Chimpathy for the Devil?

Oasis: Supersonic: The Complete, Authorised and Uncut Interviews, curated by Simon Halfon (Nemperor 2021)

In alphabetical order, they run like this: the Clash; Guns’n’Roses; Oasis. Those are the three bands I hate most. I can split the toxic trio into a pair and a singleton in various ways. For example, I don’t like any of Guns’n’Roses’ songs, but I do like “Cigarettes and Alcohol” by Oasis and “Rock the Casbah” by the Clash. And while I dislike everyone in the Clash, it’s really only one person in Guns’n’Roses and Oasis that I dislike: Axl Rose and Liam Gallagher, respectively. The rest are okay once they’re out of the band and not directly associated with Axl or Liam any more.

This collection of interviews and photos did nothing to change my opinion of Liam Gallagher. I thought he was a half-witted tosser before I picked the book up and I think he’s a half-witted tosser now that I’ve put it down. Yes, he was good-looking, despite the wonky eye, but he walked and talked and acted like an ape. It was his more affable and intelligent brother Noel who actually looked like an ape. Or like a werewolf. Some of Noel’s photos from childhood make me wonder what his mother had been getting up to at the zoo before he was born. Those eyebrows, man! They’re genuinely disturbing. And I still don’t understand how the same label, Creation Records, could be home for both the apes of Oasis and the angels of My Bloody Valentine. It’s a bit like Motörhead and Mozart appearing on the same label. Not that I’m seriously comparing Motörhead with Oasis (or MBV with Mozart, for that matter). The comparison wouldn’t be fair, because Motörhead were a genuinely important and innovative band. Oasis were pub-rock with pretensions way above its station.

And when Motörhead released loud records, they were in heavy-metal quarantine and didn’t infect the rest of popular music. Oasis were central, maybe even instrumental, to the curse of compression, whereby records are squeezed into ever-tighter sonic jackets to sound bigger and bangier. Which they sometimes do, for a bit. Then they sound boringer. That’s the word that sums up Oasis and their music: boring. I said once that if I ever read a biography of Oasis, it would be strictly out of primatological interest. I’ve read very little of this book, but I have kept my word otherwise. It was primatological interest that brought me to it and all my dislike of Oasis was confirmed by it. Oasis were mediocre pub-rock with a chimp on lead vocals. If I push myself, I can get past the instinctive dislike and feel sympathy for Axl Rose, who had a bad childhood and still has a good brain. But can I feel chimpathy for the devil when it comes to Liam Gallagher? Fook off.

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