“It’s a very sad song about not wanting to lose someone you’re close to. The middle eight I made up on the spot, I never had that lyric until the day we recorded it: ‘Me and you, what’s going on?/All we seem to know is how to show/The feelings that are wrong’. It’s after a row. Quite bleak.”Noel Gallagher (759)

“I suppose it comes across in ‘Sunday Morning Call’ and ‘Where Did It All Go Wrong?’ – they’re the most factually correct on the record, because they’re about certain real people who I know, but who, obviously, remain nameless. People who used to always turn up on my fucking doorstep, but at ungodly hours of the morning – and these are proper, well-off, rich, famous people, quite young. And they’d be running you through their drug and booze hell, and they ultimately think that to sort all this out they just write a cheque made payable to The Priory clinic, and six weeks later everyone’s going to come up smelling of roses. ‘Course, six weeks later they’ll be back in your kitchen going, ‘I can’t handle it any more.’ And you’ll be going, ‘At least you’re not washing car windscreens for a living on fucking Baker Street. Get a grip of yourself, man.’ It’s like, if you don’t want to do it no more, then don’t do it. But for fuck’s sake don’t spend 20 grand trying to kick the habit that you can just kick by looking in the mirror and saying to yourself, ‘Where did all this go wrong, man?’ That’s basically what them songs are about.”Noel Gallagher (761)

“I suppose it comes across in ‘Sunday Morning Call’ and ‘Where Did It All Go Wrong?’ – they’re the most factually correct on the record, because they’re about certain real people who I know, but who, obviously, remain nameless. People who used to always turn up on my fucking doorstep, but at ungodly hours of the morning – and these are proper, well-off, rich, famous people, quite young. And they’d be running you through their drug and booze hell, and they ultimately think that to sort all this out they just write a cheque made payable to The Priory clinic, and six weeks later everyone’s going to come up smelling of roses. ‘Course, six weeks later they’ll be back in your kitchen going, ‘I can’t handle it any more.’ And you’ll be going, ‘At least you’re not washing car windscreens for a living on fucking Baker Street. Get a grip of yourself, man.’ It’s like, if you don’t want to do it no more, then don’t do it. But for fuck’s sake don’t spend 20 grand trying to kick the habit that you can just kick by looking in the mirror and saying to yourself, ‘Where did all this go wrong, man?’ That’s basically what them songs are about.”Noel Gallagher (761)

“It’s just about the inane people you tend to meet when you’re out, who talk to you like they’ve known you for 15 years, whereas they’ve known you for 10 minutes, they’ve just heard a couple of your records on the radio. It’s like, ‘Fuck off!'”Noel Gallagher (761)

“If I ever got like that again [a night where he had to be coaxed off a hotel window ledge in Las Vegas and that produced the song – Ed], if I ever got that bad, where I disappeared for a couple of weeks and nobody could find me…I was a young man then; I was 26 or 27. And it was all exploding, all over the world, in our faces, and we probably didn’t know how to deal with it. All right, I knew how to deal with it, but I didn’t know how to deal with the rest of the band, who didn’t know how to deal with it.”Noel Gallagher (761)

“It was Liam’s birthday as we crossed the International Date Line on the way from Japan to LA to start our first proper American tour, so he had two birthdays. It’s the first night of the tour at the Whisky A Go Go and everyone but me were wasted on crystal meth, someone got hit in the face with a chair, there was a big fight, the press called us a bunch of drug addicts and I got the tour float, my passport and fucked off to San Francisco. Creation sent [former Creation MD – Ed] Tim Abbott to find me, probably the worst person in the fucking world to do that. He says, “We’ve got to cancel loads of gigs, what’s happening?” and I was like, “I can’t be arsed, man, these cunts are just amateurs. And I’ve come over here to do the fucking business, man.” I had six grand. So we went to Vegas and stayed in the Luxor hotel in the Pharaoh suite, the room service guy comes dressed as a Pharaoh, we were eating fucking Pharaoh burgers and having one of those terrible cocaine conversations about water pressure in the desert. Anyway I wrote that song in those three or four days. The line, “Sitting on my own, chewing on a bone” is about chewing your face off on cocaine, a thousand miles from home.”Noel Gallagher (756)

“[The lyrics to the song ‘Married with Children’ were inspired by Noel’s girlfriend at the time, Louise Jones. Fed up of hearing her boyfriend playing the guitar day after day, Jones reportedly told Noel that “your music’s shite, it keeps me up all night,” a line quoted verbatim in the song – Ed]. I looked at them two in the show [the American sitcom ‘Married with Children’ – Ed], and looked at us two, and I thought, that’s us, that is! It’s another song that anybody could relate to, because if you live with a girlfriend or just a flatmate, there are always petty things that you hate about them, and this song’s just about pettiness.”Noel Gallagher (757)

“‘Rock’n’Roll Star’ is the whole manifesto of the band. I’ve never wanted to say anything else in a tune. We’re going to be rock stars, and even if we don’t, even if we’re just playing in the fucking Boardwalk the rest of our lives, we’re going to act like fucking rock stars. When we started it, my ambitions were to have a jet, a monkey, a house with a swimming pool, and a gaff in Ibiza. Did I ever get a monkey? I’ve got Liam. He’s the only monkey I’ll ever need. I wrote ‘Rock’n’Roll Star’ when I was on the dole. I wouldn’t have put my fucking council flat on it, but we knew we were the best thing that was up and coming at that moment. When we got signed, McGee wasn’t saying anything that I didn’t already know myself. We played it at the three or four gigs we played at the Boardwalk before we were signed and there would be about ten people by the end singing “Tonight I’m a rock’n’roll star” and the staff would all be sniggering.”Noel Gallagher (756)

“‘Lyla’ might have been started after I listened to a track by The Who, called ‘Armenia, City In The Sky’. I’d written the song and it was originally called “Smiler”, but Gem had already had a song called ‘Smiler’, so I had to change it and the only girl’s name I could fucking come up with that rhymed with “Smiler” was ‘Lyla’. It’s about a heroine, the line “catch the silver star” I think I might have nicked off the Woodstock video.”Noel Gallagher (756)

“The title is from a book of quotes about the importance of being a lazy bastard. I was lying on the couch at home, two years into making this album, we’d scrapped it twice and Liam was on the phone going, “What the fuck are we going to do?” I was saying, “Look, it’s all gonna be alright, don’t worry about it.” Everybody was trying to throw as many ideas into the mix as possible as how we could make this album. And I was like, it’ll all come right in the end, stop panicking. All the songs were great, and it happened. That song is about that period. It’s also one of my personal favourites, I love singing it, and I’m so fucking made up it went to No. 1 as well.”Noel Gallagher (756)

“‘Slide Away’ is the unsung hero on that album, round about the time, that was everybody’s fucking tune, everybody’s bird. Again it’s about an imaginary individual, it’s teenage love affair stuff that I wrote off the cuff in the studio. Johnny Marr gave me one of his guitars, he took it out of the case, and out came that song. He reckons he’s due royalties! You know, we never get to sing it live, ‘cos Liam won’t sing it. He reckons it drags on a bit. He was 19 when you first heard him sing it, and he’s 35 next year! There’s that line — “Let me be the one that shines with you”— well, Liam reckons he spontaneously came up with that. But I’ve got a demo where I clearly can be heard singing it. It’s just a fucking tune, man.”Noel Gallagher (756)

“‘Half The World Away’ was written at the same time as ‘Talk Tonight’ during those Vegas sessions, so it’s the second country and western song. We were away on tour somewhere, and we got this message from Craig Cash. I’d known him for a while, and he said he was doing this sitcom called The Royle Family and they wanted to use one of our tunes. Craig explained what it was about: it’s a northern family, could be Mancs, could be Scouse, they don’t get on but they all love each other. I was thinking: “Well, ‘Married With Children’ [off Definitely Maybe – Ed] is fucking perfect.” Then when we got back and they said they were going to use ‘Half The World Away’, it didn’t make any fucking sense to me. For me it’s all about desperately trying to leave the situation that you’re in, dreaming of being somewhere else, leaving the house, leaving the city that you’re in. When you put that together with the sort of situation like The Royle Family, it’s kinda quite tragic. They’re all tied to each other in that fucking little room.”Noel Gallagher (756)