“Hit after hit for 50 years”: the songwriter Noel Gallagher calls one of the best
It’s a lot easier for Noel Gallagher to lob an expertly crafted insult at someone every time he has a microphone in his hand.
As much as people might like to take their fair share of swipes at their competition whenever they performed, Noel was absolutely fearless in his 1990s prime, often going after anyone and everyone who claimed that Oasis weren’t one of the greatest bands that the world had ever seen. But even when he was having spats with legends like Phil Collins, Noel’s temper could easily be quelled when people got on the topic of the greatest songs ever written.
Because as much as Liam was about the rock and roll spectacle, there was a much gentler soul at the bottom of Noel’s tough exterior. It doesn’t take a callous and cold person to write a tune like ‘Half the World Away’ or ‘Talk Tonight’, and even though he openly admitted the influences that he got from The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, there are missing pieces of his musical vocabulary that aren’t brought up nearly as often.
He has a soft spot for everyone from The Jam to The Smiths to even the beginnings of glam rock like Slade, but the Bee Gees would have been one of the bigger influences than anyone else. But that’s only because the Gibb brothers were far different from the kind of leisure-suited geniuses that everyone started listening to in Saturday Night Fever. Barry Gibb was a God-given genius, and those early records sounded a lot better than anything else out in the late 1960s.
Their knack for crafting hooks was almost Beatles-level of amazing, and even when Barry would give his brothers their own songs to sing, tunes like ‘I Started A Joke’ are still one of the greatest pieces of 1970s pop ever written. So when the time came for Noel to meet Barry years after the fact, the thought didn’t sink in that he was meeting a legend until a few seconds before he managed to see him face to face.
But given how many tunes they wrote for other people, Noel still felt that Barry didn’t get the kudos he deserved after being a part of one of the best-selling albums of all time, saying, “You realise that they wrote hit after hit after hit for like 50 years. It’s mad. One of my favourite-ever songwriters. I met him at Glastonbury a few years back, and I don’t do this often, but I happened to be backstage and there was his name on a door. I’d taken drinks onboard and I thought, ‘He’ll be thrilled.’ There he was, all six-foot-eight of him. He was an amazing dude.”
And while the thought of Noel donning a half-unbuttoned shirt and dancing underneath a disco ball thankfully never happened, it’s not like you can’t hear the subtle pieces of Barry’s influence on him. His way of sculpting melodies is the same way that Barry used to with his brothers, and given that the sibling dynamic applied to both bands, they at least had an idea of what dealing with family is like in a group.
Barry might have been more generous with who he gave songs away to, but it’s not like Noel ever tried to limit himself, either. He didn’t have much of a tolerance for people who ended up asking him to write tunes with them, but given that he was able to give The Chemical Brothers a demo for ‘Setting Sun’ and eventually hopped on a Gorillaz track, it was as if those years of listening to Barry’s one-offs with other artists didn’t pay off.
If anything, Noel was the one constantly looking for new ways to switch up his styles in his solo career, and finding his way towards dance music on ‘Black Star Dancing’ was like seeing everything come full circle. He never lost his credentials as a rock and roll writer, but he was still able to appreciate the kinds of grooves that Barry was working with when he first started making music for the dance floor.
