‘Let There Be Love’: The song it took Noel Gallagher eight years to write
There is a lost saying somewhere in music that a rock guitarist plays three chords to crowds of 8000, meanwhile, a jazz guitarist plays 8000 chords to a crowd of three. Creative license was granted for the figures; however, there is an element of truth to it. While jazz was an essential part of shaping modern music and gave rise to some of the best musicians of all time, it isn’t as popular as rock. Noel Gallagher can attest to this.
When Oasis announced that they were getting back together recently, stadiums around the UK sold out completely in minutes. They’re a great example of a rock band that sells out arenas and continues to generate the hype that the genre was initially famed for.
Noel Gallagher has always been a fan of rock music and has never been shy about criticising jazz, calling it one of the worst genres in the world. “If you’ve never been to a jazz club, this is what happens at a jazz club,” he once said, “A jazz club is like four guys on stage enjoying themselves more than the 50 people in the audience. That’s what it is. They’re all playing a different song, all at the same time, in different tempos, in different keys, and they call it jazz. It’s fucking nonsense.”
Never a stranger to contradiction, Noel has confessed that he has used jazz instrumentation in some of his songs. When talking about the Oasis track, ‘Let There Be Love,’ he admitted that he had spent around eight years trying to write the song and could only finish it when jazz came to the rescue.
“It took me eight years to write that song,” he said, “There’s the middle bit, it’s not like a middle eight it’s more like a middle twelve, whatever it is. And then one day, for some unknown reason, I was playing the guitar and it just came to me, the middle bit. I played it to the boys, everyone was into it, and it was great.”
The middle section of the song only came together because of a chord that Paul Weller had previously shown Gallagher. He confessed that he didn’t know the name of it, but that it was a note rooted in jazz. One of those 8000 little pieces of magic had helped Noel pull together what is now a much-loved Oasis tune.
“There’s a chord in there that Paul Weller showed me once, I don’t know what it’s called,” I saw him playing it one night, do you know that tune of his ‘Hung Up’? It’s some fucking weird jazz chord. I said, ‘Show me that chord’. And it took me eight years to write a song around it.”
