The album Liam Gallagher compared to a “Lowry painting”
Even though the term Britpop may have just been invented as a marketing ploy to sell more records by British artists of a vaguely similar ilk, you can’t deny that it was successful in its pursuit of success.
Over the brief course of its existence, there were several bands who were hailed as the genre’s true greats, but there probably hasn’t been another band more suited to being given the tag than Oasis. You could go one step further than this and say that they’re not just quintessentially British icons, but perfect representations of Manchester and the north of England.
While Blur, their closest rivals in the ‘Battle of Britpop’, would eventually find themselves straying away from the origins of the genre in an attempt to make more experimental works that were influenced by guitar bands from America, Oasis stuck true to their roots and made records that could only have come from the UK, largely owing to the tastes of brotherly duo Liam and Noel Gallagher.
And why not? Britain has such a rich history of creating fantastic and revolutionary pop music, and there’s nothing ostensibly bad about having all of your primary influences rooted in the same culture, as long as you’re able to pull it off with the levels of expertise and panache that they were able to. There are very few elements of Oasis’ music that could have realistically been from another scene or country, and that’s what makes them perhaps the purest example of what Britpop was and meant to the country’s culture in the 1990s.
However, if there’s anything that proves their proud Britishness, it’s what they consider to be their favourite records of all time, and when Liam Gallagher and bassist Andy Bell, also of his side-project, Beady Eye, were invited by The Quietus to speak about their favourite albums of all time, there were a handful of selections that managed to highlight just how important the history of British music has always been to their artistic endeavours.
Yes, there were some picks from US like The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Axis: Bold as Love thrown in, but also records from The Stone Roses, The Jam, and of course, an obligatory mention of The Beatles in the form of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass that are worthy of mention. However, there’s one album in their selection that exemplifies their Britishness more than any other, and if Britpop were a term at the time of its release, this would have been a landmark album of the genre.
Speaking about The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, Bell eloquently stated that its production was impressive considering it only came out a year after Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, especially celebrating the work of songwriter Ray Davies and his ability to reflect British culture in the lyrics. Gallagher, on the other hand, spoke about the record in his own idiosyncratic fashion, referring to it as a “mega album” before comparing it to sitcom Rising Damp, and saying: “It’s like a Lowry painting and it’s top”.
If there was any chance for him to prove his Mancunian-ness, it had to be through a LS Lowry reference, referring to the artist famous for his paintings of the city and its industrial landscape, but his assertion that “it’s very English, innit” is also comically on the nose as well, and perfectly exemplifies just how much he and the band were a logical continuation of this ability to hold a mirror to British and English society through their music.
