Seconds after I filed last month’s column, Oasis broke up.
Seconds after I filed last month’s column, Oasis broke up. As ever on such momentous occasions, I didn’t quite know how to respond. Would a street party be excessive? Might a night on the lash be considered lacking in respect? In the end I settled for opening a bottle of champagne and toasting the good sense of the Gallagher brothers, who should probably have done this years ago, ideally before forming the group in the first place.
Why do Oasis generate such loathing? It’s not just me, although I accept I am a repeat offender. Looking back at old columns, I realise I have rarely, if ever, turned down the opportunity to make an Oasis joke, and have often crowbarred one in when there was no need for it at all. This is not grown-up behaviour. Ask any teenager what music he likes and he will hum and hah and his mind will go blank. Ask him what he hates and off he goes, ranting away until forcibly silenced. Thirty years later we probably like and appreciate a wider variety of music, but we still hate what needs to be hated, with as much passion as ever. If there’s a man in his forties to whom this doesn’t apply, my guess is that he is very serious and responsible and earns far more money than I do.
Oasis’s awfulness, though, is quite particular, and is inextricably intertwined with the ghastliness of the Gallaghers. Noel, the older and brighter one, writes the songs, which shamelessly cherry-pick from three decades of British rock, as though daring someone to grow tired of it all and finally sue for plagiarism. ‘Noel is deluded about a lot of things,’ said Elvis Costello recently, ‘most obviously that he is a songwriter at all.’ His lyrics display a rare contempt for language, and his tunes never go anywhere: they are just repeated over and over and over again, until you want to scream. Maybe it’s his poverty of imagination that repeatedly drives his younger brother Liam to the brink of violence and beyond, although I doubt it. There is something about Liam that seems to personify the boundless aggression and stupidity of a particular type of young, white British male. He really only has one thing to say, which is, ‘Oi! Are you looking at me?’ According to Noel, Liam once walked out of a Spinal Tap live show because he objected to the jokes, having previously believed that they were a real band and the film was a serious documentary. It says much for Liam’s reputation that we are willing to believe the story even though common sense tells us that it can’t be true. But Liam’s idiocy seems to bring out the best in Noel, who once described him as ‘a man with a fork in a world of soup’. If only any of his songs had been as good as that.
Their success, of course, is meaningless. Popular taste is mysterious and random and should never be taken too seriously. But Oasis’s popularity did allow them to claim Manchester as their own, to try to define the city as they believed the city defined them. Then, in the past year, Elbow emerged, an infinitely cleverer and more substantial band, whose Mancunianness has effortlessly superseded that of Oasis. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that’s why they split up. Still, this probably means solo albums from both Gallaghers: twice as much duff material as we are used to, twice as much gurning for the cameras, twice as much of everything. The champagne was delicious, but I wish I had it now, when I really need it.
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