For the week that’s in it, we asked our Toronto Bureau Chief – and long-time Oasis anorak – Eoin O’Callaghan, to file a guest post about the Irish influence on Noel Gallagher’s work.
Margaret ‘Peggy’ Sweeney was an emotional wreck when she arrived in Manchester from Charlestown, Co. Mayo, in 1962. Like so many before and since, there were the relentless pangs of regret and guilt, mixed with the isolation and loneliness.
But there was a steely community in the city, the overflow of the mass migration throughout the 1950s, when over 80% of Irish emigrants moved their lives to the UK rather than the United States. Among them Peter and Betty Morrissey, who swapped Crumlin for Hulme in South Manchester. John and Frances Maher moved from Athy and initially settled about a 30-minute walk away from the Morrisseys, in Ardwick Green. Their respective kids, Steven and John, went on to form The Smiths, along with bassist Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce and of the eight parents, seven were Irish: Rourke the only non-thoroughbred.
There was also Anne Farrell, from the outskirts of Athy, who eventually landed in Crumpsall, close to Heaton Park in Greater Manchester, with her husband Colin Mounfield. Their son, Gary, would go on to become an integral part of The Stone Roses and later Primal Scream.
Peggy waited tables at Manchester’s Central Railway Station, later to become the GMEX, and not long after meeting Tommy Gallagher, a native of Duleek in Meath, at the Astoria Club, a traditional haunt of the relentless Irish swathe. They married before finding a house in Longsight in South-East Manchester. Immersed in the vibrant and spirited Irish diaspora, Tommy supplemented his income from various construction sites by moonlighting as a country music DJ, making a name for himself at a litany of local Irish social clubs.
By that stage, there were two boys: Paul, born in 1966 and Noel, who arrived a year later.
Speaking with Dermot O’Leary on BBC 2’s Reel Stories back in 2019, Noel recalled how he and his brother would accompany their parents to various Irish watering holes on Sunday afternoons. Supplied with a steady supply of crisps and Coca-Cola, the siblings would sit and watch the regular stage act run through the usual showband fare.
“That’s where my first experience of live music would have come from,” Gallagher said.
“Four or five Irish guys playing ‘Catch me if you can/My name is Dan/Sure, I’m your man.”
The point here is not to overstate the influence of such a moment, nor to suggest that Brendan Shine – an Irish cabaret turn from Athlone – is high on the list of Noel Gallagher’s musical heroes. Rather, there is an undeniably stark Irishness to Gallagher’s early Oasis offerings and that these early childhood experiences – listening to a collection of songs that delved deeply into the Irish soul and usually lamented a self-imposed isolation and carried a deep-rooted frustration at how life played out for the protagonist – did find a curious listener in Gallagher. Another Brendan Shine hit, ‘Where The Three Counties Meet’ [‘Oh sad was the day when I went far away to work amongst timber and concrete’] was almost certainly played at those Irish clubs in Manchester, as was Joe Cuddy’s ‘I’m Gonna Make It’ too [‘All I need is time to breathe, pack my things, make a quick getaway’].
In a long-held identifier of the Irish psyche, aspiration and/or desperation to move on are forever bound by circumstance to stay put. Think of that generation-spanning poetry or prose learned in many Irish schools. Mise Raifteirí an File begins with the main character thankful for his status as a wandering bard but ends with the painful realization that he’s “ag seinm ceoil do phocai folamh” [‘playing music to empty pockets’]. ‘An Spailpín Fánach’ follows a similar pattern, where a jobbing labourer comes to the conclusion that the dream is over, that there will be no change to his poverty, poor health or place in society.
Noel Gallagher grew up in the heavy glare of a dominant Irish cultural doctrination with extracurricular activity including Gaelic football with the Oisíns club in Didsbury as a teenager [leading to a commonly-shared tale of him playing at Croke Park] and socializing almost entirely with Manchester Irish, following the well-worn path of previous generations. Back at home, he faced regular physical and verbal abuse from his father – as did Peggy, who also had to deal with her husband’s many infidelities.
For Noel, that atmosphere – constantly volcanic – led to a prolonged stammer that needed years of therapy. And then, maybe as a way of trying to appease his father, he began to play Tommy’s guitar that hung on display in the house. Peggy eventually bought Noel his own instrument from a Kay’s catalogue and he began creating a protective teenage bubble for himself. Sitting on his bedroom floor, finally finding a place to put the things he felt: vulnerability, separation, rebellion and a longing for something else somewhere else.
Alan McGee, the co-founder of Creation Records and the man who signed Oasis in 1993 – by then featuring Noel on lead guitar, Paul ‘Bonehead’ Arthurs on rhythm, Paul McGuigan on bass, Tony McCarroll on drums and Noel’s younger brother, Liam, on vocals, tells a story of how Gallagher would inform him whenever he had written a brand-new song during the ‘Definitely Maybe’ and ‘[What’s The Story?]) Morning Glory’ years. McGee later felt duped, believing Gallagher had amassed such a considerable personal archive in the previous years that he’d merely dust off the appropriate demo and bring it to studio, presenting it as something he’d just created. And it’s a solid hunch.
“I think he lied,” McGee said.
“I think he already had the first two albums when he met me.”
There’s a steady stream of songs, the majority with Noel on vocals and constantly [quite remarkably given the quality] hidden away as B-sides, that are anchored in melancholy. On ‘Take Me Away’, the flip side of the debut Oasis single, ‘Supersonic’, he sings of his isolation and the search for a temporary reprise.
Take me away, just for a day because I’m sat here on my own.
And then there’s Gallagher’s constant frustration at how his future – like that of his entire family – was hopeless and already pre-determined. After Peggy masterminded a midnight run from Tommy to a council house at Cranwell Drive in Burnage in 1984, the family of four [another boy, Liam, had arrived in 1972] finally fled the fear. By that stage, Peggy worked at the local McVities factory and also as a dinner lady at the local school. Money was tight. Gallagher remembers collecting his dole alongside his own father, while his friends and their Dads stood beside them in the queue.
On Supersonic’s other b-side, ‘I Will Believe’, Gallagher leans into that realization of hopelessness, that there was actually no way out of Burnage.
“I’m locked up in chains for the rest of my life. There’s no else to blame but me.”
It’s a similar theme on ‘Rockin’ Chair’, incredulously slipped in as a B-side to ‘Roll With It’.
“This town holds no more for me. All my life, I try to find another way.”
In BBC One’s Oasis: Right Here, Right Now documentary that aired as a teaser to the release of the Be Here Now album in 1997, Noel told a magnificent story of when Liam went to see his career guidance teacher and was asked what he wanted to do when he finished school.
“He told him he wanted to be in a band and be a pop star. And the teacher kicked him out. He said, ‘Well, you can’t be that.’ Thou shalt work at Ford or the McVities factory.”
“Day by day there’s a man in a suit who’s gonna make you pay,” Gallagher writes on ‘Listen Up’, another B-side, this time on the reverse of ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’.
“For the thoughts that you think and the words they won’t let you say.”
Perhaps the strongest example of Noel Gallagher’s accepted glumness, and maybe most relevant to the current reunion tour, where its included in the set list, is ‘Half The World Away’.
Stuck on the B-side to the ‘Whatever’ single from December 1994, Gallagher nicked the melody from Burt Bacharach’s ‘This Guy’s In Love With You’. And although not quite as hysterical as Hal David’s desperate, pleading lyrics [‘Say you’re in love with this guy/ If not I’ll just die’], it’s another attack on the monotony of life, the lack of a way out and those around Gallagher who shoot down his optimism [‘So what do you say? You can’t give me the dreams that are mine anyway’].
Though Gallagher offered them another original, ‘Married With Children’, when they first pitched him the idea, Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash used ‘Half The World Away’ as the theme music for their BBC comedy show, The Royle Family, where each episode revolved around the mundane conversations and dull family dynamics of a completely unremarkable Mancunian household.
Throughout the years, the Irish influence on Noel’s songwriting has been regularly examined. But given the prominence of booze, drugs, violence and Spinal Tap-esque levels of changing drummers in the band’s story, it’s easy to merely discuss the boisterous energy, swagger and ultimately combustible quality of the Oasis DNA.
But the real Irish influence lies in those early Gallagher compositions, those that revolve around a frustration with the hand you’ve been dealt and an earnest, compelling yearning for something better. The Oasis story in a nutshell.
FÓGRA:
Eoin’s first book, Keane:Origins, is available worldwide now.
Eoin’s sports documentary Celtic Soul is available across the United States on iTunes, Amazon, GooglePlay and more.
Eoin’s personal website can be viewed here:
https://eoinocallaghan.squarespace.com
Follow Eoin on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/EoinOCallaghan
The Blackpool Sentinel 
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