“I always switch that part off”: Noel Gallagher on the one Rolling Stones song he can’t listen to
The most important part of any great artist is to be open to new ideas. Even though someone might be the grand leader of the group that writes all the songs, it’s important to be generous when someone has an arrangement and entertain the idea that something that you didn’t come up with might serve the song in the right way. Noel Gallagher did eventually need to understand that kind of compromise during the second half of Oasis’s tenure, but he could tell when some of his heroes made things too overblown.
And considering this is the same man who oversaw the entire production of Be Here Now, it’s safe to say that he knows a thing or two about what ‘overblown’ means. That entire record was packed to the gills with some of the strangest detours that anyone heard on a Britpop record, and for as much as they wanted ‘All Around the World’ to be their version of ‘Hey Jude’, it was always going to be tricky trying to get millions of people to get on board with a song saying everything’s going to be alright delivered in Liam Gallagher’s snarl.
But despite Noel practising a bit more restraint, his interest in the production side of things never waned. Because if you think about it, Noel was the less reprehensible version of Phil Spector during his 1990s run. He knew that the best part of recording was layering different parts on top of each other, and throughout the rest of his career, he tried to incorporate whatever he could into his music if it would work.
That might have led to some strange detours that left rock purists shaking their heads, but his collaboration with people like The Chemical Brothers wasn’t a case of him cashing in. He simply wanted to make something new out of his usual wheelhouse, and when listening to what he did on his debut solo record with High Flying Birds, he was more than happy to stretch out beyond anything Oasis had done.
Some of the production does end up feeling a bit like the trippy moments of Dig Out Your Soul, but there are a lot more grandiose moments in the mix as well. ‘The Death of You and Me’ feels like ‘The Importance of Being Idle’ if Paul McCartney wrote it, but when working on ‘Everybody’s on the Run’, Noel seemed to go full-on baroque pop, complete with a massive choir setting the stage before he comes in on the verses.
While the opening does bring to mind visions of when The Rolling Stones used a choir on ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’, Noel said that he would have wanted nothing to do with how Mick Jagger and Keith Richards approached that tune, saying, “Oh, I fucking hate that one! Not the song, I do like the song, but that bit in the beginning – [sings] ‘I saw her today…’ – I always switch that part right off.”
The tune is one of The Stones’ absolute finest moments, but that might have to do with the way that Noel saw the band in their prime. For any major Beatles fan, The Stones were their edgy counterpart, and compared to something like ‘Gimme Shelter’ or ‘Street Fighting Man’, this must have felt like them going too far in the opposite directions, complete with the kind of chipper melody that could pass for one of McCartney’s tunes.
Still, that shouldn’t detract from what The Stones did during their prime. Noel may have seen them as the archetype for what a pure rock and roll band sounded like at their best, but if their deep cuts had taught their audience anything, it’s that no idea was a bad one when Jagger and Richards got ahold of it.
