have certain parts of a record that I can listen to and enjoy them for what they are. I don’t sit and listen to "Morning Glory" – or "Definitely Maybe" – but particularly "Morning Glory"… When I hear songs off that record – it was recorded so quick, 12 days in and out, no fucking messing. A mix a day done on days off from a European tour. It’s literally a bunch of demos that no one had heard before we went into the studio, we recorded them once, there’s no outtakes, there’s no demos. That’s it. I still think: God, this album sonically sounds appaling. So I listen to that record and I think: If I was re-recording "Don’t Look Back In Anger" tomorrow it’d fucking be immense, it’d be so colossal, and if we were doing "Wonderwall" tomorrow it’d be less frantic and more bluesy, ’cause we’d have taken our time. So now when I listen to records when Gem or Andy or Liam’s songs come on, I can listen to the records and not bother listening to the bass drum. I can just listen to it, and enjoy Oasis music like everyone else. Whereas when I’m listening to my stuff I’m like, "Fucking hell, that should be louder!" So the democracy thing wasn’t conscious, that’s just the way it’s fallen, and I think it’s good for the band.'

People are intersted though, as you pretty much wrote the book on operating bands as a dictatorship
'I think that comes with being young and feeling invincible. When you’re all in your twenties, you can all order each other around like "Lord Of The Flies", you know. But when you’re all grown men with kids, you can’t really go into a studio and go, "Here y’are, you’re not fuckin’ playing it like that…" I wouldn’t speak to Gem or Andy the way I used to speak to everybody else. I was mad then, ha ha! Looking back on it, there’s a lot to be said for that kind of madness, ’cause those were what’s widely regarded as the fucking glory days. But Bonehead and Guigs and Liam facilitated that madness. They were very prepared for me to say, "This is what’s going to happen," and they’d be like, "Right, you know best." Whereas you grow up and have kids, and I wouldn’t speak to Gem and Andy like... I wouldn’t speak to anybody like I used to speak to [original drummer] Tony McCarroll. Fucking hell. I used to give him proper shit, man. But that’s not to say that if I felt strongly round about the time of the next alum that I should write it all, I’d just do it. I probably wouldn’t put it as blunt as that, but I think they’d probably go with it.'

You seem to have put a lot of effort into layering sounds
'I have to say, it was Dave Sardy’s idea to go for this particular feel of record; I was quite prepared to just sit at the back of the studio and let him get on with it. I was like, "You have to convince me that this was the way to go." Because even though "The Turning" and "Bag It Up" have turned out great, the initial demos weren’t that great. They were like scratchy fucking blues things to me. But he was like, "No this is the way to go", and I went, "Fair enough, if you’re got something in your head I’m quite prepared now at this stage in my life to let you go and get on with it." And I can just be in the band and sit at the back and take the piss out of you. So usually I’d be up at the desk scratching my head, and he was brilliant. It’s the first time that one man has been given the production credit for an Oasis album that doesn’t involved anybody from Oasis. I wish we’d have fucking done it years ago."

You sounds like a young band
'Well, Dave, he lives in LA, he mixes virtually every fucking band there is on American radio. So he hears more music than we do. So if it sounds new and fresh, well he’d know, because he listens to fucking new music all the time. And when we were doing "Falling Down", I was doing the demo and thought it was alright, And he said, "It’s really fucking good, because he could hear it all in his head before it was finished." I thought: Great, I can just sit down and enjoy playing it.'

Looking forward to the Electric Proms?
'I am after last Monday night, ’cause we had a rehearsal with the choir in somebody’s kitchen in Muswell Hill. There’s only 16 of the choir there, a few tenors and a few sopranos and few bits in the middle, but there’s gonna be 50 on the night. And they’re singing on seven songs, and it’s fucking mindblowing. Really, really great.'

How’s it going to work?
'Well, they’re gonna amble on halfway through the set in their own clothes – actually, they’re quite made up that we’re letting them wear their own clothes. I had a meeting with them and they said, "What do you want us to wear?" And I said, "Wear? What do you usually wear?" And they said, "Well we usually get made to wear all black." I was like, "No no no, you either all come in fancy dress, or you come in your own clothes." They were all like, "Wow, you’re gonna let us wear our own clothes? He’s gonna let us wear our own clothes!" In the rehearsal, they were actually in the kitchen coming up and saying, "It’s really great you’re letting us wear our own clothes." I just thought: What kind of clothes do they usually wear? So they’re just gonna amble on in the second half of the set and sing some of the big numbers.'

All of the new album by any chance?
'No… in fact, are they doing any off the new album? No, they’re not. They’re more celestial. They’re singing like a string section. It’s an everyman choir. For instance, the brief was, look, when we play, everyone sings along. We’re a singalong rock ‘n’ roll band, so sing along. We let them kind of go off and do their own thing and met up on Monday – there was a few bits we had to change, cause we’re doing "I Am The Walrus", and I said, "Yeah, just go mad and do whatever you want." Then I heard it and thought: Fucking hell, not that mad though. Don’t do that – that’s mad. But I think it’s gonna be really brilliant.'

Have you wanted to play the Proms before?
'I done one with the Coral last year, but not really wanted to do one myself. I’m from a different generation. I’m not from the generation that was like, "Get me on Live 8! Get me on the Brits, we need to be on the Brits!" Fucking every band in England, every time the Brits is around, every one is clamouring to get on that show. We’re the only ones going nominate me for anything. So we’re not from that, our foot is in the door, so we don’t need to do that sort of thing. We do Jools Holland if we’re around, but er... we weren’t saying, "Get me the Electric Proms", they came to us and we were like, "You know what, we’re around, we’ll do it." '

It’s good of the BBC to try and present pop in such a classy way
'I think, and I’m not just blowing smoke up their arse, I think it’s an amazing institution the BBC. I think it should be kept at all fucking costs. It’s brilliant television. It’s brilliant radio. It’s great, pop music would die without Radio One in this country. It’d be all adverts and fucking Celine Dion. They can have "Top Of The Pops" – if one of the children must go, let it be "Top Of The Pops". But the BBC is such a fucking important institution, in you think of the things that have been important… even in the last ten years, things that have been culturally important that they’ve done, like "The Office".'

'It kind of annoys me a little bit when you see the BBC try to compete with ITV with these "Pop Idol" formats. It’s like, "You’re better than that man." "X Factor" and all that, it’s a sign of the times innit; again, it only exists because people demand it. If people didn’t watch it, it wouldn’t be on. But the "Strictly Come Dancing" thing we can do without. I don’t need to see swimmers pretending to be ballroom dancers. But the BBC is a great institution, and I think people who don’t travel the world don’t realize how lucky we are to have something like the BBC. There’s not any other country that has a national broadcaster that’s like that.

'But I do think they do the overkill on the festival circuit, you know. "Live from Reading", "Live From T In The Park"… you just think to yourself: Can Edith Bowman and Zane Lowe live in a world where they think Jack Penate and Queens Of The Stone Age are amazing? People cannot live in that world. I’ll be watching it on the telly, them interviewing Jack Penate: "I see you went down amazing last night mate, you did a really amazing set, people were really getting into it, you were really amazing." and then two minutes later saying, "Now we’re gonna go to QOTSA from last night which really was amazing." I’m like, "Fuck off! Press pause on that fucking Sky+ for a moment!" – people don’t live in that world man – you’re either into Jack Penate or you’re into QOTSA, I won’t allow anybody to be into both. Not fucking happening, not on my watch.'

It’s that kind of generalized enthusiasm…
'Everything’s amazing! I’ve said it to Zane Lowe – "Come on man, everything can’t be amazing at Glastonbury!" Off-mic, they’ll tell you what they think. But everything can’t be amazing! You can’t sit there for a whole weekend and see 752 live acts and it all be brilliant. One of ’em must have been shit. That’s why I should be running things like that. I’d be like, "How did it go mate? Alright?" And they’d say, "Yeah, I thought it was pretty good." "Yeah? I heard differently mate. Sound was a bit shit though, wasn’t it?" But they do the overkill on the festivals – which is why these festivals are now in danger of petering out. Because for many, many years, to experience Glastonbury, you had to be there. You don’t need to be there there any more – you can watch it live on the telly, and listen to it live on your radio, in your back garden. You can put the kettle on. Why would you go and sit in a field full of piss and shit when you can watch it on the telly? These things shouldn’t be broadcast live, they should be shown the weekend after as highlights.'

Will you be singing with Burt Bacharach?
'Love to. If I’m around, definitely. And Robin Gibb. I don’t like anything past "Mr Natural". But anything before that, I’m bang up for. I love it all. I’ll fight tooth and nail for the Bee Gees, me. Hometown boys and all that. They were great… and then… they went disco. But they were fucking great in the ’60s man, I fucking love all that stuff. I remember saying to Robin Gibb once, and you can’t say these words to many people, "Your first six albums are fucking brilliant." Apart from him, you can only say that to The Beatles and Neil Young. Not even Bob Dylan. It’s like, "I love your first six albums and the rest is shite." '

You’ve sung with Burt before, haven’t you?
'I sang with Burt Bacharach at the Royal Festival Hall in 1995, I did "This Guy’s In Love With You". I met him by chance in a hotel foyer, and he was coming to England for his first ever, ever gig. And I asked, "Who’s singing the songs", and he said, "Oh I’m gonna get guest singers in." And I said, "Who’s doing ‘This Guy’s In Love With You?’," and he said he didn’t know, so I said, "I’m doing it. C sharp, that’s my key." '

Had he heard of 'Definitely Maybe' before you met?
'Yeah. He was getting on with his life in LA in 1994, and all these people kept saying "Hey, do you know these guys Oasis?" And he kept hearing the name, and somebody gave him the album, and said "Look". And I remember when I first met him he said, "You know, I bought your record, and I put it on, and I found it really easy to listen to." And I thought: Oh wow! He said "easy listening"! He said the words!'

That’s like Johnny Rotten calling it ‘punk rock’
'Absolutely. And when I’d offered my services, funnily enough, I’d been on a two-day bender in LA with Johnny Rotten. So I’d gone from the fucking sublime to the utterly ludicrous. It’s like going out with John Lydon and ending up with Burt Bacharach in 48 hours. Going from saying the Sex Pistols and Oasis, should do a joint world tour, to two days later, still on the same bender, saying to Burt Bacharach that I should sing some of your classic songs. That’s how mad it fucking was.

'Go up to his big huge suite, in the corner is a white grand piano. And it’s just me and Burt Bacharach. I was 27 at the time, just signed off two years ago, still hungover, half a front tooth missing, lunatic fucking drug addict, and the guy who married Police Woman. I was thinking: What am I going to say to him? The last time I saw him I was arseholed and couldn’t stop talking. So he's telling me about the '60s, and I went to get a beer, and by the time I turned round, he was at the piano playing the chords for "This Guy", and he said , "Why don’t you come and sit over here man?" And I sat down beside him and he went, "Just join in man." And we sang it once and he went, "Hey man, that was great I think this is gonna be great." And that was it. I walked out, into the early evening, went down to the Groucho Club, got pissed up for two days and then went and sang with him. I thought: What a life. And then people say to me, fucking hell, sometimes they resent the fact that I embraced it in the '90s and was like, I’d have it all. But that was just another day. "What you been up to today?" "You wouldn’t believe it – me and Burt Bacharach have been jamming." That was just one day of a glorious week. When I read stuff about people who’ve still got a problem with it, I think you miserable joyless fucker. One of my days is better than your entire life condensed. Those were great, great fucking days man.

'It was like with the fame and the wealth, I’m not shy about shit like that, I don’t get emabarrased about making a shitload of money. I’m in an enviable position. I wrote those songs on my own, in hotel rooms and various studios. I wrote it, and I don’t give a fuck, I haven’t got middle-class guilt, I haven’t got Catholic guilt, I got rid of all that. For every pound I made out of Oasis some other cunt made three. But when I go out on a night out, I’m gonna fucking paint the town red, and then redder the night after that. I’m not embarrassed by wealth or fame or stardom. It’s what I was born to do man. We go back to Amy Winehouse, sometimes people think they’re not worthy of it, so they kind of build a shell around themselves which cannot be penetrated. But like I said, nobody made me. I wrote those fucking songs. They might sound similar to other people’s songs, but fucking sue me, ha ha!'

Oasis play Wembley Arena on Oct 16 & 17 and the BBC Electric Proms on Oct 26.