Did this man really walk offstage to a game of Frustration and an early night? Liam Gallagher in Dublin. Photograph: Cathal McNaughton/PA
On the road with Oasis: an endless bacchanal where the non-stop boozing, drugging and other bad behaviour only halts when Man City are on Sky Sports, right?
Not according to the band's new tour documentary Lord Don't Slow Me Down. Filmed during the world tour of 2005-6, Lord... serves as final proof that even Britpop's hedonistic elite now prefer an early night to dusk-til-dawn sessions discussing aliens with Kasabian.
"The years of kissing the sky and drinking champagne out of cowboy boots at 10 o'clock in the morning are all gone" admits Noel, with a hint of regret. As if to prove it, the Oasis dressing room is at it's most frenzied during - of all things - a fiercely contested bout of 70s board game Frustration.
The sad truth, of course, is that after a while touring in a rock'n'roll band becomes as crushingly monotonous as any other job. Artfully contrived videos might give the impression that backstage areas are a crazed combination of the Hellfire Club and Turner's pad in Performance , but sadly the reality is far more mundane.
Take a peak behind the curtain and you'll often get a lot less than you bargained for. I once rushed backstage to congratulate Radiohead on their first ever performance of the Bends , only to find them in total silence, huddled around a kettle.
Visit any of the latest indie icons after a rapturously received gig, and chances are you'll be faced with a bunch of exhausted musicians sipping warm lager under strip lights whilst, if you're lucky, a roadie knocks up a joint on a discarded copy of Nuts.
Admittedly, a friend's first backstage memory is of seeing a bare-chested singer smash open a bottle of whiskey and then use it as a jagged glass tankard. But then, it was at a Nazareth gig in Glasgow in 1972.
Should such tales of backstage craziness be taken - as Tommy Saxondale would say -with a soupcon of sodium chloride? Or have you seen proof that an AAA pass might get you more than a game of Kerplunk?
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