Over recent weeks, former Oasis bandleader Noel Gallagher has become quite the potty-mouthed chatterbox when asked to share his thoughts on… anything, really. Having dubbed Prince Harry a “fucking woke snowflake” and labeled Boris Johnson a “fat c**t” for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, Gallagher has been gleefully spouting sweary opinions like a man who has long since run out of fucks to give.
A cynic might wonder if Gallagher’s newly unleashed BritPop Roger Mellie act is born from the realisation that he has a new ‘greatest hits’ album to promote this week and has suddenly woken up to the fact that his last two UK singles charted at number 71 and number 77 respectively, and he hasn’t had a single penetrate the Top 20 since - checks notes - ah, 2011.
In a new interview with Absolute Radio’s Andy Bush and Richie Firth, Gallagher opens up about why he thinks people claim not to be fans of globally-popular Irish stadium rockers U2.
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- "If he hadn’t been around, we’d have had to get some fat old geezer who’d be telling us about how he played with Clapton in ’76." Noel Gallagher on how Johnny Depp ended up playing on an Oasis album
Essentially, Gallagher reckons the supposed hostility is actually down to his mate Bono’s “do-gooder” attitude, rather than the music itself.
He explains: “I get a bit frustrated when people are like ‘I don’t like U2. And I’m like no, what you are saying is you don’t like Bono.
“It’s like you’re not telling me you don’t like one single note that they’ve ever done. It’s rubbish, it’s nonsense.”
He added: “I’ve said this to him, so I’ll say it to you: nobody likes a do-gooder, nobody likes it. That’s why people like me, I’m a do-badder.”
Although Gallagher's characteristically mouthy hypothesis seems a little ungallant, he and Bono apparently have a very close – and honest – friendship. In 2019, Gallagher even declared that if he was ever faced with the unlikely scenario of having to dispose of a dead body, he’d choose Bono to help, stating: “We could dispose of the body somewhere in Africa and nobody would know”.
During the radio interview, Gallagher also compares U2's The Joshua Tree to Michael Jackson's Thriller, hailing the album "mad", which we're pretty sure is a compliment.
The Joshua Tree, not a greatest hits collection incidentally, contains three UK Top 10 singles, two of which - With Or Without You and I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For - were number 1 singles in the US.
Thriller, also not a greatest hits collection, contains no fewer than seven US Top 10 singles, two of which, Billie Jean and Beat It, reached number 1. It also happens to be the biggest-selling album of all time, with 66 million copies sold at the last estimate.
