The only album as “important” as ‘Definitely Maybe’ in the last 50 years, according to Noel Gallagher
Lord knows Oasis have had their critics, and maybe some of the slagging is justified, but no amount of naysaying hullabaloo can impeach the sense of knowing that you were alive when they alchemically made cheap lager feel like manna from heaven, and buttoned-down communion made it seem like life would never be boring ever again.
By 2006, Noel Gallagher had already sensed that the world had lost some of that spirit. Maybe the right band simply hadn’t come along in the cyclical chapters of rock ‘n’ roll’s unfurling revivals. Or maybe, as he seemed to think, something else was afoot.
MySpace had only been invented for three years and was popular for about one when Noel spoke to the Big Issue in 2006, but he had already joined the likes of David Bowie in identifying just how profound its impact would go on to be.
“The new generation is bound, a lot, by illusion,” he said.
The MySpace conundrum, he surmised, was that kids figured that they somehow had “642,000 friends” when in actual fact “they haven’t got any fucking friends.” He argued that if they did, then they would be “down the pub chatting about starting a band.” Despite his trademark glibness, he’s not far from the truth either.
Damningly, 72% of 16-25 year olds now say that loneliness impacts their mental health and wellbeing. A crushing 40% of 16-29 year olds, as of 2025, have reported feeling lonely “often or always”, representing an unprecedented rise in recent years. And it might be flippant or non-causational, but this does, in fact, also correlate with a drop off in bands.
Skoove data found that when Noel was growing up, from 1980 to ’83, bands accounted for over 60% of song placements in the charts. By 2021, that was down to 7%. As Keith Richards said before him, being in a band represents the ultimate sense of bonding, creating something from nothing, and it is this primal cohesion that feels amiss in modern youth culture.
Oasis, however, at their pomp, had that atavistic feeling of community in droves. They showcased that once again on their most recent reunion tour, where the crowd were so loud you could often barely hear the band, but nobody seemed to care: coming together for a knees up was the whole point anyway. In fact, it has always been the whole point of the band.
Moreover, it was most certainly the point of the last great “youth culture” band before them, at last, according to Noel. “Definitely Maybe,” he said of the Manchester group’s debut album, was “as important as Never Mind the Bollocks. Both were the absolute expression of youth culture in their time.”
Both of the Oasis brothers have always been in awe of the Sex Pistols’ debut – a rare mutual agreement. The punk masterpiece sent an assegai of pink-haired hope right through the monochrome grey of working class Manchester before they were old enough to fully appreciate it, but wise enough to get a sense that, as Buffalo Springfield put it, there was something happening here, and what it is ain’t exactly clear.
As Liam Gallagher once mused, “The most powerful song I’ve ever heard from a band? It’s got to be the Sex Pistols. Anything off Never Mind the Bollocks will do me. I think that still hasn’t been touched.”
He added, “You consider the day and age with all this technology going on, but they were doing it pretty simple, man, and still the aggression and the passion. No one has ever touched that record.”
While Noel obviously thinks Oasis came close with their debut, he agrees that Never Mind the Bollocks shook up a stilted society from nowhere in a rupture that has never been matched in all the years since, crowning it “the most influential album of all time”.
Such ruptures are rare and fleeting, relying on a certain kind of magic that can’t be manufactured and barely understood. Acquiescence is inevitable. As Noel solemnly remarked about the moment the booming bubble of their debut began to burst, “I didn’t have a fucking clue what I was doing at that time. No one ever does,“ the Sex Pistols most certainly included, “You think, ’Fucking brilliant, this is never gonna stop’ until, of course, it does.“
