Noel Gallagher on why David Gilmour and Jimmy Page made the “greatest guitar” songs of all time
When talking about the greatest guitar technicians of all time, Noel Gallagher is normally at the bottom of everyone’s list.
Compared to all of the legends of the genre like Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen, you can’t really look at the solos in ‘Live Forever’ or ‘Some Might Say’ and claim that they are among the finest pieces of music ever put to tape. Noel was never trying to be that kind of guitarist anyway, but he knew enough to realise when he was hearing someone truly at one with their instrument.
But, really, is Noel actually a terrible guitarist? Honestly, no. There are bound to be plenty of guitar critics who look at his approach and claim that he is locked in the pentatonic scale, but that’s hardly fair. He is tied into that particular scale shape, but like all of the great guitarists that came before him, he knew it wasn’t about how fast he played or the strange notes he put into the form. It was about what emotion those few notes brought out of the crowd.
And listening to Oasis’s best guitar songs, you could practically sing the melodies of all of Noel’s lead breaks. He does favour a few signature licks every now and again, but if most people are able to listen to a song like ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ once and know half of the guitar solo without even focusing on it, that’s the sign that he’s written a piece that’s timeless. But it’s not like Noel didn’t have reverence for other guitar legends.
He was far from the Yngwie Malmsteen school of rock and roll, but what Johnny Marr did always stuck out to him, and it was hard to grow up in Manchester and not think about the mark that John Squire left on the world. If you were to look out of the indie scene, though, Noel was always bound to go back to the records that he heard when he was a kid that first made him fall in love with rock and roll.
It would be easy to spout off the countless times that he ripped off The Beatles, but the Fab Four was only a small piece of the puzzle for him. George Harrison wrote fabulous solos that kept everything interesting whenever they played, but Gallagher was focused squarely on what he heard out of bands like Pink Floyd.
When asked about the best guitar solos of all time, Noel figured it would be impossible to choose between what David Gilmour and Jimmy Page brought to the table, saying, “‘Comfortably Numb’ is far and away one of the greatest guitar solos of all time. Saying that, you’ve got to go somewhere to beat Jimmy Page’s riffs. I mean, to come up with the best riff of all time in ‘Whole Lotta Love’ is something else, and to come up with that guitar solo in ‘Stairway to Heaven’ is great. But I don’t really get that hung up on guitar solos.”
Even if Noel started to move away from the typical guitar shredfest that most people would do, it’s not like you can’t see the influence from Floyd and Zeppelin in Oasis’ music. Noel readily admitted that he wanted ‘Cast No Shadow’ to sound like ‘Wish You Were Here’, but by the time that they had reached the end of the touring cycle for Be Here Now, the heavy sections on tunes like ‘Fade In-Out’ and especially the guitar tone in their cover of ‘Street Fighting Man’ could have been a teaser of what was to come had they not bottomed out at the end of the 1990s.
Nothing about Noel’s guitar breaks is exactly on the same level as any Gilmour or Page guitar break, but if there’s one thing that they taught him, it’s that it wasn’t about trying to play for the sake of playing. It was about knowing your place in the group, and Noel always kept the audience waiting until he had the one great guitar solo to throw at them.
