Another lyric on the new single sounds very pointed – on the B-side ‘Angel Child’ you sing “I gave all my money to people and things/And the price I’m still paying for the shit that it brings, doesn’t fill me with hope for the songs that you sing”. Who’s that aimed at?
“I suppose it’s about the way that whenever I put my foot in my mouth I always get a letter off some cunt telling me how much it’s going to cost me. It’s like when we were leading up to Earls Court and there was all the stuff that I’d said about Damon and AIDS. The Terrence Higgins Trust wanted all the profits from those Earls Court gigs. Which profits? Those profits never existed. We never made any money out of those gigs. We said, ‘You can put a stall up inside the place if you want’, but there’s no profits because all the money goes into putting the show on. The song’s about that sort of situation.

“And, I suppose, it’s about like when I said that thing at the Brats about drugs being like a cup of tea. Right, well, I had Leah Betts’ parents on the telephone giving me a hard time. Like, fucking hell, I don’t know your daughter, I don’t know your circumstances. You don’t know me, so why don’t you fuck off and leave me alone? It starts off with this big compassion and guilt thing and then at the end of the line it all boils down to how much money are you going to give us?”

Most of ‘your people’ agreed with you on that one, though.
“The best thing about that whole scenario was I’ve got a cover of the Daily Mirror that says ‘98 per cent back Noel on drugs’. Which is a great headline, one for the grandkids, innit? What I was saying to the geezer was – and they only used a soundbite – ‘Look, you know I do drugs, I know you do drugs, everyone in this fucking room does drugs, there’s probably some doing drugs in here right now. What’s the big deal? For most people it’s like a cup of blah blah blah.’ I suppose I may’ve gone a bit far saying all the Members of Parliament were fucking heroin addicts, but, I mean, the rest of it was just stating a fact. I hate the way that people in this country just brush it under the carpet.

“The funny thing is, I went up to Birmingham after the awards to do this Ronnie Lane EP with Ocean Colour Scene. It was about five in the morning, and I was with Cradock and that, flicking through the pages on Ceefax trying to get the football scores, and this page flashed up that said, ‘Noel accuses Cabinet of drug addiction’! I was walking past to the fridge or summat and I was like, wind that one back! That lot were all stoned out of their minds going [puts on Dylan Rabbit voice], ‘Hey? What, man?’ Next thing the phone rings and it’s Marcus [Russell, Oasis’ manager] saying, ‘I think you better come back to London now!’ Ooooops! I was on the phone to him in the car and he was saying, ‘You can’t go home because you can’t get in the fucking street.’ So I said to the geezer driving, ‘Go past our house because I’ve got to get a picture of that.’

“So I stopped off at a garage and got one of those little disposable cameras and turned the corner and it was like I’d won the election! Big aerials everywhere, man, and TV crews combing my garden! Fucking Range Rovers with satellite dishes on the top, the lot! Meg was in but she didn’t know anything about it. She gets up the next morning and starts farting about in the kitchen, opens them roller blade curtains and it’s ‘Cckkkkkkkkklicckkkkk!’ So she phones me up and says, ‘What the fuck did you say last night?!’ I was like [mumbles], ‘Oh don’t ask’! All she was arsed about was not being able to find her fucking sunglasses, though. ‘I can’t wear my shades to work.’ I was like, ‘Yeah! Proper rock star’s wife!’

“I had to go and stay in a hotel and I was watching London Tonight and Michael Howard was on it talking about me. I’m sitting there chopping one out and Michael Howard is halfway through this speech going, ‘He should be kicked out of the country’. I’m going [acts chopping a line of cocaine out], ‘He can’t say that! [sotto voce] Do you want one of these, mate? That’s bang out of order!’ But he came out with a classic. He said, ‘I hope he goes the same way as Brian Harvey, I hope he gets sacked by the band as well’! I thought, ‘Yeah, imagine that! Imagine Bonehead coming up to me and going [adopts Home Counties Dave Rock voice], “Now listen, man, we’ve had enough of your mouth, man, you’ve just got to go! Me and Guigsy, man, we’ve had it up to here!”’

“The next day, we had a meeting and I was looking at them thinking, ‘Maybe they did see it after all.’ I could just imagine Whitey piping up [perfect apples’n’pears Cockney accent], ‘It’s not the group I joined, mate. Sorry, you’ll have to go, innit’… What was the question?”

Something about ‘Angel Child’.
“Oh, yeah. Sorry. The other song, ‘Stay Young’, I’m not so sure about that one. As soon as we’d finished it, I just kept seeing the word ‘Britpop’ everywhere. It’s a bit too jolly, y’know. Nice sentiments, though: ‘stay young and invincible’…”

Beautiful singing from Liam, too.
“Oh yeah. His singing is top drawer throughout the album. I went on holiday for three weeks in January and I left him there in the studio to do the singing. I got back and they hadn’t done a thing. They’d all been sat there going [conspiratorially], ‘He’s on holiday for three weeks!’ They sat there, getting pissed, didn’t do a stroke for the whole three weeks. I came back expecting the album to be finished and went, ‘Right then, lads, what have you got to play us?’ They were like [pulls hangdog face and adopts ultra-scally voice], ‘We were waiting for you to come back and that, you know.’ But despite being lazy cunts, the singing on the album is fucking brilliant. On ‘Fade In-Out’ the singing is so good it’s quite scary. One take as well, which isn’t like him.”

Owen Morris said that all the press intrusion gave Liam’s singing an edge. Would you agree?
“Yeah, the thing about him is that he’s still not cottoned onto how we make him sing an angry song as well as he does. The more you wind him up, the better his singing is. The more you wind him up, the more you call him a cunt, the more you bring the papers in and say, ‘Look what they’re saying about you, you soft bastard!’, he’ll just go in there and deliver straight away. But he’s got the hardest life to deal with, being the singer and being with Patsy. And to be honest, I would’ve thought he’d have gone under by now. I was saying to my mam a few months ago, ‘It doesn’t look good, he’s only 24 and it’s not very healthy’, but he’s hung in there. He loves moaning about it, but he does fucking love it as well. He’s always going around saying, ‘Why are they picking on me?’ and I’m going, ‘Because you go around punching photographers in the face, man. That photographer’s going to be waiting now until he sees you picking your nose and then he’s going to get you.’ He goes, ‘Why’s that?’ ‘BECAUSE YOU FUCKING PUNCHED HIM IN THE MOUTH!’”

How bad has the press intrusion been for you?
“When you meet people from other bands they’re always shocked by it. Richard from The Verve came around one night and as he got out of the car a few photographers jumped out of a car, looked at him, said, ‘Don’t know him,’ and got back in again. He was like, ‘Does that always happen outside your house?’, and I’m like, ‘Yeah, it happens every day.’ Freaked him out. But it’s been going on for so long that you tend not to notice it now.

“We haven’t changed over the last three or four years. We’ve always been the so-called bad boys of English rock. If doing that [flicks a V-sign] and saying ‘cunt’ in interviews constitutes being bad, it’s pretty sad, really. I’m not bothered about me, though. When I say something ridiculous and somebody takes it the wrong way, I can take them all standing outside my house. It’s when they go knocking on my mam’s door, because she’s, like, 56. She doesn’t know what’s going on. She’ll be like, ‘He said what?!’ They go, ‘He said taking drugs is like having a cup of tea.’ ‘What?! He doesn’t take drugs, does he?’ She’ll be on the phone going, ‘What did you say last night?’ And I’m like, ‘Er, I don’t know. Remind me.’ ‘Well, there’s a load of people here saying you’re going to bomb the American Embassy.’ ‘Oh, must have been taken out of context, Mam’!”

Do you feel part of someone else’s soap opera?
“Yeah. I don’t mind that when we’re on tour or we’ve got a record out, but when we’re sat around doing nothing it’s stupid. We weren’t even in the studio, we were just sat around doing nowt and because of that they just start making it up. As long as we’re kept busy we’re all right. It’s like, this weekend there were people who’d come back from Glastonbury who said that the paparazzi were going, ‘You know where they are!’ And they’re going, ‘No, no, he’s at home. I just spoke to him.’ They wouldn’t believe them. I was down to play with about 15 bands, I think. Even Radio 1 were going, ‘Oasis are scheduled to play.’ I’m, like, ‘I’M NOT FUCKING PLAYING! ALL RIGHT?’ But, we’ve grown up with it now, we’re used to it.”

Does it put a strain on your relationship with your wife, Meg?
“No. If anything it brings you closer together. There was a thing in the Daily Star a few months ago where I was supposed to have been with a stripper in New York. There’s this big fucking fat stripper on the cover of the Star saying she’d been with me. It was about seven in the morning and Goldie was around and we’d been up all night with Meg having a party, and Marcus calls up and says, ‘Have you seen the Daily Star?’ and I say, ‘It’s funny you should say that because it’s just been put through the door.’ I’m on the phone and I go to pick it up and it says, ‘Noel rubbed strawberries and cream all over me’, or something. The funny thing was I was actually doing an interview when I was supposed to have been in New York, so I went to my solicitor and showed that my passport hadn’t even been stamped. So I had ’em bang to fucking rights, the evil bastards.

“But, still, there’s lingering doubts in your missus’ mind. Your missus is always, ‘Were you really doing an interview?’ I’m like, ‘I was only gone two hours, Concorde takes three to get there!’ Then your mates start coming up to you going [pats NME’s knee], ‘Yeah! Good work, my son’. It’s funny, all your mates think you’re dead cool for two weeks and all your missus’ mates think you’re a right cunt for two weeks. They’re going to Meg, ‘You want to fuck him off, the dirty sod!’”

How is married life otherwise?
“I don’t know, it’s the same as being single, really. It just means that she is going to get more flak in the papers, but I told her that in the first place. She’s a drama queen, the missus. ‘Look what they’re saying about me in the papers! Boo-hoo!’ I’m like, ‘Do I look like I give a fuck?… Did they mention me?’ It’s hard for her and Patsy, but that’s the price you pay, you know.

“I can’t get that angry about it, though, because when I was on the dole there was nothing I liked more than seeing a celebrity being put through the fucking mill, you know. We get paid enough money to do what we do and if that’s the price, a little snidey story here and there, then so be it. Usually they only write stories that have a semblance of truth anyway, because when they start writing lies we just sue ’em. And how can you damage my character?! In court you can see me going, ‘It was a slur on my character!’ The judge is like [strokes chin], ‘Are you the same person who accused all MPs of being heroin addicts and swore on children’s television and admitted to taking drugs? Get out of it!’”