Their planned collaboration was going to be the album on which the Oasis songwriter fully embraced prog and psychedelia. But at the 11th hour, he changed his mind, and the album that came out was the Gallagher-by-numbers trad rock of his 2011 High Flying Birds’ debut.
Gallagher recently explained in Q magazine that the AA versions of his tracks, “weren’t good enough… and it would have been my name on the cover.”
Cobain, however, offers his side of the story. “There was quite a bit of annoyance on our part,” he admits. “They [Gallagher’s management] were quite underhand. My mandate was to do the most difficult thing: to make pop music out of Noel’s psych and prog influences. Brian [Dougans] and I gradually applied all this to each track and we were on this glorious path.
“We decided that the songs he was writing were too mid-paced, introspective and guitar-derived for a guy name-dropping krautrock and saying A Monstrous Bubble… was his favourite album of the year, someone who had had two great No 1 singles with The Chemical Brothers and was proclaiming our collaboration the new Dark Side Of The Moon.
“It was all going well until his press conference where he announced the release of the High Flying Birds album. I literally watched that with my mouth open. I turned around and said to Brian, ‘Our album is fucked.’
“Noel has been talking about the album and his rebuttal of it is a disgrace. He just wants to back away from it as quickly as possible. It’s doing me a lot of damage. I spent two years of my life on it, but he hasn’t even fulfilled his respectful obligation to myself and Brian as producers.”
