What Made Noel Gallagher Stressed Before First Oasis Show

Playing your first show can be stressful enough, but as Noel Gallagher tells it, a last minute realization before he hit the stage with Oasis for the first time led to "most stressful fucking day of my entire life."

In a clip teasing his Gibson TV Icons series interview previewed with Rolling Stone, Gallagher recalls the anxiety when he realized that he had forgotten that he had "never played guitar standing up" during a show. To the average non-player, that might seem like something not all that scary, just a matter of rising to two feet and playing. But Noel says that this was particularly stressful as they were planning to do a song of his, "Columbia," which was an instrumental, and he became very suddenly self-aware.

“We’ve got a gig on Tuesday, and it suddenly dawns on me that I’ve never played guitar standing up. Not only that, I don’t own a fucking strap. This is Sunday night. And I’m skint. Never played guitar standing up,” recalled the guitarist.

He continued, “That seems [like a] preposterous fucking notion now. But I can only tell you that the Monday was probably the most stressful fucking day of my entire life.”

Gallagher says that first he had to "borrow a strap," and then came the anxiety over how he looked.

“I’d say [I spent] a good hour looking in the mirror," recalls the musician. "And I think where you hold your guitar for the first time is crucial..It kind of signifies how much of a cunt you’re going to be, because if it’s too high, you don’t get no fit birds, mate. If it’s too low, she gettin’ a goth, alright? But if you get it right, you know, the ‘Gunslinger’… And I remember looking in the mirror thinking, ‘Doesn’t look right.'"

Luckily for Gallagher, he "nailed it" in his presentation. “I was stressing about it for 24 hours,” he explained. “Thank fucking God it was before phones and cameras, because there would be some pretty fucking awkward footage of it now. But you know, an exhilarating experience all the same.”

Where You Can See Noel Gallagher (Strap and All)

These days, Gallagher is hitting the stage with his solo band Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds. Having toured the States earlier this year in support of the Council Skies album, the group is currently in the midst of shows in the U.K., performing in Somerset tonight (Aug. 24) and Manchester and Dublin this weekend (Aug. 26 and 27). The tour will carry over into Europe next month, then he gets some time off before playing dates in Europe, the U.K. and Asia to wrap up the year. Ticketing info can be found here.