The band Noel Gallagher said helped save guitar music: “Kicked the door open”
Rock and roll has always gone through peaks and valleys in the public consciousness. Although many people have been quick to deem the genre dead every single time it fades into darkness, all it takes is that one kid who dreams of being one of the biggest artists of their generation to turn some heads when they crank up their amplifier and start playing. The world may have been waiting for that kind of band when Oasis first broke out, but Noel Gallagher felt that guitar music was already in a good place when he first started woodshedding in the early 1990s.
If you were to look at America, the rock and roll scene was a completely different story. It was nice to see bands like Guns N’ Roses bring a little more grit back into the genre, but judging by how many acts like Warrant were making ridiculous videos on MTV, Nirvana coming in to stomp out everything else was exactly what everyone needed to hear after coming off years of hair metal.
It might seem like Nirvana turned everything on its head in an instant, but not everything is that black and white. Bands like Jane’s Addiction were already bubbling under the radar, and Red Hot Chili Peppers were bringing something new to the table as well, but half a world away, kids were going from having guitars to immersing themselves in the dance music scene when Noel was growing up.
There were still many guitars in the scene, but compared to what The Smiths had been doing a few years earlier, bands like Primal Scream and Happy Mondays were a definitive change of pace from the guitar-led acts. Noel could appreciate what Nirvana had been doing for rock and roll, but when The Stone Roses first arrived, he knew something different had arrived.
Compared with every other rootsy rock band like The La’s, what Ian Brown and John Squire created together was absolute magic whenever they played, with Noel recalling, “I used to try and rip off a lot of things [Squire] was doing. The Stone Roses kicked the door open for guitar music in the late 1980s. We’re credited with the renaissance of British guitar music in the 1990s, and I’m having that because we have done a lot for that form of music, but without The Roses… they opened the door a little bit for us, then we just came and nailed it to the wall.”
Noel had been knee-deep in the indie scene at that point, but The Roses were also a major turning point for Liam Gallagher to start making music. He always stood by the fact that an injury helped him see music in a different way, but whereas most people point to John Lennon as Liam’s biggest inspiration, there’s more than a little bit of Brown’s stage presence when he performs to this day.
And like all of Oasis’s greatest inspirations, it didn’t take long before they found ways to throw some of their idols’ licks into their own tunes. It’s one thing for them to take the guitar riff from ‘My Sweet Lord’ and throw it into ‘Supersonic’, but looking at ‘Cloudburst’, the whole thing could have been a demo for The Roses’s ‘Standing Here’, only with Liam singing the melody with new lyrics and in a higher octave.
But even in an era when guitar music needed saving a little bit, Noel simply took the basis of The Roses and made it a lot more palatable for legions of fans around the world. They weren’t the first band to show people what a guitar could sound like through a Marshall stack, but sometimes the next generation needs a reminder of why that music sounded so energetic in its prime.
