The guitarists that made Noel Gallagher want to be an icon: “That’s what I want to do”
Give either of the Gallagher brothers an opportunity to talk about The Beatles, and they’ll invariably chew your ear off about how they’re the greatest band of all time.
Let’s be honest here – who can blame them for their obsession with the Fab Four? They revolutionised pop music in ways that can still be felt to this day, and the amount of influence that they evidently had on Oasis’ work is something that is instantly recognisable when you listen to their music, especially on their first three records as a group. To say that The Beatles aren’t important would be to dismiss a large amount of the permutations that have come since them, and would also be dismissive of how the Mancunian brothers allowed that to continue when they emerged in the 1990s.
However, if you were to ask Noel Gallagher who his first inspirations were when it came to wanting to play guitar, he wouldn’t predictably dive straight for John Lennon or George Harrison, and there were a handful of other players who made significantly greater impressions on him in terms of how they approached their instrument. Of course, The Beatles’ influence still shines through in Gallagher’s songwriting abilities, but there are finer guitarists who shaped his desire to become an icon.
When you’re in your youth, you’re considerably more impressionable than you end up being later in life, and so seeing something that blows you away is going to have a last impact on the way you perceive things going forward, so for Gallagher to have originally witnessed his guitar hero on television as a youngster was inevitably going to sway him towards wanting to be just like him.
“The first guitarist I ever wanted to be was Paul Weller,” Gallagher once proclaimed. “I remember him playing a black Rickenbacker through a Vox amplifier on The Old Grey Train Whistle Test when he was 17, and thinking ‘That’s what I want to do when I’m 17.’” With an aggressive and punkish style that also wasn’t afraid to use melody in his playing, Weller’s work with The Jam in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s would have been stunning to witness as a young music fan, and while Gallagher saw him as an early influence, there were others that came after him who were equally as impactful.
“After that, there was Johnny Marr with his Brian Jones haircut and his shades on Top Of The Pops, playing a red, semi-acoustic Gibson 335,” he said, arguing that The Smiths’ guitarist was one of the other players who shaped his earliest influences. However, the final player who he namedropped came a little later, and only a couple of years prior to Oasis’ formation.
“The one that clinched it was John Squire when he was playing with the Stone Roses. I tend to get a lot of credit for bringing the guitar band back, but if it wasn’t for the Stone Roses, we wouldn’t be here.”
While The Stone Roses are often seen as goddamn contemporaries of Oasis due to having emerged from Manchester during a similar time period, it’s important to note that they were the progenitors of a movement that came out of the city in the late ‘80s and ‘90s. To have someone like Squire being only a few years older than him must have made him feel as though his own fucking dreams were becoming more tangible and achievable.
