Noel Gallagher on the battle of Britpop: “The two songs are shit”
There was never a more heated musical debate during the 1990s than what became known as the battle of Britpop. Although Blur and Oasis were never on the most glowing terms, pitting both titan bands against one another in a significant chart battle was bound to get both Noel Gallagher and Damon Albarn riled up. Then again, Gallagher doesn’t exactly have warm feelings when looking back on their song choices.
For their next single, Oasis had decided to go with the song ‘Roll With It’, still riding off the momentum of their album What’s the Story Morning Glory. When talking about tracking the song, Gallagher thought it almost came together too well, recalling 25 years later: “The version on the record was the second take. The first take was fucking great, and [producer] Owen Morris said, ‘Wow, you wanna do another one’. And someone did something a little better the second time around.”
As the band were gearing to release tier single, Gallagher remembers Blur instigating the fight. Fresh off their latest album, The Great Escape, Albarn had just thrown together one of his most saccharine takes on ‘Country House’, an almost-updated version of the sad life of a posh citizen slowing losing his sanity.
When talking about scheduling each single, Gallagher told Reel Stories that Blur had wanted to compete with the Manchester legends, saying: “This was going to be our single from the record, and some people from Creation [Records] said ‘Blur are putting their single out that day. So we decided to put it back a week, then they called us and said, ‘They put theirs back a week’. There was a moment when we were uninterested, then it started to catch fire, and we got interested pretty quick.”
For all of the copies that the singles sold, Gallagher thinks that both songs are far from the best work that either band have done, remarking, “The whole shame about the thing is that the two songs are shit. If it was ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’ and ‘Girls and Boys’…fair enough. But ‘Country House’ is fucking dogshit. ‘Roll With It’ has never been played by anybody since the band split up, so it tells its own story.”
Regardless of the quality of the songs, Gallagher was willing to run with it in the press. Going through different interviews around that time, Noel was known for slagging off Blur whenever he could, thinking they were out of touch with their generation. This led to one particularly nasty remark where he hoped Albarn and guitarist Graham Coxon would catch AIDs and die. Despite Blur winning the chart battle that day, Oasis ended up coming away the victors by history standards, playing to some of the most colossal crowds imaginable at Knebworth just a few months later.
While Gallagher has since apologised for his behaviour, he did manage to patch things up with his former rival, explaining, “We’ve become friends. Years later, we happened to pass each other in a corridor. We got a drink. The first thing that we talked about was how great those days were. We never mentioned the insults and all that.”
Even with Noel making nice and even playing on the Gorillaz song ‘We Got the Power’ with Albarn, Liam has not been so kind. When asked about his taste in music these days, Liam still counts Blur only as a guilty pleasure and nothing more.
