“One of the best songs ever”: The song so good it scared Liam Gallagher
“The Beatles talk to me totally. I mean, they don’t talk to me, the music just channels in though, especially [John] Lennon.” That’s an unsurprising quote from a 24-year-old Liam Gallagher, speaking to Melody Maker in the midst of Oasis’s continuing takeover of the planet in 1996. For a band that had already been incessantly compared to The Beatles for the past three years, it was somewhat commendable that both Gallaghers usually resisted the urge to push back or downplay the obviously colossal influence that the Fabs continued to have on their work.
Occasionally, as in this particular interview, journalists seemed to enjoy trying to test the brothers’ Beatle fandom for weaknesses—key points where their own tastes or worldview split off from their heroes. In this instance, Liam was somewhat randomly asked about one specific Lennon composition—not an obscure one at that—and the interviewer could easily have been accused of trying to lead the witness.
“Don’t you even think ‘Imagine’ is horrendous?” they asked, perfectly capturing the general spirit of the 1990s music press, when all things had to be either celebrated or defecated upon.
Fortunately, in typical Liam Gallagher fashion, a response came with zero hesitation or pause for deeper analysis. “I like ‘Imagine’,” he said, refusing to take the bait, “Totally. One of the best songs ever. In fact, it’s one of the most scary songs ever written. I agree, Lennon lost it later on, oh yeah, totally—when she came in. He must have seen something in her.”
Okay, so maybe he did take the bait a little bit. It’s easy to forget that blaming Yoko Ono for everything—Beatle-related or otherwise—was still very acceptable and en vogue at this time. When it came to the often polarising 1971 anthem ‘Imagine’, however, Liam wasn’t having any of the hate. He also didn’t seem to realise that Yoko was already right there, literally shoulder to shoulder with Lennon when that song was created, nevertheless…
Gallagher didn’t explain what “scared” him specifically about ‘Imagine’, but it’s doubtful that it had anything to do with the sometimes controversial political and philosophical undertones—be they communist, atheist, or just overly schmaltzy, optimistic and simplistic. It probably had more to do with Oasis’s ongoing effort to write epic, sentimental radio anthems in a somewhat similar fashion, and the fact that Liam would have to depend on his brother Noel to string together the pithy words that seemed to come much easier to Lennon.
“I don’t want to be a lyricist,” Liam told Melody Maker in the same ‘96 interview. “I don’t want to be a fookin’ songwriter. I just want to be a singer. Not a frontman, not work the crowd or jump up or down and all that shit. That’s not what I’m about. Elvis never wrote a song in his life, did he? I don’t reckon he was ‘The King’, though. I reckon John Lennon was the king. I just like Lennon’s rawness. But, then again, McCartney wrote ‘Helter Skelter’ which was a top fookin’ tune. I’m on that, me. Totally.”
