NOEL, YOU DON'T KNOW HOW BLOODY LUCKY, SON

It's not often you get sense out of Noel Gallagher, but even he's not so stupid as to believe that the elevation of his increasingly ordinary band into a national heavyweight didn't require more than a hearty share of luck:

"There're lots of tiny little things that have to fall into place, and there's kind of too many to mention, but timing is probably the best one. I think if we'd have put our first album out three or four years either side of when it come out we'd be talking about a completely different story here.

"We just kind of rode the crest of a wave really, I would say its fifty-fifty luck and hard graft."

Well, we can see the luck. We're not sure how much "hard graft" is involved in, say, this sort of thing:



But then thinking is quite tricky work, isn't it, Noel? Here, XFM Manchester asked him if he could see himself moving back to the city:

"I should have done it maybe five or six years ago, but my daughter's all grown up now and all that. But I'd definitely like to go back there to write at some point because I think some of the best stuff I ever wrote was back in town. Whether I could live there or not, I don't know anymore. I probably could actually."

That couldn't be clearer, then.

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