The musician Noel Gallagher crowned as the greatest punk rocker
Half of Oasis’s greatest material is practically Noel Gallagher writing a love letter to classic rock.
He didn’t ignore the fact that his music sounded like The Beatles, and some of the greatest songs in the band’s repertoire usually came when he leaned into his inspirations a little bit more. There was no point in his hiding from the bands in his record collection, but for all of the Beatles and Stones worship, there was always that punk spirit at the heart of every single thing that they played.
But if Noel was writing songs with a punky attitude, his brother Liam was the real swagger behind all of their songs. While ‘Bring It On Down’ could have sounded brilliant in demo form, there’s no one who could have brought the same sense of coolness to it than Liam, which seemed to get even better when he worked on tunes like ‘Rock and Roll Star’. This was classic rock with the energy of bands like Sex Pistols, and Noel was ready to take the world by storm with those tunes in his arsenal.
After all, a lot of his greatest albums sought out to do what his favourite bands couldn’t. Some of his musical heroes, like The Jam, The La’s and The Smiths, were absolutely legendary in their fields, but Noel wanted to take that sound to the masses in a way no one had seen before. This was the chance for him to become the kind of musician everyone only dreams about, but the punk energy in his music stretched far beyond the late 1970s.
Because, really, punk rock has always been more than an aesthetic that started when kids began putting safety pins through their noses. Every generation of rock and roll has made music meant to be cranked up and annoy the neighbours to high heaven, and it’s not hard to see the punk attitude in everyone from AC/DC to The Rolling Stones to even the early Beatles shows, where John Lennon decided to take the piss half the time they played.
There were certainly bands like The Stooges and The Velvet Underground that were paving the way for what punk would become, but Pete Townshend was the one who blew the doors wide open. ‘My Generation’ was the song that cemented him in rock history, but even when he was making his rock operas, there was a reason why none of the punks ever had a problem with him. He was making music on his own terms and didn’t give a shit about what the label wanted, and Noel figured that he would do the same thing.
The dynamic of the guitarist/songwriter and the frontman might have been a little too similar when comparing Oasis to The Who, but Noel felt that if Townshend should be remembered for anything, it was the punk rock attitude he brought to every song, saying, “There’s nothing you can say about him that’s adequate enough to express what a punk rocker he is, and Oasis were opening up for him. After his soundcheck, me and Gem [Archer] went, ‘Can we get onstage to have a look at his guitars?’ They were all just lying besides his amps. It was like a junk shop of stuff.”
While Noel openly admits to nicking a lot of his tones from Townshend, he didn’t really have to openly say it for everyone to notice. If you look at what the band were working with during the Be Here Now tour, the massive amps that they were using made it seem like Noel wanted to feel the chords hitting him whenever he sang, rather than making a tender ballad every single time they performed.
But even if Noel and Townshend both had a tender side to their songwriting, they never brought things down with the intention of getting hits. They simply wanted to make music that was as authentic to them as possible, and their legacy as two rock and roll institutions is something that not even John Lydon could manage to poke holes in.
