Noel Gallagher is grateful he didn’t succumb to the pitfalls of fame like Amy Winehouse during his time in Oasis.
The 55-year-old rock legend and his bandmates – including estranged younger brother Liam Gallagher – were infamous for their partying in the ’90s, with Noel once famously declaring that “drugs, it’s like getting up and having a cup of tea in the morning”.
However, the ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ songwriter had good friends and people around him to stop him going completely off the rails, unlike ‘Back to Black’ singer Amy, who tragically died in 2011 aged 27 from alcohol poisoning.
Speaking on the Pub Talk podcast, he said: “Fame can hit people really hard. I always use the story of Amy Winehouse, a lovely girl from North London.
“All of a sudden she makes that album, she becomes a world superstar, fame hit her like a truck and she didn’t make it.
“Sadly she didn’t have the people around her. I’ve been surrounded by the same people for 30 years, who look after me.
“I don’t have a transient organisation where it’s just a raft of different people every six months.
“With Amy, Pete Doherty, people like that, if you’re a grown man and you’re successful no one is going to tell you what to do if you’ve got money.”
Noel could always stop himself from going too far with his hedonistic lifestyle, because he was the songwriter in Oasis throughout the 1990s so he had to get back to work otherwise the band would have had no albums to release.
He added: “My fallback was always my work. In Oasis I was the sole songwriter so I always had my work. If I didn’t do the work then the band was going to fall apart. The partying side of it and the drugs and all that, I treated that as a bonus. I didn’t get caught up in anything other than it was just a laugh.”