Noel Gallagher has spoken out about the recent experience of touring with U2 – revealing the true extent of their drunken antics and painful hangovers.
Today saw Gallagher announce his return with his upcoming new High Flying Birds Album ‘Who Built The Moon?’, along with details of a huge UK and Ireland arena tour. The last time he toured was with U2 to mark the anniversary of ‘The Joshua Tree’ (much to the annoyance of his brother Liam). However, as Gallagher told Christian O’Connell on the Absolute Radio Breakfast Show this morning, their aftershow behaviour was far from ‘beige’.
“Let’s get to the hangovers on the tour with U2, brutal,” said Gallagher. “A lot of people know it, but those guys, particularly Bono. We do the gig in Dublin and we go the after show. I’m staying at his house and we leave at half five in the morning.
The next thing I remember is my phone going and I’m in this place I don’t know. It’s him on the phone, and he says ‘Oh you’re alive, where are you?’ and I was like ‘Well I’m supposed to be in your house, but I don’t recognise, where am I?’ I was in a guest house at the bottom of his garden right.”
Gallagher continued: “So he says ‘Oh you’re alive anyway, come on, everybody’s here waiting for you’ and I was kind of going ‘What for?’ He said ‘For the lunch I’m throwing in your honour, there’s 75 guests have arrived’. I said ‘I’ve only just got out of bed’. He said ‘Look the President of Ireland’s just arrived and you’re sitting next to him, so hurry up’. So I had to get showered, get up there ‘whey, ey’ and all that. The lunch started at three. Do you know what time it finished? Ten past four in the morning.”
Describing the experience as ‘unbelievable’, Gallagher then found himself attempting to escape the company of U2 and further intoxication.
“So the next day I wake up again in this guest house, and we’re flying to Paris for a gig the next night, and I was to my tour manager going ‘Neil, you’ve got to get me out of this place. I can’t do it anymore’. He’s going ‘right look, get your bags, I’ll pick you up at quarter to twelve’. I’m like ‘great’. As I’m kind of walking… I’ve got to say I was gonna do a runner, I mean I was in a mess.”
However, in his attempt to flee, Gallagher was caught in the act with the U2 frontman himself, “in his dressing gown, with two beers under this arm, eating scrambled eggs, listening to opera”.
“He was going ‘Where you going?’ I was like ‘Well I was gonna go to Paris for this gig’,” Gallagher continued. ” He said ‘No stay here, come on a private jet’. So we get on the jet, more boozing. This is the part of the story that kills me. More boozing, we land in Paris. He says ‘Look, when the jet lands I’ve got to go off and do this thing, so I’ll see you at the hotel’. I’m like ‘Great’, thinking once he’s out of sight I’m going straight to rehab, this is too much for me.
“So he goes off, I get to the hotel, it takes me 20 minutes to find the remote control for the telly, another 10 minutes to order a club sandwich, with some guy who’s clearly neither French nor English on the other end of the phone. And as I was kind of sitting down I put on the telly and I’m flicking through, and there’s Bono doing a live press conference with the Prime Minister of France about Africa. And I know what we’ve been up to the previous three days and I’m going ‘He’s not real man’.”
Gallagher added: “And the next night we do the gig in Paris. I’m sweating pure lager, and he gets up and sings like a 24 year old. And I’m like ‘I’ve had enough’.
Source: NME