Noel Gallagher has confessed that he took cocaine every night for four years and it caused ‘brutal panic attacks’ which led him to quit the drug.
The singer-songwriter, 52, said he feared he was going to have a heart attack “a couple of times” at the height of Oasis’s fame, during his “crazy years” between 1995 and 1998.
Speaking to comedian Matt Morgan on his Funny How? podcast, Gallagher, revealed that he had a few health scares during a period that was marked by excessive abuse of the Class A drug. “It was from 1995 till 1998. That was my crazy years,” he said.
“I did have to check into hospital once. I was in Detroit as a matter of fact and imagine having the psychosis and having to have to go to hospital.
‘They don’t understand a word you are saying because of your accent and you are like “I think I am on my way out”
Gallagher has in the past said he had his Damascus moment when he watched a ‘98 World Cup fixture between Germany and Greece with fellow drug users.
He also revealed to the Irish Independent how he had successfully quit smoking.
‘I woke up one morning and said: “That’s it”. I gave up smoking by accident. I just didn’t have another f***ing cigarette. It wasn’t, “Today I am going to attempt to give up smoking”
‘I’d had enough of drugs. I think at the time I was thinking that I’m going to give up drugs for f***ing six months and see what happens.
‘I wasn’t planning on such a major lifestyle change. But after about two weeks I was like I f***ing much prefer this! Much prefer it.’
Asked whether he missed cocaine, Gallagher said: “No, I do not. It is a sh*t drug. It’s not creative, it’s not very sociable.
You end up locked in a bathroom with some f****** idiot who you don’t like, particularly, and… saying that, I mean, I did a f****** load of it.”
The singer however claimed the majority of stories about his life of rock ‘n’ roll excess were “ramped up” by the tabloids “by the power of three.”
“I can tell you now, anything that the press ever wrote about me – so I’m assuming it’s the same as anybody else, whether it would be how much money you’ve got, how much f****** drugs you take, women, all that – they usually times it by three.”
“For instance, at the height of it, there was a front page of the f****** Sun, a story that I had a four grand a week cocaine habit…
“We worked it out, how many grams you’d get for four grand and it’s like… I mean, it was summat like, you’d have to be doing a gram an hour for 24 hours a day, which is impossible.
“They put [it] on a front page of the newspaper, a rock star does a bit of gear, that’s not a story. Rock star does a f****** sh*t load of gear and bites the head off a f****** guinea pig while f****** a, you know, a nun. You know, that’s a story.”
