(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sat 7 March 2026 14:30, UK
Noel Gallagher wasn’t one to apologise for being a student of rock and roll.
Although there’s no doubt that he wears his influences on his sleeves, some of them might be a little more noticeable than others whenever he starts writing some of his tunes. But for all of those claiming that Oasis wouldn’t have existed without The Beatles, there were just as many that were trying to tear ‘The Chief’ down just for the hell of it.
Granted, it’s not like Noel didn’t give everyone reason to have problems with him. He was brutally honest about every single artist that he came across, and if he took offence to something that Blur, Nirvana, or Radiohead were doing, he wasn’t afraid of getting in front of a camera and calling their names to their faces. He was a straight shooter, but that also meant that everyone could be upfront when they caught him red-handed while making some of his classic tunes.
It didn’t take a music scholar to know that he lifted the riff to ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’ from T Rex or adopted the opening piano line of ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ from John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, but he never played those riffs because he couldn’t think of anything else. He was a walking encyclopedia of rock and roll, and since the world was still immersed in musical irony thanks to grunge, this was him reminding everyone why those classic riffs from back in the day worked so well.
If Definitely Maybe already had a few obvious “borrowed” tunes, What’s the Story Morning Glory has a lot more originality to it. There are still a few obvious thefts like ‘Step Out’ taken from Stevie Wonder’s ‘Uptight’, but it’s not like anyone is questioning where Noel got ‘Wonderwall’ from. Those chords have been buried into the skulls of everyone who has ever played open mic nights in the past 25 years, and the reason why it works is that it’s frankly that iconic.
The chords might be simple, but simplicity normally does the job just fine on any soft pop song. Noel had a bit of magic on his hands when he came up with this tune, but even with the millions of covers of the tune that have existed for years, Noel remembered getting more than a little bit pissed when he heard Mike Flowers Pops doing a big band version of his tune.
Any band is liable to have the piss taken out of them, but when the papers accused Noel of stealing his signature tune from a comedy band, he wasn’t necessarily giddy, saying, “I get this call saying, ‘Y’know ‘Wonderwall’? You did write that, didn’t you?’ I mean, yeah. And they said, ‘There’s this tune making the rounds over in England.’ And I was like, ‘really?’ The story was, ‘Ahh, this blagging bastard. They found this tune from the 1950s.’ I listened to it and I was like, ‘Ah, you bunch of dicks.’”
In all honesty, it’s not like the Mike Flowers Pops version is absolutely terrible by any stretch. For anyone who has a high tolerance for artists like Richard Cheese, it’s actually pretty good for what it is, but given that everyone knows about the original, the joke seems to wear out its welcome pretty quickly.
It might have been a little bit funny at the time, but even with all of the scorn that Oasis received back in the day, there’s a reason why ‘Wonderwall’ has stood the test of time over the easy listening version of the tune. They were known as the bad boys of rock for a while, but no one’s going to forget those moments where they wear their hearts on their sleeves.