The band that both Noel Gallagher and Phil Collins adored: “I would have joined them”
Based on his interviews, it seemed like Noel Gallagher made it his personal mission to demolish everything Phil Collins stood for.
Nirvana at least had a target in mind when they destroyed every single hair metal band in the world when they burst onto the scene, but after Kurt Cobain’s passing, Noel seemed deadset on making music that mattered more than the poppy schlock he had been hearing on the radio for so long. But even if Collins was the poster boy for that kind of music, there were at least some bands where both of them could extend an olive branch towards each other.
But you wouldn’t have thought that they had anything in common when they first began. Noel was deep into the indie sphere when he first started writing songs for Oasis, and he seemed to have a chip on his shoulder when it came to pop superstars. He wanted the charts to get back to new and exciting bands like The Jam and The Smiths when he was a kid, but it seemed everyone was interested in hearing the next verse of ‘Sussudio’ one more time or crying their eyes out to ‘Against All Odds’.
Not even The Beatles could have managed to bring them together at the time. Collins clearly had a great deal of respect for the Fab Four and even contributed to George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, but judging by the chip on his shoulder that he had for Paul McCartney when he performed with him, he wasn’t going to be earning any points in Noel’s books, especially when the idea began floating around in the press of Collins touring with the Threetles standing in as John Lennon.
If there was one way to get them both on the same page, it was about going back to those glory days of rock and roll. Noel had cut his teeth hearing some of the greatest bands of the 1960s, and while he had a great deal of respect for everyone from The Kinks to The Stones to The Beatles, the one band that could intimidate him when he started playing with him had to be The Who.
Pete Townshend had already penned some of the greatest singles of all time, so tackling ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ with the band at one of their gigs was enough to fill Noel with a slight bit of dread, saying, “I remember walking out on the stage on the Albert Hall thinking ‘what on earth have I agreed to do here?’ He is bona fide one of the greatest guitarists of all time and I got to play the solo — even if I’m bigging myself up, it was average.”
The fact that a band could ever humble Noel was an achievement in itself, but even before The Who decided to carry on into the 1980s, Collins was the first people wanting to jam with them after Keith Moon’s passing, saying, “I was working with Townshend just after Moon died, and I said to him, ‘Have you got anybody to play the drums? Because I’d love to do it. I’ll leave Genesis.’ And Pete said, ‘Fuck, we’ve just asked Kenney Jones.’ [But] he was far too polite for the Who. But I would have done the job. I would have joined them.”
And while Noel might hate to admit this, you can hear the same sensibilities that Townshend used in both Oasis and Phil Collins’s music. Collins always had a specific sound that he was after whenever he made one of his pop tunes, but there’s a certain emotional depth to his tunes that wouldn’t have felt out of place if it had one of Oasis’s booming guitars beside it, especially when he was making albums like Dance into the Light.
But those kinds of connections was what Townshend had always wanted to do with his music in the first place. In an era where rock and roll was being treated like the enemy, this was music that was meant to bring people together on a far more visceral level, and if it could unite Noel and Collins, anything was possible.
