The 1967 song Noel Gallagher called “one of the greatest” in pop history
It doesn’t really take much to get Noel Gallagher discussing the impact that he has had on the music world.
It’s one thing for many artists to become one of the most celebrated icons of their generation, but Noel was one of the few who managed to call his shot and remain one of the greatest songwriters in the world after announcing it to everyone when Oasis hit it big. But aside from him being at the top of the heap in his own mind, he was more than willing to share that accolade with some of his personal heroes.
Then again, does it really take a rocket scientist to tell which artist belongs at the very top of his list? Everyone and their mother has made digs about how Noel has ripped off The Beatles, but if we’re being honest, that kind of argument has been played out. Yes, Noel has shamelessly made references to The Beatles, but if you’re going to be pulling from anywhere, why wouldn’t it be from the band that single-handedly changed how the entire world thought about popular music?
It wasn’t like Noel needed to rely on stealing Beatles riffs, either. Some of his finest moments came from him taking influence from everyone, from The Rolling Stones to The Jam to The Stone Roses to even Led Zeppelin in a few places. Everything he made was in the name of making raw rock and roll, but sometimes the best songs that he ever wrote went much further back than traditional rock and roll riffs.
He was a sucker for a good tune, and aside from those early Beatles records setting his world on fire, he wasn’t afraid to say that Burt Bacharach was one of his all-time heroes. Bacharach’s music is still some of the most beautifully sophisticated pop songs that the world has ever heard, and if Noel could have an affinity for that kind of music, it didn’t take him that long to find the same kind of magic with the Bee Gees.
The Australian pop icons weren’t exactly known for being one of the coolest bands in rock and roll circles, but that’s only if you look at their disco years. Disco didn’t suck nearly as much as everyone made it out to be, and even when looking at those early records, tunes like ‘To Love Somebody’ and ‘I Started A Joke’ were more than enough for Noel to be insanely jealous of what they were doing.
The Bee Gees were clearly in a much different league than he thought, and all it took was a few songs for him to turn his head around, saying, “[Mark Coyle] buys this tape from this all-night truck stop. He put it on, and it fucking knocked me out. And then when I heard ‘To Love Somebody’, I thought, ‘Jimmy Somerville, you cunt, turning it into a fucking reggae song.’ This is one of the greatest–it’s a beautiful, beautiful song. You can’t knock them for being songwriters.”
And even if you were to take some of the songs from their disco years, a lot of the melodies are some of the finest ever produced. ‘Stayin’ Alive’ might be the one that gets a lot of the ire from rock and roll fans, but a ballad like ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ or even tunes like ‘Massachusetts’ are so strong that Lennon and McCartney would have killed to say that they had written them.
The punk rocker that Noel started as would have probably never given a second glance to a band like The Bee Gees, but the fact that they’ve endured gives you a better idea of what makes him tick musically. He didn’t need to be reaching for the same Beatles riffs every time he played, because as long as he was working in the Barry Gibb mould, he could do practically anything.
