Noel Gallagher could always be a little bit cagey when it came to who he ripped off. Although he would openly admit to being a fan of The Beatles in various interviews, he was sometimes a bit wary of giving away where the true inspiration behind his classic licks came from, whether that was him fessing up to openly sampling Grant Lee Buffalo for ‘Some Might Say’ or hiding bits and pieces of the lead guitar line of ‘Come Together’ at the end of ‘Roll It Over’. While everything about Oasis was one big Beatles tribute, one of the Britpop legend’s most obtuse lyrics was practically taken verbatim from John Lennon.
Looking through every one of the group’s classic albums in the 1990s, there was usually a period where the comparisons could get a bit out of hand. ‘Up in the Sky’ felt like the musical little brother of something like ‘Rain’ or ‘Paperback Writer’, and by the time of Be Here Now, seeing them overtly put Beatles titles into their song lyrics like ‘I Feel Fine’, ‘The Long and Winding Road’, and ‘Fool on the Hill’ was a bit of overkill.
In terms of the Fab influence, though, things were kept to a bit of a minimum when making What’s the Story Morning Glory. Outside of a few winks and nods to the group’s musical heroes, the closest that they came to sampling the group directly on the album came when they paid homage to the piano riff to ‘Imagine’ at the start of ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’.
But despite Liam’s apparent fixation with Lennon’s voice, Noel took the lead vocal on the song that lifted one of his phrases. Looking through some old interviews, Noel saw it as his duty to make a song out of Lennon talking about his brains going to his head when he heard an uncovered tape of him talking.
When discussing his classic songs, Noel said that he was driven to turn that line into ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’, saying, “[It was] a cassette of John Lennon in the Dakota building right before he died. In that cassette, John Lennon says the words, to the effect of, ‘then they’ll tell you that the brains you have had gone to your head’, and that line stuck with me. I thought I would fucking die if I didn’t shoehorn that into a song somewhere.”
Given the fact that Noel sings about starting a revolution from his bed, Lennon was probably talking about the different bed-ins that he participated in with Yoko Ono around the late 1960s. Since this was supposed to be the golden child of the greatest band in the world, it didn’t take people long to think that Lennon had gone insane and had completely forgotten about how to make Beatles songs.
While Lennon could rattle off those kinds of phrases off the cuff, Noel seemed to take those phrases and construct them the way architects structure a house. It’s not always easy to figure out what a tune like ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ is actually about, but listening to one phrase after the other, it’s as much about whether it rolls off the tongue well as it is about completely making sense.
That wouldn’t even be their last time sampling one of Lennon’s tapes, with Liam later returning the favour by throwing in actual dialogue from Lennon in the final section of ‘I’m Outta Time’ a decade later. Lennon is probably one of the only reasons why the Gallaghers decided to make music in the first place, but their true talent is taking those little eccentricities The Beatles had and twisting them into different shapes that no one had seen before.
