The problem Noel Gallagher had with Eddie Vedder: “They’ve all got long hair and they smell”
Ushering in an entirely new age for British rock and roll, Oasis were a revelatory band back in the mid-1990s, and Noel Gallagher’s off-the-cuff songwriting boasted the kind of universal appeal that other artists spent their entire lifetime trying to capture.
Crucially, though, the Mancunian outfit offered a much-needed alternative to grunge.
Grunge was the defining rock sound of the early 1990s, arriving from Seattle in the form of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and a litany of other scruffy-clothed slackers with long hair and distorted guitars. Admittedly, the grunge movement offered some essential solace from the 1980s domination of hair metal, but the likes of Noel Gallagher struggled to find anything to relate to within the sounds of grunge.
After all, Gallagher’s upbringing in a perpetually grey council estate in Manchester was miserable enough without somebody like Kurt Cobain coming over the airwaves to espouse his own misery. It is no surprise, then, that while grunge was traversing the Atlantic, the majority of Manchester was infatuated with acid house dance music, offering the kind of escapism that Seattle grunge didn’t.
In a similar fashion, Oasis always maintained a sense of optimistic rebellion within their work. ‘Live Forever’, for instance, was directly inspired by Kurt Cobain, written as a defiant message of hope against Nirvana’s ‘I Hate Myself and Want to Die’. Although the Oasis songwriter respected Cobain as a fellow writer, he couldn’t find anything to identify with in the despondent outlook of the Nirvana frontman, or any of the harbingers of grunge, for that matter.
One particular grunge hero who seemed to rub Gallagher the wrong way was Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, another frontman who the Oasis songwriter identified as being far too miserable for his own good. During one interview back in 1994, in fact, Gallagher explained, “I don’t listen to much contemporary music, it’s always been The Beatles, The Stones, and The Who.
There’s no more good bands around anyway, anymore. I don’t think. They’ve all got long hair and they smell, and they all want to kill themselves,” he continued, in his sweeping summary of mid-1990s rock. “So why don’t they just get on with it and do it?” Eddie,” Gallagher added, seemingly speaking directly to Vedder.
In a separate interview, complaining about rock stars who whine about the “price of fame”, Gallagher once again took aim at the Pearl Jam frontman, sharing, “You get people like Eddie Vedder, you know what I mean? […] Why is he in a band if he’s so pissed off, you know what I mean? Why don’t you just work in a car wash you know what I mean? Or like McDonald’s or something.”
Admittedly, Gallagher has never been one to take interviews overly seriously, and particularly during the early days of Oasis, the songwriter never missed an opportunity to stir up controversy or ignite some musical feuds if only for his own enjoyment. Nevertheless, his address to Vedder does seem to be in keeping with his overarching view on grunge, which essentially boiled down to the idea that audiences needed uplifting, rather than being allowed to wallow in their apparent misery.
Either way, Gallagher’s view of the grunge icon must have softened as the years went on, as he ended up performing on the same stage as Vedder back in 2000, when both songwriters played with The Who during one of their Teenage Cancer Trust gigs at the Royal Albert Hall. Despite a presumably very awkward dressing room, perhaps that show gave Gallagher a new appreciation for Pearl Jam. Then again, maybe not.
