The 1960s guitarist Noel Gallagher could never tolerate: “Awful”
Has there ever been a band in the past 20 years that Noel Gallagher hasn’t given his opinion on?
There are plenty of people who have said their piece about how Oasis are a bunch of hacks and only leech off of what their heroes have done, but there’s a reason why Noel has been able to stand with the best songwriters that have come before him. He had a gift for melody that went far beyond anything anyone else was doing, but he did know that a few of the biggest icons of the 1960s didn’t necessarily need to be there, either.
Granted, you have to take Noel with a grain of salt every now and again when he ends up talking about bands that he hates. He has at least come around on the hatred that he had for bands like Blur in recent years, and he has even admitted when he got it wrong when he started to appreciate The Beach Boys after calling them the most overrated band in the history of music.
He could definitely grow if he wanted to, but he felt that the enemy of rock and roll was every band that seemed to be about musicianship before anything else. Obviously, any guitarist is going to need to know at least a touch of what makes their guitars work to get the sound that they want, but Noel still held firm to the belief that all he needed was a couple of chords and a microphone to get his point across.
But right when his idols like The Beatles were using the studio as an instrument, the British music scene was already starting to shift towards the virtuosos. Well before rock and roll had even come into the cultural zeitgeist, there had been decades upon decades of blues artists singing their hearts out every time they played, and bands like The Yardbirds were practically an extension of that kind of music.
Jimi Hendrix was the shining light that rose above everything, but Eric Clapton was everything that Noel hated about rock and roll music. His tunes weren’t half-bad, and his work with Cream will go down as some of the most aggressive music that the decade had ever produced, but coming from someone who was known for focusing on the songs first, he felt that Clapton was the kind of musician who would try to play something soppy first and then throw a bunch of his licks over top of everything.
Even when talking about how great Hendrix was, Noel couldn’t help but throw Clapton under the bus for sounding terrible, saying, “Eric Clapton’s fucking awful. Jimi Hendrix is just too good. I put Keith [Richards] in the same bracket as Steve Jones. It’s quite limited to what they do, but they just make it work for them.” And that was the same principle that Noel worked with whenever he sang one of his tunes.
Oasis was never going to make some massive freakout jam that lasted for 20 minutes at a time, and even though Clapton had turned a corner since then, Noel was content going in a much different direction once Definitely Maybe came out. Considering Clapton had some choice words about Oasis as a whole, though, it’s not like there was very much love lost between both of them during Britpop’s heyday.
Rock and roll had clearly gone in a much different direction by the time that Noel was making his songs, and even if his music was a love letter to the kind of tunes that he heard as a kid, Clapton was the kind of person who seemed like a bunch of fluff. He didn’t have the time for that kind of playing on his speakers, and if he was going to make a statement, it was going to be with the knockout choruses he wrote instead of some technically complex solo.
