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.’
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