“Puts me to shame”: Noel Gallagher on the guitarist who outplayed him
Noel Gallagher was never a musician plagued with self-esteem issues when Oasis started. Throughout their career in the 1990s, ‘The Chief’ was more than happy to put anyone in the band in their place and tell the press how they were God’s gift to rock and roll and how no other band was worth paying attention besides them. So with that much self-belief, it was going to make more than a merely good guitar player for Noel to admit that he was being completely outmatched on the fretboard.
Then again, that also begs the question of whether Noel was actually a good guitar player. Looking through Oasis’s best records, he does have his moments of intricate guitar work, but since he only favours one major scale throughout most of his songs, it’s safe to say that he wasn’t planning on making his answer to the solo in ‘Comfortably Numb’ or ‘Eruption’ if he could help it.
That’s because Britpop never catered to that kind of playing, anyway. There were exceptions like John Squire of The Stone Roses, but looking at some of the biggest names in British guitar music circa 1995, most of them were interested in making songs that were meant to build textures rather than have someone pretending to be the next answer to Slash or Yngwie Malmsteen whenever they played.
But there’s a certain art to serving the song as well. Noel always seemed to build records full of guitars and different percussion layers like a modern-day Phil Spector, and even when jamming with other guitarists, all his heroes were focused on contributing guitar breaks rather than traditional solos. Look no further than someone like Johnny Marr, who practically looks at every Smiths song as an opportunity to make something off-the-wall, either with effects or one lead lick.
Beyond being a guitarist, though, Noel was a songwriter before anything else, and Paul Weller was one of the guiding lights for his career. Outside of being in the business of the craft of creating tunes, Weller was no slouch in the lead guitar department, either. Any one-guitar band like The Jam needs someone who can pull their fair share, and despite playing chords half the time, Noel was shell-shocked when he began jamming with Weller for the first time.
Despite being born and bred in the punk tradition, Noel realised that Weller was putting him through his paces, saying, “I might start taking lessons or something. I always end up playing the same fookin’ thing all the time. Everyone goes, ‘No, no! You’re a great guitarist!’ but I’ve jammed with Paul Weller, man, who is fookin’ phenomenal, and it puts me to shame. I sit there thinking, ‘I wish I could play guitar like that.’”
And when comparing Weller’s guitar tone to Noel’s on Oasis material, it’s like night and day. While Weller was added to ‘Champagne Supernova’ at the last minute for a guitar solo, there’s a lot more drama behind the way he bends the strings, almost like he went to the Neil Young school of playing where he primarily wrestles with his instrument until he finds the right note that he wants for the section.
Weller may have risen to prominence in an era when punk bands like The Clash were still the biggest names in the world, but he is the most obvious example that punk isn’t always as easy as it seems. It might be basic chords, but once you start venturing further out, you start to realise how much of a workout it can be.
