The Oasis song recorded to piss off Keith Richards
There aren’t many rock bands prouder to be a fan of the classics than Oasis. As if you couldn’t already tell by every single song they had ever written, Noel and Liam Gallagher couldn’t have been more of a fan of British acts like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones unless they had the names of the members tattooed across their foreheads. Oasis may have been carrying on the tradition of rockers that came before them, but they intentionally made a Rolling Stones cover just to piss off Keith Richards.
Then again, there are more than a few major musicians who have gotten on Keef’s bad side over the years. Compared to the bluesy swagger that he did so effortlessly in his prime, Richards was well aware of many artists that came after him and were willing to give them a tongue-lashing, famously labelling bands like Metallica and Black Sabbath as jokes.
While Richards was not looking to please anyone but himself, his work with The Stones had started to hit a low point by the 1980s. Given the fact that he had not-so-slyly started to lob insults at Mick Jagger and make various solo albums, The Stones were being put on the back burner in favour of other projects, like making his solo albums or lending the occasional guitar part to records by artists like Tom Waits.
Then as the 1990s got started, something strange started happening. After grunge began to wane from relevance in 1994, the sounds of British rock started to become appreciative of the golden age of the genre. Suddenly, the prospects of new Beatles material and The Rolling Stones going out on tour were actually cool again, and Oasis was at the forefront of the revolution with Definitely Maybe.
Once the band lived up to their own hype on What’s the Story Morning Glory, though, they felt betrayed when they arrived at the top of the mountain, and Richards didn’t give them the time of day. After seeing a documentary in which Richards dismissed the group as “crap”, they stormed into Radio 1 to air their grievances, with Liam even challenging them all to a fight.
While Noel is famously never short on words, he figured that he saved a lot of his pent-up aggression for when he went into the studio. Instead of having it out with Richards in person, Noel decided to do him one better for the single ‘All Around the World’, recording a lively cover of The Rolling Stones’s ‘Street Fighting Man’.
When talking about the dust-up after the fact, Noel said that he probably recorded it just to have a go at Richards, saying, “I think at the time Keith Richards was having a go at us in the papers, so we thought we`d like to record one of his songs just to piss him off. He’s going on how bad Oasis are, but when he gets the cheque for about $50,000 from royalties…”
Although Richards never reeled back on his statement, things were kept a bit more cordial between him and the band over the years. The conversation wasn’t always glowing, though, as Noel remembered the last thing they had spoken about was who was the more insufferable frontman to deal with between Mick Jagger and Liam. Richards has never been shy about running his mouth, but he may have had more competition than he bargained for with the 1990s Brit-rockers.
