Know Your Enemy

"On Yesterdays Chase Today, Noel’s lyrics have reached an almost admirable new nadir. Lines such as 'I’ll follow you down to the end of the world just to wait outside your window' cower in the mix like frightened, unflushable turds in the shitter. Luckily, Noel has found a new role as a sort of People’s Raconteur, and a new Noel album is an excuse for the Noel Gallagher Interview. And whenever Gallagher is called out on some questionable view, he responds with the line, 'Come back to me when you’ve headlined Glastonbury.' It’s easy to imagine William Blake trying to explain his visions of Christ and Noel raising his eyebrow in that mock-quizzical way, looking into the camera and saying, 'Tell you what, mate, come back to me when you’ve headlined Glastonbury.' In fact, Noel seems to lay claim to ownership of playing Glastonbury — and if I ever refer to it as 'Glasto', make me go there for the weekend as punishment — but then I guess it was the one time he was never questioned: on his musical conservatism, his dwindling songwriting, even his godawful lyrics. It was a time when 300,000 people could sing back drivel at the beaming songwriter. A kind of human mass-entertainment version of the dog having his vomit returned to him."

Given the evidence of Bad Vibes, his book about being on the fringes of the Britpop maelstrom, Luke Haines was never going to be particularly complimentary about Noel Gallagher's new album. Haines - quite rightly - has no time for Gallagher's hypocritical criticism of music's current blandness, holding him personally responsible for dad rock.

Haines' piece appears on the ever excellent site The Talkhouse. Other articles well worth a look are Gang Of Four's Andy Gill on Sleater-Kinney's No Cities To Love, an album that is still very much flavour of the month around these parts, and Andy Falkous on independent gig venues, which was of particular interest personally speaking in light of my skim-reading of the recent Music Venue Trust report and the references to the Point (though Falkous could write about anything and make it entertaining).

(Thanks to Chris for the link.)