Getting High Read online

  ‘Well fucking tell him,’ Liam shouts, pointing at Noel who is now smirking back at him, happy to see Liam riled. ‘Don’t fucking tell me. I’m telling the truth. That dickhead won’t believe me.’

  Noel again shakes his cigarette accusingly at his brother and says, ‘There’s more to this. I know it and I’m going to get to the bottom of it.’

  ‘Look,’ Owen interjects, raising his hands like a boxing referee who wants to stop a fight, ‘can we please just listen to the mix.’

  Before either Noel or Liam can say a word, Owen turns back to the desk, pushes a large button and the sound of a gentle acoustic guitar drifts in, its melody counterpointed by soft notes from a shimmering electric guitar. The guitars are joined by some slow swooping orchestral strings which add another melody before Noel’s voice enters, plaintive but strong. This is ‘The Masterplan’.

  He sings, ‘Take the time to make some sense / Of what you want to say / And cast your words away upon the waves / And sail them home with acquiesce upon a ship of hope today / And as they land upon the shore / Tell them not to fear no more.’

  Now the orchestra gets louder as Noel’s voice changes from its gentle mode into one of hopeful determination.

  ‘Say it loud and sing it proud today,’ he urges before reaching the contagious chorus line, ‘Dance if you want to dance / Please brother take a chance,’ and a horn section is introduced, adding to the majesty of the music as the song reaches its first climax.

  Unexpectedly, a distorted electric guitar, like John Lennon’s on ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ now butts in, rubbing against the strings, taking us up to the bridge. Then as Noel again urges, ‘Say it loud and sing it proud today,’ the song dips into its second chorus, propelled by chugging strings.

  After the second verse, which contains the lines, ‘Because everything that’s been has passed / The answer’s in the looking glass / There’s four and twenty million doors on life’s endless corridor,’ the song goes back into its triumphant chorus before reaching its zenith, Noel’s electric guitar solo put with backing vocals, strings, horns, all of them climbing together before an acoustic guitar enters to take us back to earth, back to ground. It’s a masterpiece. The song ends with Noel’s reverberating guitar sending out silver shivers of notes and chords.

  In the studio there is a momentary silence and then Liam stands up, goes over to Noel and says, ‘That is as good as any Beatles’ song, I’m telling you man, it is. You don’t know how fucking good you are.’

  Noel looks shyly at the floor, drags on his cigarette.

  Liam turns excitedly to Owen and the girl, a huge smile on his lips. Once again the music has healed the Gallagher brothers.

  ‘And it’s a B-side,’ Liam excitedly exclaims. ‘How fucking top is that?’

  PART ONE

  One

  Tomorrow, she starts work. Proper work, that is. Her schooling is over now, finished for good. So is her youth. Now she is an adult with a job and responsibilities.

  The year is 1956 and the place is County Mayo, situated in West Ireland. Her name is Peggy Sweeney and one day she will marry and bear the surname Gallagher. She is just thirteen years old.

  Right now she is not thinking about school. Her thoughts are on the house in Charlestown where tomorrow she will get on her knees and clean and scrub, cook and dust. It is a big house, an imposing house that she will walk to in the cold dawn mist, a house stocked with objects and valuables that she has heard about but never ever seen. She hopes that these rich people, the O’Haras, will be nice.

  To be sure, she can hardly imagine such wealth. Yet one day, incredible and staggering amounts of money will be sitting at her very fingertips, hers to keep if she so chooses. The sons that she is to bear will become world-famous. They will make millions and then they will bring those riches to her. But all she will ask for is a bigger colour TV.

  Today, there is no work. Today Peggy will sit by the small stream that passes by the bottom of her garden and stare at her watery reflection. She is dressed in a grubby cotton dress and her feet are bare. She has sea-shell eyes and dark brown hair. Above her the sky is an azure blue and the sun is a yellow snooker-ball.

  Around her are the fields and the open spaces that she knows so well; she has played here, laughed, cried and fallen upon this land.

  Behind Peggy, stands her mother’s home, a tiny two-up, two-down house that has ten children and one adult under its roof.

  Cows, chickens, hens and pigs surround it. Through their intermittent cacophony, the sound of her mother singing can be heard through the open window. The melody is Irish, the words are Gaelic.

  Her ma has a rich, deep voice, a resonant voice that always brings pleasure. In the village the people say,’ Ah, that Sweeney woman, have you heard her sing? Such a happy woman, such a happy sound.’ When Peggy hears those words about her mother it makes her feel so proud.

  A light wind comes up and passes through Peggy’s hair. She gives a slight shiver and looks down at the water to try to get a glimpse of her future. Occasionally she has sensed what is to happen next. But today, all she can see is work and tiny piles of worn-out pennies.

  From an early age, she has known that life would never be easy. It is the way of the world, the way of her people who say that in life there are two realities: there are your dreams and then there are the facts-you are allowed one but you must obey the other.

  In Peggy’s dreams she would have liked to have stayed on at school. She loved reading and learning about Irish language and culture. But the luck was against her.

  The family turns to Peggy. There are eleven of them now. If Peggy stays at school and lives in her dreams, how will they eat?

  Her brother Paddy had already gone and now he is in Yorkshire. Each day he descends into the earth to wrench out coal, hour after hour after painful hour. When his paypacket arrives, his grimy hands rip open the flimsy envelope and his blistered fingers carefully extract a certain amount. Then he slowly walks to the post office and sends the money to his mother, his brothers and sisters. He does this every week. He is a good man, her brother, a great man. Unlike her father he hasn’t deserted them.

  Now it is Peggy’s turn to help. She doesn’t question this fact or allow herself any regrets. It is the way of the world and she can’t change it.

  You get on with things the best you can. Life is hard but it is simple if, like Peggy and all the villagers, you are not given the chance to make it complex. Plus, her ma calls her the most responsible of her children, and that must stand for something.

  Peggy gazes down at the stream again. She studies the passing clean water for signs but there are none. How could she know that her mother’s voice, so strong and so clear, would actually echo down the years? That it would never die. That it would, in fact, be immortalised.

  Through Peggy that voice will travel to Manchester and there be passed on to her sons. And they, years later, will take that voice all around the world, and people everywhere will be hypnotised and inspired by its sound; their heads filled with colour and hope.

  How could Peggy know such a fantastic thing at age thirteen? On the day before she began proper work?

  Such possibilities hadn’t even been invented.

  So Peggy Sweeney, still mesmerised by the endless water that passes by her feet, gazes down into the river and looks upon the reflection of her face. It is glimmering, shimmering, and although today there is no sign, it really doesn’t matter, because she has never felt happier to be sitting there, a proud and happy child, a tiny real piece of God’s work.

  Hard people, the Irish: hard workers, hard thinkers, hard players. God had made them so because theirs was a land of extremes, a country of hope washed in suffering. Famine, invasion, war and poverty had all, like vengeful banshees, ridden the Irish land, cutting down all before them. Yet still, in the face of such atrocities, the people sang, and still they endured.

  ‘The Irish sing the saddest songs in the universe and then they get on with it
,’ Sex Pistol frontman John Lydon once wrote. Later on, in a more pertinent phrase, he noted, ‘The Irish don’t give a fuck.’ This was also true, and between those two quotes would stand Noel and Liam Gallagher.

  The Irish paused, not for self-pity but to find a way out of their desperate predicaments. They cast their eyes northwards and they saw the promised land that would deliver them. Its name: America.

  Over the years, millions upon millions travelled there, to become policemen, labourers and politicians. Those that climbed the ladder and realised the dream had to be well versed in survival techniques.

  The outside is a cold and useless place to be. Being on the outside, it kills. Literally. Ireland and capitalism, poverty and discrimination, taught them that. They learnt their lessons quickly. By the turn of this century, Tammany Hall, New York’s centre of political power, was run by the Irish.

  Yet America wasn’t within everyone’s grasp. There were other havens nearer to home for those wishing to escape but who had neither the strength nor the financial means to cross the Atlantic. Much nearer to home there lay Great Britain.

  The British, insular and suspicious of everyone but their own, didn’t take too well to the Irish. As early as 1413 the Crown was drawing up deportation laws to remove ‘Irish vagrants’ from their soil.

  In the 16th and 17th centuries English troops were routinely sent over to campaign against the Irish. Many of the soldiers on these missions hailed from Manchester, although later on a more peaceful link between the Mancunians and the Irish would be established. Naturally, money would be the peacebroker.

  Ireland’s ability to provide raw wool and linen, and then livestock, dairy produce and fish to the English, set up a strong economic and cultural link between Ireland and Manchester which persists to this day.

  Yet the image of the Irish person that was forged in the minds of the English, etched there by a media only too willing to act on behalf of the day’s government, was not good, not good at all.

  One potent source of derision was through humour; the major newspapers often carried anti-Irish cartoons. They depicted the Irish as yobs on the scrounge, uncivilised, stupid, incapable of anything but fraud and deceit. ‘Did you hear the one about the Irishman...’ isn’t a new phrase.

  In 1780 the winds of ‘luck’ changed. The Irish were suddenly in demand: to assist their rapidly expanding cotton industry, Manchester turned to Ireland’s skilful hand-loom weavers, promising them significantly higher wages and better living conditions.

  It wasn’t a hard choice to make. In Ireland even the farmers have it tough. In many areas the soil isn’t particularly fertile; in County Mayo, for example, the spartan land is too exposed to the elements, especially rain, and only grass, oats and potatoes will grow. And, like the land they tilled, the Irish culture was also conservative, based as it is around the restrictive teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.

  The first great wave of Irish migration to protestant Great Britain was in 1780. For those early travellers a huge culture-shock was awaiting them. They landed as the Industrial Revolution was starting to take shape.

  It was bad timing on their behalf. New developments in machinery were about to cause the biggest upheaval that English society had ever known, and the Irish would bear the brunt of these turbulent times, pushed into extremes of poverty that would shock the world.

  Manchester was about to become the first-ever modern industrial centre. And that kind of change doesn’t come easy.

  Paddy was the first born. Then came John, and Bridie. On 30 January 1943 Margaret Sweeney gave birth to her second daughter. She was christened Peggy and brought back to Margaret and her husband William’s tiny house in Mayo. Over the next few years, there would be more brothers and sisters, namely Kathleen, Helen, Ann, Una, Pauline, Billy and Den.

  The house the Sweeneys lived in stood on flat bog-land amid a beautiful but harsh landscape. It had been bequeathed to Margaret by John and Mary, her aunt and uncle. Margaret herself came from a family of eleven. As a little child, she had been sent to her aunt’s to live. They had no family, so they :welcomed her arrival.

  When they died, the house was bequeathed to her. Margaret then married William and settled down to do what all women of her area did, which was to bring life into the world, and then nurture it as best she could. William worked as a labourer but sadly he wouldn’t always stand by his wife’s side.

  Margaret would endure her husband abandoning her, not once, but twice. The first time occurred after the birth of Una; the second time after the eleventh child, Den, was born. Like most of Mayo’s inhabitants, the Sweeneys were poor, desperately poor. Life was a tough struggle, further exacerbated by the elements. When harsh winter came and the land refused to yield food, well, that was the worst of it. Not to mention the lack of heating.

  Each day, Peggy and her family would rise early from the beds they had crammed into, bruised somewhat by their unconscious kicking of each other as they slept. With hours of disturbed sleep behind them, and violently shivering against the cold, they would put on yesterday’s clothes and wonder if today, at least, there might be enough food for breakfast. On some mornings, there would be nothing to fill their stomachs for the walk to school.

  Each child had his or her own job to do round the small house, although its cramped size meant there was little to do. Even so, the boys would be allotted the manual work while the girls would wash, sew, clean and cook. One of the first lessons that Peggy learnt was that women tended to the house and the men went out into the world to do the tough work.

  It was a way of life that was enthusiastically backed up by the Catholic Church. God had put women on this earth to give birth and raise children. Catholic children. Good Catholic children. This tenet was so sternly ingrained in them, they never once dared question its wisdom.

  With breakfast finished, they would pull on their coats and, as morning light started to break, walk the one and a half miles to their school. It was named Chorton. In Ireland, at the time, there was no separation between the ages, and no primary or secondary schools.

  Chorton was a National School: you stayed there until your circumstances forced you to leave. Most left early. At school Peggy loved reading. She especially liked girl’s comics with titles such as Secrets. When she was engrossed in these magazines or if she had her nose in a book, it was as if the world and all its hardships magically fell away.

  Reading suited Peggy. She wasn’t a boisterous girl and she never drew attention to herself. She was quiet, withdrawn, a little bit of a dreamer, but with a strong sense of responsibility.

  The lessons that captivated her mind the most were the Gaelic class (although today she would be hard pressed to remember a sentence), and English where she could indulge her love of reading. She wasn’t good at sports but loved knitting and needlework at which she excelled. Again, it was another activity which allowed her to slip free from herself.

  At the end of school, she would walk home again. On a lot of these occasions her stomach would ache with the pain of not eating all day. When she arrived home there would be a meal, usually made of milk and potatoes, awaiting her.

  If Peggy was deprived financially, the same couldn’t be said of her emotionally. The Sweeney children belonged to a tight, loved family, never starved of love. For sure the sisters tended to band together against the boys, and that was only natural. But there was no cruelty, no violence. Their parents gave them love and discipline, fully preparing them for the world by not allowing them any illusions. William and Margaret knew how tough things were, and weren’t about to fool their children.

  When Peggy was seven years old she received her first Communion. From then on the weekend belonged• to her church: confession on Saturdays, Mass on Sundays. This small church, Bushfield was its name, lay to the West of the village and it was here, as well as school that Peggy was indoctrinated into the ways of a religion obsessed with sexual purity and strict moral behaviour.

  In Catholicism priests
do not marry, and boys born illegitimate can never enter the priesthood. To lose your virginity before marriage was a sin and, to this day, the use of contraception is strictly forbidden. Homosexuality was viewed as absolute proof of the Devil’s work.

  The Catholic Church instilled everlasting sexual and moral guilt in all its children, and Peggy was no different. She learnt about good and bad, heaven and hell. She was taught that one of the worst things that could ever happen to her was to be excommunicated from the Church. It would mean eternal damnation.

  When Peggy thought about her God she imagined a vengeful and wrathful God, precisely what the Church wanted. Complete social control. The Church took the young and stole their minds. It taught that all people are born in sin and must spend their lives in penance. It said no one is without evil.

  When Peggy went out into the world and married, she had to bear children and she must never, never, ever divorce; to part from your husband would mean severance from the Church. The Vatican would never sanction divorce, and therefore it was considered a terrible sin for which there could be no forgiveness. Such powerful ideas invade an impressionable young mind. At an early age Peggy vowed she would stick by her eventual husband, good or bad.

  No one missed Mass in Mayo. It was unthinkable. Everyone went. In rain, sleet, snow and cold winds that howled across the bleak landscape in winter, Peggy and her family walked up their bordeen (country lane) and through the fields to church every weekend.

  And still the babies kept arriving, one every year. Eventually there were too many children to house. Peggy, along with Kathleen, Una, Helen, Ann and Bridie were placed in the hands of a convent school in Ballaghaderren where they stayed for the next six and a half years and were further exposed to the scriptures and strictures of Catholicism. Yet Margaret knew that out of all her brood Peggy was the most reliable and the hardest worker. More than that, Peggy had a natural affinity for child rearing. Many times, with her baby sister Pauline in her hands, she would dream of the day when it would be her child that she would be tending to. It was the only dream that she would ever be encouraged to follow.