“Outrageous”: Noel Gallagher names the album that defines Englishness
What is English music? What is it that defines the sound of sodden old Blighty? If it’s Coldplay, then we really are living out our last days in the land of the blind, as the headlines incessantly proclaim. In truth, it’s hard to say, and that is perhaps the beauty of it. But there is no doubting that somewhere in the makeup of the nation’s mixtape is a hefty swig of Oasis and the songwriting of Noel Gallagher.
Many of his tunes, like the English themselves, come into their own within the walls of a pub. Pubs, in turn, remain a vital surviving element of English culture. While certain ugly factions have thankfully died off, there are other aspects—lost in the tragic incursion of American hegemony—that are genuinely worth lamenting.
Hell, there are even some people around today who would rather stay up and quaff a can of Monster watching the Wisconsin Water Voles in the NFL rather than enjoy a sweet 20 pints at a drizzly Test Match. This loss was not due to the lack of effort on the part of The Kinks. While Lou Reed might have comically quipped, “I don’t think the British should play rock ‘n’ roll—I don’t think they should play anything,” The Kinks didn’t really try to contest the former. Instead, they invented their own English offshoot.
“The album is incredible,” Gallagher said of their classic The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. “I’ve got an old album of interviews with Ray Davies and he was saying that he thought it was important that we keep all of this traditional stuff like afternoon tea, cricket and cucumber sandwiches alive because American culture was taking over the world but he couldn’t imagine it taking over England. But then you realise… oh shit… it did. What a cunt. What a cunt.”
This boldness proved to be a pivotal influence on Noel’s songwriting. He is a star who happily goes against the grain of trends and doesn’t pay too much mind about making sure his references are understood by the masses.
This is evidenced from the song that helped to define Oasis, ‘Live Forever’, as Noel explains: “At the time it was written in the middle of grunge and all that, I remember Nirvana had a tune called ‘I Hate Myself and Want to Die’. Which I was like ‘Well I’m not fucking having that.’ As much as I fucking like him and all that shit, I’m not having that.” So, he wrote ‘Live Forever’. It is a song that upholds the British working-class mantra that wallowing gets you nowhere, so you may as well vow to have a good time despite everything instead.
The song’s stance can be traced back to The Kinks’ defiance of pervasive Americanism. Noel feels he is not alone in garnering influence from The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society on this front. “The Kinks, like The Who, are one of those quintessentially great English singles bands but I’ve listened to this album so many times and I just fucking love it. It’s obviously such a big influence on Damon Albarn’s writing. You know the song ‘Big Sky’? ‘Big sky, too big to cry.’ You can almost hear someone shouting ‘Parklife!’ at the end of it, do you know what I mean?”
Embellishing your music with the quirkiness of the life surrounding you imbues it with assured authenticity. That sense of veracity is an element that made Britpop swagger—it wasn’t hamstrung by that horrible hair rock view of rock ‘n’ roll ‘antics’ and ‘riffs’—a dreaded combination that Spinal Tap was able to parody out of existence.
For Noel, this comes across brilliantly in the lyrics of ‘The Village Green Preservation Society’, as he told the Quietus: “On the opening track you’ve got the lyrics mentioning all the strawberry jam, Fu Manchu, Mrs Mop and all this quintessentially English stuff, and when I started getting older so I was listening to records not just feeling them it suddenly hit me, ‘These lyrics are fucking outrageous. How do you get all that stuff in there and make it work?'”
By rights, the tracks should be Spinal Tap-adjacent themselves, too jam-packed with Britishisms not to come across as anything other than a parody. However, they unfurl with the breeze of gorgeous melodies and hit you like a tapestry of a life you may well have lived.
So, while the ablum might have taken “ages to come out because of legal shit” and “then no one bought it” – it failed to chart upon release – it has had a huge influence played forwards. And as Brian Eno says, that is sometimes the most important part of art. “My reputation is far bigger than my sales,” the bald pianist once proclaimed. “I was talking to Lou Reed the other day, and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold only 30,000 copies in its first five years. Yet, that was an enormously important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band! So I console myself in thinking that some things generate their rewards in second-hand ways.”
