Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds are an English rock band created in 2010 as the solo alias of former Oasis songwriter, lead guitarist, and backing vocalist Noel Gallagher. Former Oasis members Gem Archer (guitar), Mike Rowe (keyboard), Chris Sharrock (drums), and Russell Pritchard (ex-Zutons) make up the touring band (bass). Moreover, the band has included a range of guests on recordings, including Johnny Marr, Paul Weller, the Crouch End Festival Chorus, and Amorphous Androgynous.
On The Jonathan Ross Show, Noel Gallagher said that the band’s name was inspired by two songs: the prefix “Noel Gallagher’s” came to him while listening to Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, and the latter part of the name was taken from the song “High Flying Bird,” which was most famously performed by Jefferson Airplane.
In two days of sales, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds sold 55,000 copies, more than twice as many as its closest competitor, Letters by The X Factor winner Matt Cardle. With 122,530 copies sold in its first week, the album debuted at the top of the UK Albums Chart on October 23, 2011. Beady Eye’s Different Gear, Still Speeding, the debut album by Noel Gallagher’s band, sold 66,817 copies when it debuted at number three on the chart in March 2011, and as of January 2012, it had sold 166,609 copies in the UK. For shipments of 300,000 units in the UK, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds received a platinum certification from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) on November 11, 2011. In the UK, the album had the fourteenth-best sales that year. It also sold the second-most copies of any rock album in the UK in 2011 (after Coldplay’s Mylo Xyloto). In the UK, the album has sold 739,000 copies as of January 2, 2013. The album has 2.5 million copies sold globally as of February 2015.
