“Just because you like The Cure, doesn’t mean you have to fucking wear lipstick!” Noel Gallagher spoke to NME about his love of The Cure and how Robert Smith came to remix his new hit “Pretty Boy.” Gallagher posted Smith’s “spacey remix” of the Johnny Marr-featuring track from his lauded new album with The High Flying Birds, ‘Council Skies,’ back in March. The former Oasis guitarist and songwriter has now detailed how they came to work in a new interview with NME’s In Conversation series.
“Because the song [‘Pretty Boy’] sounds like The Cure, I was like, ‘Does Robert Smith do remixes?'” Gallagher explained. I got hold of his email, the first sentence was, ‘Hi Robert, it’s Noel Gallagher’. I expected him to say, ‘Fuck that c**t,’ at that point. He responded with ‘Send me the track’. I did, and fuck me if I didn’t think it sounded like The Cure when it departed, it sure did when it came back! “It wasn’t until I played it in front of a few people that someone remarked, ‘That’s one of Oasis, one of The Smiths, and one of The Cure on the same fucking track,’ and I was like, ‘That’s far out!’ What a crazy notion!’ I’d never met him, but I’d been a fan of his music since ‘Boys Don’t Cry.'”
Gallagher and Smith finally met not long after receiving the remix, with the former confessing his love for The Cure. “When I eventually met him, I told him I remember buying their singles album ‘Standing On The Beach, Staring At The Sea’ at HMV in Manchester,” Gallagher explained to NME. “When I told them, they said, ‘You like The Cure?'” ‘Yeah, just because you enjoy The Cure doesn’t mean you have to fucking wear lipstick!’ I said. Do you understand what I mean? But I later met him, and he’s a pretty humorous man. He’s also rather amusing over email.” “He sends all his emails in shouty capitals, and when I got the first one, I was like, ‘Oh wow,'” Gallagher added. I wasn’t wearing my spectacles at the time – sorry to break your hearts, but I do wear glasses – and I mistook him for asking me to fuck off. I could simply see shouty capitals and thought, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize he was so adamantly opposed to the notion.'”
This comes after Paul Weller referred to Smith as a “fucking fat c**t” last year after a journalist told him that one of Gallagher’s new songs sounded like The Cure. “I can’t fucking stand them,” Weller said about the band. “Fucking fat c**t, with his lipstick and bollocks.” He’s my age, too, isn’t he?” Gallagher was recently pictured backstage with The Cure on their current US tour, watching the band from the side of the stage. Fans are expecting that the long-awaited ‘Songs Of A Lost World’ – the band’s first new album since 2008’s ‘4:13 Dream’ – will be announced shortly.
Smith has long teased the album, informing us that two new records would be released at the NME Awards 2020, and confirmed to NME last year that one of them would be “real very soon” and dubbed “Songs Of A Lost World.” Discussing the topics and character of the long-awaited album, Smith remarked that it “doesn’t have very much light on it” and that it sounds “more like ‘Disintegration’ than ‘Head On The Door'”. Gallagher also discussed the development of his new album, the mistakes on every record he has ever created, both with Oasis and as a solo artist, the AI-generated Oasis album, Britpop reunions, Brexit Britain, and his thoughts on modern rock and The 1975 in a new interview with NME. Gallagher’s ‘Council Skies’ is currently tied with Foo Fighters’ ‘But Here We Are’ for this week’s UK Number One Album. He is now on tour with Garbage and Metric in the United States before returning for a run of UK and European concerts, as well as a headline tour, in the winter. For tickets and additional information, go here.