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25th Sep 2017

Noel Gallagher tells a great story about going on a serious session with Bono

Bono out-drank him so hard that Noel actually tried to escape...

Rory Cashin

Bono out-drank him so much that Noel actually tried to escape…

We imagine a certain kind of tolerance must be built up over the years, between being Irish and a rock-star, so the fact that the 57-year-old Bono enjoys a tipple well into the early hours doesn’t surprise us.

What does surprise us is that he drank Noel Gallagher so far under the table that Noel ended up trying to make a break for it out the other side.

Noel supported U2 for a number of dates during the band’s The Joshua Tree tour, and during his recent interview with Absolute Radio, he talked about what took place after the Dublin gig.

It kicks off with Noel waking up after a night out with Bono, not realising he’s actually been sleeping in Bono’s guest house, when he gets a phone call from U2’s front-man…

“So he says, ‘Oh you’re alive anyway, come on, everybody’s here waiting for you,’ and I was kind of going, ‘What for?’ He said, ‘For the lunch I’m throwing in your honor, there’s 75 guests have arrived.’ I said, ‘I’ve only just got out of bed,’ He said, ‘Look, the President of Ireland’s just arrived and you’re sitting next to him, so hurry up.’ So I had to get showered, get up there, ‘whey, ey’ and all that. The lunch started at three. Do you know what time it finished? Ten past four in the morning.”

“He was going, ‘Where you going?’ I was like, ‘Well, I was gonna go to Paris for this gig.’ He said, ‘No, stay here, come on a private jet.’ So we get on the jet, more boozing. This is the part of the story that kills me. More boozing, we land in Paris. He says, ‘Look, when the jet lands, I’ve got to go off and do this thing, so I’ll see you at the hotel.’ I’m like ‘Great,’ thinking once he’s out of sight I’m going straight to rehab; this is too much for me.

So he goes off, I get to the hotel, it takes me 20 minutes to find the remote control for the telly, another 10 minutes to order a club sandwich, with some guy who’s clearly neither French nor English on the other end of the phone. And as I was kind of sitting down I put on the telly and I’m flicking through, and there’s Bono doing a live press conference with the Prime Minister of France about Africa. And I know what we’ve been up to the previous three days and I’m going, ‘He’s not real man.’

And the next night we do the gig in Paris. I’m sweating pure lager, and he gets up and sings like a 24-year-old. And I’m like, ‘I’ve had enough.’”

Noel needs a few more cigarettes and alcohol.