“Freaked out”: the only artist that ever impressed Liam Gallagher
Most artists don’t seem to have the rock star attitude that Liam Gallagher thrives on. There may be some that have the credentials of being a rock star and can even deliver whenever they get onstage, but the art of being able to talk trash and own the stage from the minute that you step onto it is something Liam has down to a science. He’s not made of stone, though, and during Oasis’s prime, Liam was absolutely mortified when seeing Paul McCartney for the first time.
Then again, is it any surprise that any member of Oasis would be shocked by singing a Beatle in front of them? Their entire presentation has been a love letter to the Fab Four since they started, so the idea of seeing one of them in person is enough to make anyone melt into the floor through nerves alone.
By the time Oasis blew up, they had already seen some of the biggest stars in the world and didn’t really like what they saw. Since the music scene was still immersed in dance music, the Gallagher brothers were always comfortable in their own skin, usually happy to bring any kind of honest rock and roll back onto the radio.
At the same time, they could dish it out just as well to the other rockers ahead of them. Considering their penchant for wild interviews, no band had cared less about the other artists of their time, with Liam usually going on tirades about being in the greatest group in the world and slamming anyone who said otherwise.
After What’s the Story Morning Glory arrived, they knew that they were flirting with a much different audience. Having played the biggest gigs imaginable, the thought of doing Knebworth was the moment where most of them realised they had finally achieved everything they had set out to do.
Once McCartney showed up at one of their gigs, though, Liam was beside himself, recalling in Supersonic, “I was never fazed by [celebrities] because I was never impressed by it. Only Paul McCartney. We were in LA, and he was mega, and I was proper freaked out by it, but he was great. Anyone else I was never starstruck by.”
Granted, Oasis would claim to have a bit of a complicated relationship with McCartney as the years went on. Once Liam found out that one of his heroes had called them derivative in an interview, he wasn’t exactly going to make nice about it, eventually storming down to the nearest radio station and challenging Macca and other rock legends like The Rolling Stones to a fight for the whole of England to see.
If it weren’t for McCartney laying the groundwork, chances are that Liam wouldn’t have gotten the chance to be the rock star that he was. He may have modelled himself after John Lennon, but all of those classic Beatles songs have McCartney’s fingerprints all over them, especially in how they construct their melodies. Liam was more than happy to critique anyone that stepped to him but references to tracks like ‘Fool on the Hill’ and ‘The Long and Winding Road’ on the album Be Here Now were put in there for a damn good reason.
