CityLife

Interview: Tony McCarroll

Tony McCarroll during the early days of Oasis

As Oasis set off on what would prove to be their last world tour two years ago, Noel Gallagher made some  cruel digs at former bandmate Tony McCarroll.

When new Oasis drummer Chris Sharrock played songs from Oasis’s 1994 debut Definitely Maybe, he would have to pretend to be Tony McCarroll: “Sit there and be a **** with a **** haircut”, Noel joked.

For McCarroll, being denigrated yet again by his former friend, 13 years after being given his marching orders from Oasis, was the final straw. It was this remark – not the final sundering of Oasis with Noel’s departure last year – which determined the drummer to write his story.

“I was part of something fantastic, magnificent. And for him to detract from that... no!” says McCarroll. “I’m very contented now, settled in life, and doing this book has lifted a weight off me.

“It’s something I needed to do rather than sit there taking Noel Gallagher’s comments and the myths he creates sometimes, in my opinion.”

One such myth, according to McCarroll, is that Noel, already armed with a bag full of potential hit songs, stepped in and took control of a ‘hopeless band of misfits’.

“Noel thought it was all about him. There were another four members of the band that helped get us there,” says McCarroll.

A turning point, he writes, came when Oasis signed a record deal with Creation and Sony in 1993 which gave Noel the power to fire any member of the band.

“We were five young lads with an opportunity, called down to London to sign a contract,” McCarroll recalls. “You take advantage of the day, and we were all rather drunk. We were smoking weed on the way down, a bit of cocaine here and there.

“I put a lot of faith in Noel thinking he would look after us, that it was us against them. That wasn’t the case. (The contract) left the rest of us as sitting ducks, cardboard cut-outs.”

The book tells how he grew up in Levenshulme and befriended future Oasis bass player Paul McGuigan in his early teens, then Noel and Liam. McCarroll, McGuigan, and Paul ‘Bonehead’ Arthurs started a band called
The Rain, which Liam and then Noel joined, rechristening themselves Oasis.

From the start, Noel had a ‘masterplan’, says McCarroll, which involved a high media profile. Oasis had to be ‘more cocksure than the Roses, more  mental than the Mondays’.

Were the arguments in the band magnified by their rapid rise to fame?

“Yes, and couple that with immaturity and then loads of drugs, alcohol, blah, blah blah,” says McCarroll.

After being told, by a phone call to his mother’s house in April 1995, that he was out of the band, McCarroll eventually received  £550,000 in an out-of-court settlement. Now 39, he divides his time between Manchester and Ireland, working as a drum tutor and a businessman. He has a partner and two children from a previous relationship.

McGuigan and Bonehead both left Oasis in 1999. McCarroll has not seen either Noel or McGuigan since the day he left Oasis. He is still in occasional touch with Bonehead and last saw Liam in 1995, months after he was sacked.

“It was cool, as expected,” he says. “Liam is a complete gentleman, a lovely guy.”

» Tony McCarroll will be signing book Oasis: The Truth (£17.99) at Waterstone’s, Deansgate, Manchester, tomorrow (November 20, 2010) from 12.30pm.