OTHER TECH

The Season 2 boxed set has a lot of extras. Does the behind-the-scenes filming ever get in the way of your work? If I'm supposed to be crying all day or I'm in a bad place in relation to some of the other characters on the show, I tend to go into myself anyway. I don't tend to be too easy to talk to at those times. The DVD guys know those probably aren't the best times to come over and ask me for jokes and stuff. But other times, like the days I'm onstage with the band [Drive Shaft] and it's kind of a peak for my character, I'm more than happy to talk about that. They film it all anyway, so they get a lot of information.

Speaking of music, in the Season 2 episode "The 23rd Psalm" [Episode 10], when you're fishing with Jin [Daniel Dae-Kim], you start singing the Kinks' "He's Evil," which was a great moment. Did you make that song choice, or did the writers? Actually, that came from Damon. He knew that I love the Kinks. They're a classic English band, and you could argue they're one of the first semi-punk style bands, doing early-rock-era music you wouldn't usually associate with punk.

You could even argue that the riff for "You Really Got Me" was the first punk riff. Sure, yeah, in that they're very irreverent in their way and style of playing, and they kind of showed the audience a different way of playing things, even though from the outside they looked like relatively clean-cut boys. The Kinks choice was also made because the brothers [Ray and Dave Davies] were fighting and not getting along too well.

Anyway, I knew the song, and it was a great thing to have played. I just hope that Ray Davies heard it at some point and went, "Oh that's nice that people still know and like my music."

Well, it made me go dig out Preservation Act 2 [the Kinks' 1974 album that contains "He's Evil"]. So there you go. We achieved it times one.

Do you get to make any song choices yourself? Sometimes. I mean, I think it was relatively collaborative to call my brother Liam. We were talking about names, and I was like, "Well, Liam would be good, just for the whole Oasis idea." There's a line in "The Moth" where I say, "It was all about the music." And that's directly ripped from a very hard to find Oasis B-side [single, actually] called "Wibbling Rivalry," where Noel and Liam Gallagher have a huge argument, and it eventually culminates in Noel saying to Liam, "It's just about music. This whole thing with you is about the music. It's not about drugs, it's not about champagne, it's not about f---ing women, it's about music." [Released in 1995, "Wibbling Rivalry" consists of 14 raucous minutes from an April 7, 1994 interview John Harris of NME did with the Gallagher brothers in Glasgow.] And I really wanted to get that across in the show, because I think it's a huge fundamental difference between Liam and Charlie: Liam's all about the idea of rock & roll, and Charlie's more about making a piece of art. And that's a beautiful thing.