Noel Gallagher has spoken about how David Bowie is “more of an influence on [him] now than he ever was”.
Speaking to Sky News at the premiere of the forthcoming Bowie film Moonage Daydream, the High Flying Birds musician said that the late icon has “one of the most interesting stories in all of music”.
“My relationship’s purely through the music, really,” Gallagher explained. “I didn’t really know him that well. I was first aware of him in the ’80s, doing ‘Let’s Dance’ and all that, and then going back, when I was getting more into music, going back in time.
“I’m a big fan. I was a big fan anyway, but he’s more of an influence on me now than he ever was. He’s one of the all-time greats.”
The former Oasis singer-songwriter went on to say that Bowie had inspired how he approached making the third and most recent NGHFB album, 2017’s ‘Who Built The Moon?’.
“It was the first time I’d ever written in a studio, and he used to do it all the time, and my producer at the time was encouraging me to do that more,” Gallagher explained.
“He was kind of like, ‘listen to interviews by him, saying you’ve got to put yourself out there and be slightly unsure of what you’re doing’. That was a good point for where we were going at the time with our record.”
Earlier this year, Gallagher revealed that he’d impersonated Bowie while working on tracks for his next full-length record. He also mentioned an upcoming song that’d been influenced by the legendary artist, ‘Pretty Boy’.
“I’d sit up late at night doing [Bowie’s] voice, ‘If this song sounds like David Bowie, then I’m going to sing it like David Bowie until I’ve written it’,” he recalled.
Back in 2014, Gallagher accepted Bowie’s statue for Best Male Solo Artist at that year’s BRIT Awards alongside Kate Moss.
Earlier this year, the High Flying Birds artist talked about how his last interaction with Bowie occurred “the very next night”. He said: “I got an email pinged through on my iPad. It just said, ‘Thanks for the shoutout last night. Keep writing, love David’.
“And I was thinking, ‘David? Who’s David? I don’t know anybody called David’. And then it slowly dawned on me, so I emailed back straight away, ‘Oh, no problem mate…’. And then he emailed back straight away, and I was like, ‘Am I in a conversation with David Bowie?’.”
Gallagher added: “Turns out it was in fact David Bowie, and he was like ‘Oh, keep writing’, and I was like, ‘Start gigging’. He was a dude. A bit too tall for my liking, but still, a bit of a dude.”
Last year saw Noel Gallagher share two new singles – ‘We’re On Our Way Now’ and ‘Flying On The Ground’ – as part of a High Flying Birds ‘best of’ compilation, ‘Back The Way We Came: Vol 1 (2011-2021)’.
Moonage Daydream will be released exclusively in IMAX cinemas on September 16. The film will arrive in other UK cinemas on September 23.
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