During an appearance on Jools Holland earlier this month, Noel Gallagher welcomed a new musician into his live band: a scissors player. The unexpected addition immediately drew attention, including from his Oasis brethren Liam, who later poked fun at him by recruiting a potato peeler for his own backing outfit (as you’ll recall, Liam famously gave Noel his “potato” nickname).
Now, in a new interview with the Radio X Evening Show with Gordon Smart, Noel has finally offered some context for the newest band of his High Flying Birds. As the British rocker explained, it began with a call for a tambourine player and eventually turned into a total mocking of Liam. “It’s almost like she’s [the scissors player] snipping away at the last ribbons of Liam’s sanity,” somebody quipped, according to Noel.
Here’s a transcription of Noel’s explanation:
“The Scissors. So, what happened with that is, we were rehearsing to do Jools Holland and we’d just arrived back from South America. We had two days and Charlotte [Marionneau] arrives and she’s doing the French announcement and I’d noticed that it was a good couple of minutes before she came in and I said to her ‘can you play the tambourine or something?’. And she did that thing, the French are quite arrogant and particularly French women [laughing] and she kind of went, ‘I will not play the tambourine’. And I was like, ‘well can you play the shakers?’ ‘I do not play the shakers.’ I was like ‘well, what, can you do something?’ And she said, ‘I play the scissors.’ And I was like … and I went, at that point I took my in ear monitor out and went, ‘did you say scissors?’. And she said, ‘yeah the scissors’.
Now she’s in her own band which is called Le Volume Courbe and she’s the singer and she plays the scissors. So, when she whipped out the scissors and started playing them, my bass player, I looked at him and said, ‘this is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.’ And he went … and he was laughing, and he went ‘tch, tch, tch … do you know what that sound is? That’s the sound of Liam glassing himself’ [laughter] and we were kind of … we laughed and then, after the night it was the TV, somebody quipped, ‘it’s almost like she’s snipping away at the last ribbons of Liam’s sanity.’
So, we laughed all the way home.”
Elsewhere in Noel’s radio show chat, he dedicated a play of The Rutles’ “Cheese and Onions” to Liam. “Okay, well, that was not an outtake from The Way We Were [laughter]. That was in fact ‘Cheese And Onions’ by the Rutles. So, you know, as you weren’t,” referencing Liam’s new solo album, As You Were.
Noel, who recently celebrated the release of Who Built This Moon?, his latest album with High Flying Birds, also relayed a story about how he’d like Matthew McConaughey to play him in a movie after hanging out with him at a wedding.
I imagine we can expect a starchy reply from Liam in 3…2…