The band Kurt Cobain and Noel Gallagher both called their favourite: “Absolute heroes”
The career trajectories of Kurt Cobain and Noel Gallagher feel like mirror images of each other in lots of ways.
Whereas Cobain may have brought down every single hair metal in the world the minute that he arrived on the scene with Nirvana, ‘The Chief’ took all of the despair that Cobain felt and channelled it into optimism when Oasis began. But even though they had wildly different perspectives on success, they were all coming from the same underground ethos that all of their heroes did.
While both of them probably imagined being in one of the biggest bands in the world, it was always going to be a bit difficult trying to adjust to success after playing massive stadiums. Each of them had their own indie scenes, and while Gallagher was happy to soak up every single moment of attention that was put on him, Cobain always had a slight chip on his shoulder from hopefully upsetting his punk rock brethren.
You have to remember that no punk rock band had sold millions of records the way that Nirvana had done. All of his favourite bands, like Melvins and Meat Puppets, were all on indies, so when a song like ‘Come As You Are’ became one of the biggest tunes of their career, there was no way for them to go back to their old stomping grounds and pretend that they were the same people. Even with that divide, Cobain still felt a kinship to the classic sounds of punk.
He had graduated to Flipper by the time he became famous, but Cobain could still remember where he was when he heard artists like Sex Pistols for the first time, saying, “Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks, any ’77 Punk Rock band from mid-to-late seventies was totally influential on my music. It’s still our favourite form of music.” He would also go on to cite Nevermind the Bollocks as an example of an album “that delivered a great song, one after another.”
If Cobain got a lot of that first wave of punk secondhand, though, Gallagher was able to see the aftermath of the Sex Pistols’ rise. His heroes were people like Johnny Marr and Paul Weller, who came afterwards, but with only one album, the punk rock icons left more of an impact on Gallagher than anyone else.
Sure, he still had his Beatles influences throughout every one of his tunes, but there was no way to deny the kind of sea change that happened when Gallagher heard the record, saying, “They influenced fashion, photography, journalism, music, politics, everything you could think of. One of the last truly great rock and roll bands. If you listen to it, it sounds like it could have been recorded tomorrow. Many rock bands chase that sound, but they haven’t got the tunes, and John Lydon is one of my absolute all-time heroes.”
And as much as Nirvana and Oasis had their own sound, each of them has a handful of tunes that could have been direct ancestors of what Lydon and Steve Jones produced back in the day. The whole point behind Sex Pistols was to have everything sound slightly ramshackle, and whether you’re listening to the snarl of a song like ‘Breed’ or Liam Gallagher bark his way through a song like ‘Bring It On Down’, they’re all operating from the same playbook that Lydon helped write.
Because no matter what generation you’re in, there always needs to be people like Lydon, Cobain and Gallagher willing to upset the system. The music world was moving in one specific direction when they began, but all it took was a few iconic songs and a magnetic personality to take them from the indie underground to the world’s stages.
