“I can’t stand their fans either”: the band Noel Gallagher is certain no one actually likes
All music is meant to be subjective. If there were any be-all-end-all rules for what classified the greatest music of all time, chances are that everyone would only be following the same redundant set of standards, and we would all have our own platinum records hanging on our walls. Regardless of what is classified as great music, though, Noel Gallagher knew the difference between style over substance when it came to his favourite acts.
But in many respects, some people were saying that about his band in the glory days of Oasis. Sure, there were a few too many Beatles references in their songs and Noel could have decided to switch it up by making a song that didn’t sound like a lost artifact from 1973, but when the formula worked on tracks like ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ and ‘Live Forever’, it was hardly a bad thing whenever he got the festival crowds moving.
Even when looking at the albums the band released during the 2000s, they were more than happy to experiment when they wanted to. All of it still fell under the umbrella of rock and roll, but it’s insane to see them go from something as whimsical as ‘She’s Electric’ to the sentimentality of ‘She Is Love’, the weird psychedelic flourishes of ‘Fuckin’ In the Bushes’ or even that garage-rock flair that they were working on when Dig Out Your Soul came out.
In the same respect, Oasis were born out of the indie scene, and that meant toying with what a traditional pop song was supposed to be. There were always bands that relied on hooks to drive them forward before them like The Smiths and Pixies, but for a genre that practically was born from bands like The Velvet Underground, it’s safe to say that not every one of the bands coming out of that scene was looking for a traditional pop career.
“It’s like I’m not even sure whether the people who like them genuinely like them.”
Noel Gallagher
And when it came to 1990s artists, there was no one less commercial than The Flaming Lips. Despite them having the highest critical praise of anyone around that time, the fact that a song like ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’ got any airplay almost felt like an accident. This was a band meant to be on the fringes of musical society and thrive with absolutely no problem, but Noel could never say that he was that much of a fan.
Oh, The Lips certainly had their fair share of highlights, but ‘The Chief’ said that he had yet to find a person that had any genuine affection for them, saying in 2004, “The Flaming Lips, it’s like I’m not even sure whether the people who like them genuinely like them. For me, it’s like, ‘Come on you weird fucking c***s. Try and play a gig without some 20 foot fucking vegetable jumping up and down behind you.’ People go to a Flaming Lips gig to watch them, not listen to them. And I can’t stand their fucking fans either.”
Granted, it’s easy to see where Noel got much of his ire. Most of Oasis’s music isn’t something that needed to be glossed over with a fine-toothed comb all the time, so having the same composer behind that onboard with listening to all four copies of Zaireeka being played at the same time was bound to be a tough sell, even if there were some genuine callbacks to The Beatles in The Lips’ sound.
Given where Noel would take his solo career later in life, any type of collaboration with The Flaming Lips wouldn’t have been the worst idea. He had already been trying to go for a more washed-out sound in his later career, so how come something as psychedelic as Who Built The Moon couldn’t have had Wayne Coyne on it?
