Rock legend Noel Gallagher has revealed he quit learning to drive after just one disastrous lesson back in the 1990s.
The Oasis guitarist, 55 - who is now chauffeured around in his fleet of luxury motors – said: “The woman who gave me the lesson… I was driving round a housing estate in Slough [Berkshire] and she said to me, ‘Pull in here’. I pulled over and she got out the car.
“She said, ‘I’ll be back in a minute’ and she came out with her mum. She’d driven me to her house and her mum was taking a picture of me in the street in Slough.”
Things went from bad to worse when a nearby school bell sounded and the pupils started pouring out.
He told Zoe Ball on the Radio 2 breakfast show: “I’m in a red Nissan Micra with a massive great big triangle on the top of it with an L, with all these kids coming out. This is at the height of Oasis mania. I was like, ‘never, never again am I getting in a car’.”
The High Flying Birds frontman has for years used a chauffeur to drive him around - but that hasn’t stopped him from splashing the cash on a fleet of expensive wheels, including a £110,000 vintage Jaguar with a modern chassis, which he previously labelled his “most expensive mistake”.
“I thought when I became a fully-blown rock star, I was gonna need a car,” Noel said in 2019.
“So I got a Mark 2 Jaguar from 1967, the year I was born. But they take about 18 months to two years to build, so I thought I’ll easily have learned to drive in two years.”
After splashing out a six-figure sum for the motor, the dad-of-three promptly forgot about it - until some time later when he was in his kitchen.
“This low-loader pulled up outside the house with this car on the back. I was putting the kettle on, thinking, ‘f***ing lovely car, that. I’m gonna get one of those, one day’. And the guy knocked on the door and said ‘Mr Gallagher? Your car!’ I’d forgotten that I’d bought the car.”
The glossy black convertible trimmed with a vibrant red leather interior sat gathering dust in his garage for over 20 years, and was only taken out once for a spin by Noel and his ex-wife Sara MacDonald.
“We just happened to be near the garage it was in - it was like going to visit an old auntie. Let’s go and have a look at the Jaguar!” he said at the time.
Noel hadn’t learnt his lesson and splashed the cash on more cars, but never got round to driving any of them, he admitted to Zoe.
“I’ve never fancied it - I’ve got a chauffeur, he’s outside, Big Al - he’ll be listening. I should [make him wear a hat] but no, he wears his own clothes and we drive around incognito,” Noel laughed.
