I partied with Noel Gallagher in the 1990s and met him numerous times over 28 years - here's what he's REALLY like, and how fame changed him

Daily Mail​

06-07-2025

A woman who partied with Noel Gallagher in the 1990s and met him numerous times over 28 years has revealed what he's really like - as Oasis returns for the first time in 16 years.
Lily Moayeri, from California has been a music journalist since 1992, interviewing some of the world's most influential musicians at the start of their careers, including Oasis.
She first met Noel during a night out in 1992, after she was invited to an after party by Manchester rock band Inspiral Carpets, who Noel was a roadie for.
Since then, she has interviewed him many times over the course of his career. They developed a strong rapport, she wasn't afraid to ask the tough questions, and she could both take his banter and dish it right back.
She described him as 'a show off' with a 'witty sense of humour', but she noticed a change in Noel around 1997.
She claimed things were starting to feel 'different' as she noticed that Noel had stopped 'making eye contact with people' and by 2000 he was already talking about leaving the band.
Speaking on the Pictures of Lily Podcast, she said: 'I first met Noel in 1992 when he was a roadie for the Inspiral Carpets, the Inspirals were apart of the Manchester craze which was happening at the start of that decade.
'My interview with their guitarist Graham Lambert was my second ever interview and they were my second favourite band at the time, so I was very excited.
'After the Inspiral's show Graham and the band invited me and my friends to hang out at a nearby bar, it was here that we were first exposed to the entity that is Noel Gallagher.
'Noel was so loud, so talkative and such a show off, he was dominating the whole place, he was very very funny and he had us in stitches the whole time.
'He kept on saying loads of negative stuff about the Inspiral Carpets and he said he was going to have a band "a hundred times better" and he kept on telling us how much they were paying him to be a roadie.'
The next time she met Noel was two years later at the Chemical Brothers Heavenly Sunday social, after the Oasis album Definitely Maybe had been released.
She recalled: 'I hadn't listened to it, and I had made my mind up without hearing it that I was over it.
'I didn't realise at the time but they were playing Oasis's Live Forever and the whole place was singing at the top of their lungs and the whole place was soaking it up.
'I didn't place him but I knew I had met him before, and I was going over to ask him "where do I know you from?" but I decided against it because I was having a really good time and I didn't want to start a conversation with some random dude.'
'Later that year I was watching MTV News and they were doing a segment on Oasis and they mentioned that Noel used to be the Inspiral Carpets roadie and everything fell into place.'
A year later, after the release of What's the Story, Morning Glory, Lily got to meet Noel again, but this time for an interview.
In 1995, they at Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica, Oasis were there to film the music video for Don't look Back in Anger.
She said: 'I reminded Noel that we had met before and we had a super fun time during the interview.
'I was recording on cassette tape, I had another interview that week and I was running out of tape so I stopped the recording and Noel thought it was insane that I would stop just to save tape for someone else - in retrospect I see him point.'
She said during the interview he went to buy cigarettes and she said they were cheaper down the road and he said "I don't care because I'm f***ing rich!"
Noel said: 'I never thought we would get to this stage, I needed the money, well I made good money as a roadie but then I quit that.'
In the interview, he claimed the songs Liam wrote were 's***', but he found it to be a 'a lot of pressure' as the main songwriter of the group.
Noel wrote the vast majority of the band's songs, including many of their most iconic hits up until 2000.
While Liam also wrote some songs for the band, such as Songbird and I'm Outta Time, Noel's songwriting was the foundation of Oasis's success.
During Lily's 1995 interview with Noel he also opened up about his drug taking.
He said: 'If we don't have an album or a single coming out the article is going to be about drug. I've never told a lie, if someone asks me a question, I give them a straight answer.
'It's not big and clever to take drugs, I'd rather be a healthy person but the culture I was brought up on in Manchester was about drugs and gangs, there is no getting away from it.
'I'd love to give up smoking, drinking and drugs but I'm not going to be a hypocritical, up my own a**, righteous f*****, telling people not to do it when I do it myself.
'Every does it anyway, and there is people who deny it and they lie to themselves, but I can't for the life of me see what the f**** it has to do with the music.'
Elsewhere in the interview Noel said 'Oasis won't last forever' he added: 'It will last as it as it lasts, the next album might be the last one, but then we could go for another 10 albums, its as long as I feel comfortable.'
The next time Lily saw Oasis was when they were opening up for U2 at the Oakland Coliseum in Oakland, California in 1997.
She claimed things were starting to feel 'different' as she noticed that Noel had stopped 'making eye contact with people'.
In 2000, when she interviewed him again, Lily revealed it felt rushed and not as relaxed as it did in her earlier interviewers.
Noel told her he had planned to leave the band because he 'had enough' and he 'didn't like the people' he had to work with.
He said: 'I felt like we weren't going anywhere, it was useless. I felt my time would be better served as a solo artist so I gave up drug, rediscovered the writing bug, it was brilliant.'
Nine years after that interview, Oasis officially announced their split days after their V Festival show on August 28, 2009.
In her podcast, Lily said: 'The thing that I found with Noel is, he doesn't have deep seated loyalties, he has people who are loyal to him but he could drop his end of it without any explanation or reason instantly.
'There is always that fear surrounding him, I wasn't surprised when they other members of Oasis didn't follow him when the band broke up.'
In another interview years later, Lily asked Noel if he wanted to have the same impact as Oasis had as a solo artist.
He said: 'I didn't realise what had happened until it was all over, to be honest it' never going to happen again, it's never going to happen for me, it might not ever happen again in rock and roll.
'The music keeps on regenerating, it couldn't happen to me now what happened to Oasis then. I wouldn't be able to deal with that. Well, I would be able to deal with it but I wouldn't be able to enjoy it.'
Lisa revealed that Noel has a 'witty sense of humour' and said you can always count on him for a laugh.
However she did find it 'a little weird' that he used to always bring up money, how much things cost, how much he was getting paid, how much people should be paying him for things.