Noel Gallagher’s scissor player pulls out of tour

4 June 2019, 06:00 | Updated: 4 June 2019, 09:52

Charlotte Marionneau will not be appearing with the High Flying Birds this summer.

Noel Gallagher's scissor player has pulled out of his world tour.

The former Oasis legend had enlisted the help of backing singer Charlotte Marionneau - who performed with the unusual instrument during his performance of She Taught Me How To Fly - for his forthcoming tour this summer but, "due to personal reasons", she's been forced to step down for the time being. Noel's summer dates kick off on Friday 7 June with his homecoming show at Manchester's Heaton Park.

Noel said on Twitter: "It is with great sadness that NGHFB has to announce that Charlotte Marionneau will be leaving its 2019 world tour for personal reasons. We look forward to welcoming her back as soon as possible... ticket refunds will be available from the point of purchase.”

Back in 2017, Noel told Radio X’s Gordon Smart how the unusual percussion on the song came about.

Noel was rehearsing a TV show with Marionneau, who performs a spoken word passage in the middle of the track It's A Beautiful World and was with the band as they performed She Taught Me How To Fly: "I said to her, 'Can you play the tambourine or something so you're not just standing around?'"

"And she did that thing - the French are quite arrogant, French women in particular - she kind of said, 'I will not play no tambourine'. [ I said] 'Well, can you play the shakers?'

"'I will not play the shakers either'. She says, 'I play the scissors.'"

"At that point, I took my in ear monitors out and said, 'What did you say, did you say scissors?' They’re herb scissors, they’ve got four blades, so they’re not just the kind of scissors you get out of the drawer.

"She plays the scissors in her own band, Le Volume Courbe, and when she plays them they sound like a backwards hi-hat. Shk! Shk! The next day, she brought them in."

Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds - Black Star Dancing (Official Video)

"I leant in to my bass player [Russell Pritchard] and said, 'If this is not the greatest thing I’ve ever seen, then I don’t know what is. There’s a French woman, in a cape, playing the scissors'.

"He said: 'Do you know what that sound is? That’s the sound of Liam glassing himself’.”

"Then on the night it was on the TV, somebody quipped: It’s almost like she’s snipping away at the last ribbons of Liam’s sanity!

"We laughed all the way home. I adore that girl, she’s amazing. She means it, this is not a joke."

Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds drop their new EP, Black Star Dancing, on 14 June and it's the first of a trilogy of releases for 2019.