"Stop the Clocks" is a song by English rock band Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds. Written by guitarist and vocalist Noel Gallagher in 2001, the song was originally recorded for the Oasis album Don't Believe the Truth in 2004, but was removed from the final track listing. When the band released a compilation of the same name, it was rumoured that the song would appear as a bonus track on the album, but as of 2009 (and the disbandment of Oasis) the song remained unreleased. A studio performance of the song, believed to be dating from the Don't Believe the Truth recording sessions, as well as a live version performed in May 2003, were leaked onto the internet on 6 May 2008 by an Oasis fansite. On 6 July 2011, it was announced that "Stop the Clocks" would finally be released on Noel Gallagher's debut solo album, Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds. The song is similar to a song by The La's, "Looking Glass", which both Gallaghers have praised numerous times. History Background and composition (2001–2002) In a November 2006 interview for an Italian broadcast, Noel said that he wrote the song in 2001 while in Thailand. It was written whilst Liam Gallagher was recording vocals for "Stop Crying Your Heart Out", during recording sessions for Heathen Chemistry, sometime in 2001, and was first mentioned in interviews by Noel in the Autumn of 2002. Noel told Tokyo's J-Wave radio station that it's about, "A dream I had one night. It's wondering about if you were dead, how would you know you were actually dead, how would you know you were actually alive. When you go to bed and you dream dreams... if you never woke up, how would you know? Maybe we're all just dreaming now." In March 2003, he told Austrian TV show 'Arena' that, "it doesn't sound like anything we've done before or anything I've ever written... in its lyrical content it's quite near to The Masterplan". More details about the song were revealed by Gallagher at the Glastonbury Festival in June 2004, with Noel telling a backstage programme on BBC Three that the track was seven minutes long and would probably never be performed live because it was, "just me and an acoustic guitar and lots of backwards stuff and it's something to be listened to when one is very high". It's not known whether Noel was