Credit: Far Out / YouTube Still
Thu 17 September 2026 11:30, UK
If there’s one thing Noel Gallagher absolutely loves, it’s being taken by surprise. It is certainly a trait that helps when you’ve spent most of your life in the proximity of Liam.
It’s also a feature that defines Oasis, being able to do the exact opposite of what anyone is expecting at any given time. Even if it’s as simple as holding an air of unpredictability on stage, or people constantly guessing whether they were going to keep sweet enough to last an entire tour run.
This is also a constant thing in conversations today. Are they faking their peace so they can endure sharing a stage together one last time? All of this isn’t exactly anything new. But it does give them an everlasting edge that keeps people enticed, because you just don’t know what they’re about to do at any given moment.
This stretches into their musical tastes, too. In fact, whenever one of them discusses another musician, it’s sometimes hard to tell whether they’re praising them or taking the piss, like their passion could be seen as genuine appreciation or some kind of complicated aggression regarding anybody else who got it right.
Although, when it comes to Noel, there is one person who seems to be immune to such ambiguities: David Bowie.
As he explained in 2012, “I always thought he was great, but I never really thought he was as great as I think he is now. I think he is up there with John Lennon and fucking Bob Dylan and those guys.”
David Bowie Noel Gallagher Credit: Alamy/Wikipedia
Praising his eclecticism in Culture Map, he continued, “His recorded output is fucking phenomenal. But every single style of music that he attempted, whether it be pop in the ’60s and this glam rock thing in the ’70s and the avant-garde electronic music in the late ’70s and then, like, electro-pop in the ’80s. All fucking truly amazing. And it’s beginning to blow me away, so I’ve been listening to it lots recently.”
Looking at someone like Noel, it’d be easy to guess his favourites. He’s probably like all of us and respects the classics while secretly knowing the Berlin trilogy was him at his best, him at his most creatively free. But what he also loves is how much Bowie could quite literally spawn out of nowhere and take you by surprise all over again. This was the case in 2013 with Bowie’s The Next Day – his first release in ten years at the time.
But what’s especially funny about this was that Noel wasn’t just taken by surprise musically. It literally came out of nowhere, to him at least, and was only brought to his attention by his wife, who charged in one day going on about a new song. “I came downstairs and my missus, Sara, said, ‘David Bowie’s got a new single out,’” he recalled.
“I’m like, ‘Are you sure it wasn’t ‘Heroes’?’ She shoots back: ‘I know what fucking ‘Heroes’ sounds like and it isn’t that!” he continued. “Nothing will match the jaw-dropping moment of going online and playing ‘The Stars (Are Out Tonight)’ for the first time. I’m lying on my bed listening to it, get to the end and think, ‘Hang on, it can’t be that good, I’ve got to listen to it again!’ I must have played the album 20 days in a row when it came out. I obsessed over it.”
Sadly, he also lamented that Bowie was the last of his kind, adding, “There won’t be another David Bowie, that’s for sure. Because the industry doesn’t want that. They don’t want a guy like David Bowie completely murdering Ziggy Stardust to go off and become another character.”
