Oasis’ Noel Gallagher has spoken out about the lack of a “working class” voice in the contemporary music industry, specifically shaming the UK’s Arctic Monkeys and Kasabian for not inspiring in the last decade another wave of working class acts to follow their lead.
“Shame on those two bands for a start because they didn’t inspire anybody else,” Gallagher said during an interview for BBC Master Tapes via NME. “The working classes have not got a voice any more. There doesn’t seem to be a noise coming from the council estates, you know what I mean?”
“Music is very middle class,” he continued. “I’d have eaten Bastille alive in an afternoon in the ’90s, one interview, destroyed, gone, never to be heard of again. Easy, had ’em for breakfast. My bass player summed it up, we’re constantly saying, ‘Where is the next band coming from?’ and he rightly says, ‘Never mind the band, where are the people?'”
After dismissing One Direction as “not a band” but a group, Gallagher lamented that the chart topping bands of the ’90s like Oasis, “Manic, Pulp, The Verve, Suede and Blur” have been “marginalised and side-lined”. “There’s not really been any great bands in the last 10 years,” he said.
“When I first started I wanted to get in the charts and wreck it, like stamp Phil Collins out and Wet Wet Wet, they’ve got to go, and all that 80s gear, we don’t need that anymore. I don’t see anything from the working class, I just don’t see it.”
In the same interview, as reported this week, Gallagher weighed into the U2 album giveaway controversy and its effect on the value of music, laying out a hypothetical scenario wherein the music industry has changed to a point where the next Coldplay album will be hand-delivered to fans by Chris Martin and come with some complimentary housework and an extra ten bucks.
“For the record,” he said, “no-one’s getting anything out of me for free.” Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds will release their new album Chasing Yesterday in March 2015.
