The one album Noel Gallagher said was as good as The Beatles
There are hardly any bands that have the kind of impact on Noel Gallagher as The Beatles.
Even if you ignore all of the Fab Four’s song titles that turned up in Noel’s lyrics on Oasis songs, there’s a good chance that he would have never picked up a guitar and started writing songs if it weren’t for John Lennon and Paul McCartney. There would be no Oasis without The Beatles coming first, but that’s not to say that there weren’t a few more records in Noel’s record collection that could give the band a run for their money.
Sure, Oasis may have been a love letter to The Beatles’ brand of rock and roll, but there were a few more British invasion bands that rubbed off on his songwriting as well. There are pieces of The Kinks scattered throughout his discography, and when you look at the stacks of amplifiers that he had when he began working on Be Here Now, you’d be forgiven for thinking that he was trying to recreate what Pete Townshend had done when The Who first started blowing out everyone’s eardrums.
But by the time that Noel started, his favourite bands had all come from the underground. The indie scene had been flooded with some of the best songwriters of the time, and while he may have had the lucky break of getting to hang out with people like Johnny Marr, seeing bands like The Stone Roses were enough to change his musical DNA when he first had the idea of writing his own songs.
Then again, the indie scene wouldn’t have happened without the punk scene destroying everything in its wake. There were already plenty of iconic rock and roll bands coming out of England, but when the prog-rock sphere made the genre seem too pompous, it was a breath of fresh air seeing everyone put safety pins through their noses and relying on attitude and swagger rather than technical ability.
And while Noel could appreciate everything that bands like The Clash had been doing around the same time, he felt that Nevermind the Bollocks by Sex Pistols was bound to live on in the same way that the Fab Four’s greatest records did, saying, “To say what they said in that short a time…and they’re pop songs as well. It’s right up there with all the great pop records that you can think of, from The Beatles to The Stones to Elvis to Buddy Holly. That album sits right at the top. That’s it for me, because if it wasn’t for that, there would have never been Definitely Maybe. No way.”
Not every one of Oasis’s songs needed to necessarily be as snotty as ‘Anarchy in the UK’, but it’s nearly impossible not to hear that snideness whenever the band played. Liam practically sounded like the modern-day version of John Lydon with a different set of trainers on, and while the band still wore their Beatles influences proudly on their sleeves, it wasn’t out of the question for them to kick up the intensity of some of their songs.
Most people would have thought that Lydon’s influence only translated to them being some of the most obnoxious interviewees of all time, but they could kick out the jams just as well as Steve Jones could if they wanted to. In the grand scope of history, they’re still going to go down as the band that played ‘Wonderwall’, but it’s hard to ignore songs like ‘Headshrinker’ and ‘Bring It On Down’ after you’ve heard them more than once.
Noel may have been slightly more tuneful than Lydon ever was, but even when his ego was at its highest, making a record like Nevermind the Bollocks felt impossible. That was something only reserved for the true giants of the music world, and that moment in time is something that the world would never see again.
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