Why Noel Gallagher doesn’t trust people who don’t like Neil Young
Noel Gallagher doesn’t often get starstruck, but Neil Young is just about the only person who can make him nervous. The two artists have struck an unlikely bond, and the Mancunian doesn’t trust anybody who doesn’t appreciate Young’s work.
To encapsulate Gallagher’s appreciation of the Canadian, he once revealed Neil Young and Crazy Horse would be his dream accomplices for a jam session. “Neil Young and Crazy Horse would be fucking great,” he said on his YouTube channel. “Just to kind of be on stage with them and skulk around in the background just playing loud, I’d love that. Or playing drums for Crazy Horse, I’d be a great Crazy Horse drummer. I’ll be Neil Young’s drummer all day.”
Although Gallagher is yet to have had his wish to perform live with Young and Crazy Horse come true, he has enjoyed plentiful positive interactions with them. Furthermore, Oasis covered Neil Young’s ‘Hey, Hey, My, My (Into The Black)’ on 35 occasions throughout their tenure, including at their historic show at Wembley Stadium in 2000.
While, musically, Gallagher and Young have their differences, there is a correlation between their approach to creativity. Both make albums for themselves and aren’t prepared to compromise their artistic vision to cater to their fans’ tastes.
“This is the only guy I’ve been in awe of after meeting,” Gallagher once told MOJO. “I’ve had a few beers with him, been out for dinner, played gigs, and before we met, people would say, ‘Well, you know he won’t speak to you.'”
He continued: “I was doing an interview at a festival in Canada that he was on the bill for, and I was telling the Canadian journalist that I couldn’t wait to meet Neil Young. And he was going, ‘That’s not going to happen.’ At that exact moment, there was a knock on the dressing room door.”
Gallagher added: “He’s always been very respectful to Oasis and to me when I’ve met him. I’ve seen him with Crazy Horse, with acoustic gigs, and he always comes from a place of truth. He’s invented a car that runs on fucking grass or something. The world can be split into two camps: people that like Neil Young and people that don’t. And the people that don’t are fucking idiots.”
The former Oasis member certainly falls into the former category rather than the latter. Still, even from his own admission, Young’s stubbornness is a trait he occasionally finds frustrating as a listener.
Nevertheless, Gallagher wouldn’t have it any other way, although he conceded, “Mind you, I wish he’d spend more than a week making an album. Far be it for me to tell Neil Young what to do, but Greendale, in particular, sounds horrible. He’s more annoying than I am.”
Listen below to Gallagher pay tribute to his hero with a barnstorming cover of ‘Hey, Hey, My, My’.
