{"id":785272,"date":"2026-09-28T12:44:16","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T12:44:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/785272\/"},"modified":"2026-09-28T12:44:16","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T12:44:16","slug":"rock-stars-shouldnt-be-role-models","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/785272\/","title":{"rendered":"Rock stars shouldn’t be role models"},"content":{"rendered":"

Three things are eternal: death, taxes, and Oasis. No matter how many times they break up, they get back together. As well as announcing a new tour for next year, the band have just released a documentary sanitising the snark and brotherly in-fighting that made them what they were. \u2018The little things that used to annoy us about each other,\u2019 smiles<\/a> Noel Gallagher at one point, \u2018have all gone away.\u2019<\/p>\n

Most fans don\u2019t want preaching to<\/p>\n

Those who want their musicians to mellow with age, and maybe become an award-winning cheesemaker like that chap from Blur, will be delighted by the film. I say, no. Turn the prickishness back to eleven. To all rockers, young and old, I implore you: stay loud, loutish and dangerous to know.<\/p>\n

After all, why do we demand ageing artists evolve their sound or soften their manners just because they\u2019re quasi-OAPs? The Gallagher brothers have made a dozen group and solo efforts, all of which sound identical, which means that even their bad albums are perfect for bopping along to when you\u2019re three pints deep. Who can ask for anything more?<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s good news for lovers of bad behaviour like me. Look at other interviews or clips aside from the Don\u2019t Look Back in Anger documentary, and you can still find glimmers that, three decades on, Oasis have retained the attitude of snarling 20-somethings you daren\u2019t bring home to mother. And thank God; surely without that greasy spunkish vibe, you cease to be a rocker? As Lester Bangs, legendary critic for Rolling Stone, put it<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u2018For performing rock \u2018n\u2019 roll, or punk rock, or call it any damned thing you please, there\u2019s only one thing you need: NERVE. Rock \u2018n\u2019 roll is an attitude, and if you\u2019ve got the attitude you can do it, no matter what anybody says.\u2019 Rock, Bangs added, is not an art form, but \u2018a raw wail from the bottom of the guts.\u2019 It\u2019s not clever, but it is big. Sometimes volume matters more than skill, just so long as you\u2019re blowing the hair back of the crowd, and turning a wet Tuesday for your average rat racer into a tinnitus bacchanal.<\/p>\n

Being a rock star is a job, at the end of the day. That job is to make me envious. Each war-torn week should be filled to the gills with groupies, bloviating stadium solos and enough alcohol to poison a medium-sized river. Bad decisions should abound. Childish behaviour will be not just expected, but rewarded. Not for nothing has a certain story of Keith Moon, legendary wildman drummer for The Who, been told with glee for half a century as the apex of rock stardom. (In brief: be Keith Moon<\/a>. Drive a Rolls-Royce into your hotel pool, then calmly ask the front desk for your room key.)<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t have stories about Greek heroes slaying gorgons any more, or journeying to lands unknown. We must look to real men and women \u2013 stupid, brash, chemically unbalanced mega-children \u2013 for tales that are, if not inspirational, then at least evocative of awe in us. As we totter to work in morning traffic, save wisely for our pension, and don a mildly silly hat at the office Christmas party, we can dream now and then of what it would be like to wear ludicrous pants, buy mega-yachts we never use, and occasionally chew the head off a bat. To ape Billy Idol and party so much<\/a> on a tour in Bangkok that you cause $US140,000 worth of damage, and end up (quoth Idol) \u2018tranquilised and lashed to a military stretcher\u2019 by the Thai army, who promptly kick you out of the country.<\/p>\n

Do we want to do these things ourselves? Not really. But we\u2019d like to pretend that a universe exists where we too could be a star (or, if you\u2019ll forgive the pun, a Moon). The more outlandish their behaviour, the more enjoyable it is to live vicariously through them.<\/p>\n

The opposing example is to be like U2: the wannabe saints of the music world. Solid, pleasant players who release a free album to the entire world on iTunes () and spend most of their interviews talking about feeding the poor. These are laudable acts. The problem is they leave the kindly singer universally hated. Don\u2019t ask me why, but it proves my point. Righteous piety gets tiring fast. We like stars who act like incorrigible children, not schoolmarms.<\/p>\n

For proof, here\u2019s the infamous story of Bono trying to spread awareness of hideous rates of infant mortality from famine at a gig:<\/p>\n

BONO: Every time I clap my hands, a child in Africa dies.<\/p>\n

FAN IN THE CROWD: Stop fucking clapping then!<\/p>\n

The tale, like all the best anecdotes, is sadly false<\/a>. But the sentiment is real. Most fans don\u2019t want preaching to. We ain\u2019t a choir. Nope, we want devils who can make us dance. Give us louts like Liam, still putting in the hard yards by (despite what the cheery recent documentary purports) ageing not one iota, mentally or physically, since Tony Blair was in power and Oasis were the biggest band on the planet.<\/p>\n

You can even follow Gallagher Junior, and his still somehow-gloriously-sexy-I-don\u2019t-know-how-he-pulls-it-off monobrow on Twitter. Do so, and you\u2019ll be rewarded richly by nonsense one-word posts like \u2018BUMBACLART<\/a>!\u2019 (For those of you unfamiliar: a Jamaican phrase, Merriam-Webster tells us<\/a>, coined from bumbo, a coarse patois term for female genitalia, and claat, a Jamaican type of cloth. Combined, the words literally mean \u2018menstrual cloth.\u2019 It can be used to express anything from anger to joy to wild surprise.) Or wisdom like this little Liam gem<\/a>: \u2018There\u2019s only 2 sauces worth there wait in gold that\u2019s HP and HEINZ the rest can kiss my arse JESUS SAVES LG x.\u2019 And really, who can argue with that?<\/p>\n

The acid test is this: as long as their music stands the test of time, musicians are allowed a platinum-level get-out-of-jail-free card. If you wrote \u2018Jumping Jack Flash\u2019, or \u2018Seven Nation Army\u2019, songs that can make a mere mortal feel like a god for a minute or three, you may act the fool as much as you like. Because you make air guitaring feel like a high-octane escape from life, where even losers like me can prance like a golden god in four-four time. I guess what I\u2019m trying to tell you is, I said maybe, you\u2019re gonna be the one that saves me. And after all, you\u2019re my wonderwall-l-l-l.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Three things are eternal: death, taxes, and Oasis. No matter how many times they break up, they get…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":785273,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,1769,44520,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-785272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-oasis","tag-rock-n-roll","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=785272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785272\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/785273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=785272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=785272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=785272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}