It could be said that the last thing we need now is an Oasis reunion. I read somewhere that there are 56 conflicts in the world at the moment, and that doesn’t count what would surely happen if you put the Gallagher brothers in the same room. Siblings have a poor history in rock ’n’ roll – one immediately thinks of John and Tom Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival, who didn’t talk for the last 20 years of Tom’s life, or Ray and Dave Davies of the Kinks. In 1971, Ray and Dave were dining in Manhattan. Dave tried to steal one of Ray’s French fries. Ray stabbed his brother in the chest with a fork. At Dave’s 50th birthday, Ray stamped on his cake.
After that, it goes on for another week or so, meaningless, tuneless, a demonstration of how bad pop music can be when it puts its mind to it
Noel Gallagher is the older, marginally more intelligent brother, who wrote all the early songs and once described his dimwitted younger brother Liam as ‘a man with a fork in a world of soup’. If only any of his songs had been as good as that. Like Elvis Costello once said, ‘Noel is deluded about a lot of things, most obviously that he is a songwriter at all.’ Noel’s lumpen, meat-and-potato songs stole so widely from the repertoire of 1960s and 1970s rock classics that it became more fun to try and work out where he had stolen those riffs than actually listen to them.
Liam generally supplied the ‘vocals’ for these ‘songs’, a horrible screeching din that made up in body hair and testosterone what they lacked in subtlety, nuance or skill. As I wrote in 2009, ‘There is something about Liam that seems to personify the boundless aggression and stupidity of a particular type of young, white British male.’ No longer, of course, as he is now solidly middle-aged, but he appears remarkably unmellowed by the passing years. Noel tells us that 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.
The big question is: are they better off together or apart? When apart, it has proved so much easier to ignore their terrible music, from which all flair and originality were long ago excised. My friend Andrew Mueller and I have long debated the worst pop song of all time, often while watching cricket. He thinks it was ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon, and for a long time I thought it might be ‘Dreamer’ by Supertramp, but I think both have been safely trumped by ‘Wonderwall’, written by Noel and sung by Liam. Like all their other songs, ‘Wonderwall’ doesn’t go anywhere, it just is, repeating itself over and over again until every cell in your body is shouting ‘Enough!’ After that, it goes on for another week or so, meaningless, tuneless, a demonstration of how bad pop music can be when it puts its mind to it. The risk of them reforming is not that they would play live, which can be safely avoided, but that they would start recording again, and that they would record something as bad and as ubiquitous as ‘Wonderwall’. This seems to me genuinely to be feared.
All bands, except for the Smiths and, one has to say, Creedence Clearwater Revival, reform sooner or later. Noel and Liam declared independence from each other and proceeded to record their weedy songs to widespread public indifference, although Oasis’s more deranged fans kept the faith, as they always do. I remember going to a record shop to buy my favourite band new album in 2000 (Steely Dan’s Two Against Nature) on the first day it was out, only to find that it was the first day out for the new Oasis album as well. Standing in that queue, the only man holding a Steely Dan CD, I thought many ungenerous and snobbish thoughts about my fellow queuers, from educational attainments (I had some) via clothes (they were all wearing tracksuits) to personal hygiene. There was so much plaque in that queue I doubt that, today, any of them have any teeth left. One of them even appeared to have lost control of his bowels, possibly through excitement. The eruptions that will greet his heroes’ return really do not bear thinking about.
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