“”True perfection has to be imperfect” is a Buddhist saying I read in a book. I like that, because everything that’s beautiful slightly has to have an imperfection to it or else there’s just a blank canvas. Nothing is perfect, the way I see it.”Noel Gallagher (323)

“Its original title was “Wishing Stone”. We played the Cathouse in Glasgow, I met some girl and we went back to my hotel room and she had this stone in her pocket that she insisted I had. You meet these kind of divvy birds all over the place. I thought it was a great title and the song came out of that. It was called Wishing Stone for ages until we were listening to Wonderwall Music by George Harrison and it was like, “Brilliant, I’ve got a Beatles connection”.”Noel Gallagher (324)

“”You found your God in a Paperback/You get your history from the Union Jack” – The Gideon Bible, you see that a lot in American hotels in paperback. American culture and its history comes from England. That song directly out of “I’m Waiting For The Man”; it was on in the dressing room one night really loud. Again I wrote the tune and then waited for the words to come along. The song’s not really about anything, but that line is specifically about American culture and how it’s very prevalent in our society at the moment, everything about it annoys me. But I like Americans, funnily enough, and I like America. I love going there, it’s a brilliant place, but the shit they export around the world is mind-numbingly awful.”Noel Gallagher (325)

“I wrote it in Paris. The words I don’t remember. Liam came up with the word Sally. I was doing it at a soundcheck. I was singing so…didn’t have that word, I was saying something but I don’t know what. He came up and said “Who’s Sally?” and I went, “What do you mean” and he said, “Who’s so Sally can wait?” “the brains I had went to my head” came from a tape recording I had of John Lennon talking about writing his memoirs before he was shot. The opening was a bit like “Imagine”. It sounds like it’s about a girl who’s lost something, she’s leaving home, she’s going off to.”Noel Gallagher (325)

“”We’ll see things they’ll never see” – that’s about when you’ve got a best friend. I had a  mate in Manchester called Rob Rodgers; he worked in a butcher’s. He used to have a scooter and we used to go on rallies. We’d get dressed up in our mod gear and go on scooter rallies. I remember our mate saying, “What do you do when you get there?” “Hang around outside chippies with 10,000 other people, sleep in bus shelters, get pissed, go to a disco and come back again.” He was like, “you fucking pair of idiots.” It was like a thing between me and him; they don’t get it, we get it.”Noel Gallagher (326)

“[Noel wrote the lyrics to Live Forever as a direct response to early-Nineties grunge music, which he thought unnecessarily depressing – Ed]. It seems to me that here was a guy [Cobain – Ed] who had everything, and was miserable about it. And we had fuck all, and I still thought that getting up in the morning was the greatest fucking thing ever.”Noel Gallagher (757)

“The song that changed everything. That and ‘Supersonic’. It’s a sleazy rock’n’roll tune. The sentiment of ‘Live Forever’, see, you can still live by that to this day, man. I remember writing that in Manchester and that had come out of Nirvana’s second album, where he had a song called ‘I Hate Myself And Want To Die’. I was like, “That cunt is sat in his mansion in Seattle, on smack, he’s got everything, he’s got the world at his feet, right, he’s in the biggest and most revered band in the world today, and he fucking hates himself and he fucking wants to die.” I was like: “I’m not fucking ‘aving that! Bollocks! He might have been depressed, but there’s no need bringing everybody else down!” I remember, I was listening to Exile On Main Street, and it was ‘Shine A Light’ which kicked off this song. You know that line: “May the good Lord shine a light on me'”? I was on the guitar, going “Maybe I don’t really wanna know”…It came out of that. It took me a night to write that song. And it’s still the gig favourite. It’s about friendship. Your best friend of that fucking night. The most important line in it is: “We’ll see things they’ll never see”. When you have a friend and the two of you have a sitcom or a favourite album that everyone else thinks is shit, but you two know it’s got something special.”Noel Gallagher (756)

“”Some might say they don’t believe in heaven/Go and tell it to the man who lives in hell” – Social comment there. I’m not religious and I’m not spiritual, I don’t think. I guess maybe it was directed at myself. Poor people tend to be exploited by religion a lot. The poorest people in the world have got God – that’s all they’ve got. The rest of us don’t see God on a daily basis, do we?”Noel Gallagher (323)

“”Slowly walking down the hall/faster than a cannonball” – “Slowly walking down the hall” is either from Chigley or Trumpton. Which is the one with the train? I remember as a kid the phone ringing and the guy walking really slowly down the hall for ages. This is going to sound bizarre, but it’s about that and a train in American mythology called the Wabash Cannonball which is a really fast train.”Noel Gallagher (323)

“[One song from the album, ‘Cast No Shadow’, seemed to be partly about your dissatisfaction with your lyric-writing – Ed]? “Bound with all the weight of all the words he tried to say.” That’s me. I’m not Morrissey, I’m not Bob Dylan, I’m not Brett Anderson. They are better lyricists than I’ll ever be. [‘Cast No Shadow’ could imply that you want to say less in your lyrics – if you let it all out then it might hurt you – Ed]? Exactly right. I don’t ever want to bare my soul. Lyrics to me are an ongoing grey area and I don’t know what it’s about.”Noel Gallagher (758)

“‘Into my big mouth you could fly a plane’: even I’m not interested in what I’ve got to say half the time. But, ‘I ain’t never spoke to God/I ain’t never been to heaven’, that’s about fans who think you’re on the phone to John Lennon and you have all the answers. I understand where it comes from, people meeting their heroes, they talk to you without thinking because they only have a minute. They go bang about something happening in their lives and you go [open-mouthed, blank-faced gawp – Ed].”Noel Gallagher (759)

“It starts, ‘Made a meal and threw it up on Sunday’. When I first moved to London my mam kept on ringing up and asking was I eating properly. Yes, mam. So I tried to cook a Sunday roast and puked up for two days with food poisoning. It was back to Pot Noodle after that.”Noel Gallagher (759)

“[In ‘Stand By Me’ there’s a verse about how enclosed you are: “There is one thing I can never give you/My heart will never be your home” – Ed]. That’s about the private space you have to keep – the place where I go to write my stuff. Meg was fairly upset by that. I said, I wasn’t talking about you. But there are are places where you have to go alone. I put off opening it up. I don’t know how to do it. Or I don’t want to do it.”Noel Gallagher (760)

“You guessed. Meg is the girl in the dirty shirt. We were doing a gig in Brighton (December 29, 1994, probably), just before Meg and me were going out, and she was at the hotel ironing a dirty shirt because she hadn’t brought enough clothes with her. I know it sounds a bit soft. Liam will read this and say, ‘You fucking wanker!’ Because he thinks all the songs are about him. He even thinks ‘Wonderwall’ is about him. So he’ll be telling me it’s a geezer in a dirty shirt really, except I couldn’t say that because it would look bad.”Noel Gallagher (759)