Though worthy of a little more respect than a covers band, Oasis were never shy to brandish their cherished musical influences. The most obvious example would be Liam Gallagher’s highly publicised John Lennon era, during which he wore his hair long, sported circular tinted shades and even named his firstborn son Lennon after the late Liverpudlian.
Throughout the 1990s, the Gallagher brothers rekindled Beatlemania with their unconcealed obsession. In a cultural ripple, Oasis treated the band as a deity, echoing John Lennon’s controversial comments about God when claiming they’d become “bigger” than The Beatles.
“Oasis were young, fresh and writing good tunes,” McCartney once told Q, reacting to such swaggering statements. “I thought the biggest mistake they made was when they said, ‘We’re going to be bigger than The Beatles.’ I thought, ‘So many people have said that, and it’s the kiss of death.’ Be bigger than The Beatles, but don’t say it. The minute you say it, everything you do from then on is going to be looked at in the light of that statement.”
It’s up to the listeners to decide whether Oasis managed to summit this Everest. I will, however, remind you that Oasis named their fourth studio album, Standing on the Shoulder of Giants, for a reason.
This reason being, of course, that Oasis welcomed musical taste into their songwriting as well as their wardrobe. Liam wasn’t a prolific songwriter for the Mancunian legends, but when he did, he sought a bit of Lennon-McCartney wisdom.
“My song ‘Little James’ was inspired by ‘Beautiful Boy’ and ‘Hey Jude’. More ‘Beautiful Boy’,” Gallagher revealed in an interview feature for Uncut. “People who’ve got any soul will realise that there’s a day when you go home and put your feet up and cuddle your kids. If anyone slags it off, they’ve either got no heart or they don’t know what the meaning of life is. They just go out and do-do-do-do-do the same thing every day. So fuck them. You can’t win with these people.”
Noel also used several Beatle-inspired progressions for some of Oasis’ big hits. ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ from 1995’s (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? was famously inspired by Lennon’s progression for ‘Imagine’ and David Bowie’s ‘All the Young Dudes’.
It turns out Lennon also inadvertently wrote one of the song’s lines in a memoir. “I got this tape in the United States that had apparently been burgled from the Dakota Hotel, and someone had found these cassettes,” Noel recalled during a 2020 Track-by-Track feature on (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? “Lennon was starting to record his memoirs on tape. He’s going on about ‘trying to start a revolution from me bed because they said the brains I had went to my head.’ I thought, ‘Thank you, I’ll take that!’”
Elsewhere in Oasis’ collection of singles and seven studio albums, we can also find several more direct references to The Beatles and some of their classic songs.
