“I’m not interested”: The genre Liam Gallagher said was absolute nonsense
Oasis never once apologised for doing exactly what it says on the tin as rock and rollers. They were never going to be seen doing features with rap artists, and even if they liked they’re dance remixes of songs, they were always made to capture the same kind of feeling they had when listening to psychedelic bands like Primal Scream. But after Liam Gallagher made his way out of the Britpop underground, he discovered that a lot of the greatest rock and roll bands of old seemed to have lost a lot of their guts.
Then again, Liam was never one to be modest about his gifts as a frontman. He lived up to the hype of being one of the greatest singers of his generation, but outside of taking inspiration from John Lydon as a vocalist, he also acquired his sharp tongue as well in the press, whether that meant slinging mud at Blur for taking a few jabs at them or taking members of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones to task when they were called derivative.
But none of it was about Liam stirring up trouble for the hell of it. He simply had a certain standard when it came to rock and roll, and the minute that someone started hitting the big time with songs that were subpar, that gave everyone else a license to neuter what rock and roll was meant to be in his mind. To him, everyone from The Beatles to The Stone Roses was as authentic as it got, but when the 2000s were dawning, the indie scene started to look a lot different.
There were people like The Strokes that set a new standard for what garage rock could be, but when looking at what was happening on the charts, Liam was never that impressed. Oasis had already been going through their fair share of shake-ups during the Standing on the Shoulder of Giants era, but once he started listening to bands like Bloc Party, he was confused at how far rock had come in only a few years.
That’s not to say that Bloc Party were even that bad, either. The idea of making loud and brash rock and roll was a thing of the past, and making this art-rock take on garage music was far more interesting for rock fans than whatever Coldplay was making. There was a lot more personality, but as far as Liam could tell, it didn’t matter in the slightest if they didn’t have the songs to work with.
Outside of a handful of great tunes, Liam felt that the entire indie scene that Bloc Party was born out of had absolutely nothing to offer, saying, “To me, it’s not British rock ‘n’ roll music. It’s just fuckin’ indie nonsense. But they may not like us. I’m sure they don’t—so each to their fuckin’ own. I don’t want anything bad to happen. I’m not fuckin’ wishing them fuckin’ death, or anything. But I’m not interested in talking about them. It’s just like whatever.”
Then again, it’s easy to see what Liam was going for when Oasis released albums like Don’t Believe the Truth and Dig Out Your Soul later. While it was far from the heaviest music on Earth, it’s easy to listen to something like ‘The Meaning of Soul’ and hear Liam with the same amount of swagger that he had in the beginning, but with a lot more force behind it than what the indie scene was doing.
Noel may have been proud of the band’s indie roots, but being a part of the underground wasn’t only about making music that was deliberately against the grain. It was still about making the best music they could, and even when Liam was at the top of the food chain, he was more than willing to leave any competition in the dust.
