Noel Gallagher teams up with Johnny Marr on new High Flying Birds single, Pretty Boy

Noel Gallagher has teamed up with fellow English guitar legend Johnny Marr on his new single, Pretty Boy.

The first taste of the upcoming fourth album from Gallagher’s High Flying Birds – which is due to arrive next year, almost six years after the band’s last full-length, Who Built the Moon? – Pretty Boy finds former Smiths man Marr serving some of his trademark jangly electric guitar riffing over a bed of quick-strummed acoustic guitar. Watch the track’s music video below.

As Gallagher explains, Pretty Boy was the first track he wrote, demoed and finished for High Flying Birds’ yet-untitled fourth record, “so it’s only right that it’s the first thing people get to hear”.

“Massive shout out to my mainest man Johnny Marr for taking it somewhere special,” he says, adding that the first person to spot his cameo in the track’s music video “wins a packet of Flamin’ Hot Wotsits Giants” (a British snack similar to Cheetos).

In an interview with the Daily Star earlier this year [per Music News], Gallagher described much of the new High Flying Birds album as having an “orchestral” vibe.

“There is a track on the album called Dead to the World, which is one of the best songs I have ever written,” he said. “It gives people goosebumps. It’s quite orchestral and a bit like [1969 film] Midnight Cowboy.” 

Gallagher added: “The whole album has got a vibe. There’s 10 songs and six of them have got strings.”

The former Oasis guitarist also revealed that the album “took [him] a year to write”, adding that those who have heard it so far have given their approval.

“People are coming to the studio and you play them the track and they’re like, ‘Fucking hell! I’m getting goosebumps listening to that’,” he said. “I forget because I’m so into [it] now that it’s just a bunch of songs that I want to finish so I can write some more.”

Johnny Marr and Noel Gallagher have enjoyed a decades-long friendship, with the former loaning the latter guitars in the early days of Oasis in the early ‘90s.

As the story goes, Marr attended one of the band’s early gigs after they had generated some buzz around Manchester, but was not impressed with how long Gallagher had spent tuning his guitar. “You could go get a pint and come back, and he’d still be tuning,” he told Far Out Magazine.

At Marr’s suggestion that he buy himself a new guitar, Gallagher – who was unemployed at the time – retorted: “Alright for you, isn’t it? I’ve got like 12 quid.”

So he offered to loan Gallagher one of his guitars: a sunburst 1960s Gibson Les Paul and formerly owned by The Who’s Pete Townshend. The budding Oasis man accepted, and the guitar quickly became his main six-string, and was used to write Live Forever, from the band’s 1994 debut, Definitely Maybe.

But some time later, while on tour, Noel’s brother Liam became involved in an altercation when an audience member rushed the stage, prompting Noel to take a swing at the invader with the loaned guitar. 

As a consequence, the guitar was badly damaged, but fortunately Gallagher was able to convince Marr to issue him a replacement, this time the black Les Paul he used to write the entirety of the Smiths’ 1986 album The Queen is Dead.

But this guitar was sent to Gallager with a word of warning. “This one’s well heavy,” Marr wrote. “If you take a big swing with this one you’ll take the fucker out!”

In another interview with Stereogum, Marr described Gallagher as “a hell of a lot more than meets the eye”.

“He’s very disciplined,” he said. “He’s one of the most disciplined people I’ve ever worked with, without a shadow of a doubt. Maybe even the most disciplined. Incredibly industrious. 

“Then there’s the other side of his life. He can’t walk 100 meters around the British Isles without people stopping him for selfies, and he’s not insane. [Laughs] I would be, without a doubt. I only have to get stopped five times and I go into a meltdown about culture. He’s a very impressive dude.”

Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds’ new album is yet to receive an official release date, but it’s slated to arrive next year.