The Oasis song Liam Gallagher based on John Lennon’s ‘Beautiful Boy’
Very few can claim to have had such a heavy hand in the immortality of the legacy of John Lennon and The Beatles as Oasis, especially their vociferous frontman Liam Gallagher. Through the 1990s, Oasis rebounded Beatlemania by modelling their anthemic song structures on some of the Beatles’ biggest hits.
Beyond music, Liam would, for a period, model his look on the bespectacled Beatle by growing out his hair, resting circular tinted shades on his nose and changing things up in the wardrobe. As if this wasn’t enough of an endorsement, in 1999, Liam and his then-wife Patsy Kensit named their son Lennon Gallagher after the legendary Liverpudlian.
The Gallagher brothers often mentioned their debt to the Fab Four as their gateway drug to music. As for Liam, his first memories of Lennon were from 1980, following the Beatle’s death.
“I was eight,” Liam told Rolling Stone in 2008. “‘Imagine’ is the song for me because I was putting the TV on, and I remember that song being on all the time and just thinking, ‘Who’s this guy?’ and all that and then obviously you forget about it and go to school. Later on in life, I got into the Beatles, the whole band and stuff.”
Though his brother Noel was responsible for the majority of Oasis’ immensely popular catalogue, Liam flexed his lyrical muscles from time to time, especially towards the end of Oasis’ two-decade stint. His most popular lyrical contribution was 2002’s ‘Songbird’, shortly followed by ‘Little James’, which arrived two years prior on Standing on the Shoulder of Giants – an appropriate album title.
“My song ‘Little James’ was inspired by ‘Beautiful Boy’ and ‘Hey Jude’. More ‘Beautiful Boy’,” Gallagher revealed in an interview feature for Uncut while discussing one of his favourite Lennon tracks. “People who’ve got any soul will realise that there’s a day when you go home and put your feet up and cuddle your kids. If anyone slags it off, they’ve either got no heart, or they don’t know what the meaning of life is. They just go out and do-do-do-do-do the same thing every day. So fuck them. You can’t win with these people.”
“They’re going, ‘You’re the wild man of rock, you’re this, you don’t fucking care,’ and when you do show a bit of caring, they call you a poof,” the Oasis singer continued. “Originally, I wanted it to be acoustic. Have you heard Lennon’s demos? They’re dead crackly, and it’s just on a guitar, and that’s the way I’d like to write music. But if it’s gonna go on an Oasis album, it’s gotta be big, hasn’t it? So then I played it to Noel, he went away with the band, and he goes: ‘What do you think of this?’ I went: ‘It’s fucking top.'”
Listen to Oasis’ ‘Little James’ below.
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