Noel Gallagher has spoken about his time on tour with U2 and told some hilarious stories about Bono’s legendary boozing.
The former Oasis star recently supported U2 with his solo outfit Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds.
Gallagher is no stranger to the hell raising lifestyle, but it seemed he has mellowed – if only a bit -since the 1990s and he freely admits that he can’t keep up with Bono.
He told Absolute Radio Presenter Christian O’Connell: “Let’s get to the hangovers on the tour with U2, brutal. 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.
“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.”
After a night like that Gallagher was hoping for a quiet day the next day and a bit of time to recover. However, it wasn’t that easy with Bono watching over him.
Gallagher continued: “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.
“He was going ‘Where you going?’ I was like ‘Well I was gonna go to Paris for this gig’. He said ‘No stay here, come on a private jet’. So we get on the jet, more boozing.”
It was starting to seem like Gallagher would never escape but it turned out that he would get a little respite when they got to Paris – but Bono still had a huge surprise for him.
Gallagher said: “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.
“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’.”
“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’.”
Written by Michael Kehoe @michaelcalling