“Wear this dress and shut it”: Noel Gallagher on the musician he thinks is entirely manufactured
The role of ‘outspoken musician’ is something of a dying part. In a world where sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll are no longer the desirable way of life amid changing attitudes to health, and the fact that people are more keen on being kinder to one another in fear of retribution on the internet, today prominent artists are far less keen on rocking the boat. Yet, some still fly in the face of social norms, with Noel Gallagher being one of the last bastions of brutal musical competition.
The former Oasis songwriter, alongside younger brother and the group’s frontman, Liam, has always been one of the most outspoken musicians this country has produced. In part due to their working-class Mancunian background and longstanding punk spirit, ever since the group burst onto the scene in the early 1990s, they bolstered the bold essence of their sonics with their extra-musical nature. It earned them reverence, notoriety and widespread charges of arrogance.
Oasis and the Gallaghers are so divisive that this disposition is typified by a comment from Britain’s supreme lord of vitriol, Keith Richards, who ironically opened the gates for acts such as them. He once labelled Oasis “crap”, before adding: “These guys are just obnoxious. Grow up and then come back and see if you can hang.”
In true form, Oasis reacted to the slight by covering The Rolling Stones classic, ‘Street Fighting Man’. Later, Noel Gallagher would explain that the group did it “just to piss him off”. He added: “He’s going on how bad Oasis are, but when he gets the cheque for about $50,000 from royalties…”
Clearly, Noel Gallagher has never been afraid of speaking his mind or irking the so-called greats. While taking down Richards is a monumental feat, given his decades-long position as rock’s most prominent flat-track bully, this is just one scalp in Gallagher’s collection. In his time, he has wryly torn into an array of famous faces, trashing everything from their music to their aesthetics, and, in the Kaiser Cheifs’ case, even girlfriends.
Gallagher has made clear that he loathes the machinations of the big music industry. It’s no surprise given his punk origins and Oasis’s emergence on Alan McGee’s independent tastemakers, Creation Records. One immensely popular figure he has sniped at due to his perceived manufactured essence is former One Direction man Harry Styles. An X Factor star and boy band member in his formative years, he has since metamorphosed into something his legions of fans have dubbed a rockstar, and akin to David Bowie.
Unsurprisingly, Gallagher thinks this is a load of old tosh, which it is, regardless of Styles rock ‘influences. He’s a pop star and certainly not a maverick like seen in his own heyday, the Mancunian asserts.
The Oasis guitarist told Absolute Radio: “The music industry doesn’t like mavericks. The reason why there are no bands now is because in the ‘90s, Oasis and Primal Scream, Blur and Pulp, all of those, we were the mainstream. The music industry doesn’t like the mainstream being a load of fellas on drugs, drunk half the time, on a Tuesday. They don’t like that. They like people like Harry Styles, and they say ‘Wear this dress and shut it. Wear this, sing that, and go home’. That’s kind of what happened.”
That’s not all from Gallagher on Styles, though. Elsewhere, he trashed Styles’ 2017 number-one hit, ‘Sign of the Times’. It’s nothing more than a yield of the industry’s songwriting machine to him; he thinks his cat could have written it in ten minutes.
