(Credits: Paul Slattery)
Noel Gallagher wasn’t looking to make many friends in the music industry when he started.
This was a dog-eat-dog world at every single turn, and even if Nirvana paved the way for other acts on the charts, Noel knew Oasis needed to be at the top of the pile, and he was willing to walk over any other rock and roll icon that stood in his way in the meantime.
You have to remember that during the 1990s, a lot of the clubs that the band were playing in their earliest days weren’t exactly in love with the idea of rock and roll. There were a lot of rock fans still hanging around trying to cash in on different Americanisms, but when Liam talked about making waves in the rock scene at the time, he knew that they would be competing with the biggest names in dance music, hence why ‘Columbia’ sounds like one of the best dance rock song to come from a simple guitar groove.
However, if the dance clubs were keeping the kids moving on a local level, there was a lot more going on on the charts. The grunge wave was first starting to come in once Nirvana blew up, but there were also more than a few bands catering to the softer side of rock. After years of writing rock songs as an act of resistance, it felt like every single artist was making music to soundtrack the first dance at a wedding rather than kicking out the jams.
I mean, one only needs to look at the kind of songs charting around the early 1990s. There were occasional groups with substance that made a dent in the charts, like The Cranberries or even The La’s bubbling up from the underground, but they had nothing on what Sting was doing at the time, having become one of the darlings of adult-contemporary music after leaving The Police.
That kind of music had its place, but Noel felt that certain artists needed to be put out of their misery once Oasis rose to prominence, saying, “You want to sell 5,000 limited-edition red vinyl seven-inches, that’s fine. Make music for a closet full of people in Bradford somewhere…but it doesn’t mean anything to anyone. Phil Collins has got to be chased out of the charts, and Wet Wet Wet. It’s the only way to do it, man, to fucking get in there among them and stamp the fuckers out.”
While much has been made about Noel’s massive spat with Collins over the years, there’s at least a few reasons why he was so upset. He may have simply not liked Collins’ stint in Genesis or loathed the soppy ballads, but looking at the rest of the charts around that time, he and Wet Wet Wet were a perfect indication of how far rock and roll had come in such a short amount of time.
The world needed people like The Jam and The Smiths, like Noel did in the early 1980s, and if they couldn’t provide that, he was going to do everything in his power to bring some guts back into rock and roll. And along with the grunge wave, Noel was practically the other side of the coin compared to Kurt Cobain, usually taking the more optimistic approach and having the perfect sense of self-belief.
It may not have worked out well for Wet Wet Wet at the time, but that’s normally how all great rock and roll movements should operate. Sure, there are going to be casualties along the way, but it’s better to have a movement be healthy than have mediocre artists overstay their welcome at the party for way too long.
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