You may or may not like what I'm about to say, I don't know, but it could go either way ...

In a recent post here there's an old news clip of one of Noel's ex girlfriends who claimed leaving him was the best decision she ever made. She said the stories of him being a hooligan and breaking into pawn shops were completely made up and he just sat in his room all the time writing songs and thinking about becoming a rock star while mooching off her and his mother. She also said he wasn't inspired by the Beatles at all; he only had one of their records, Sgt. Pepper, and he never listened to it. He liked ABBA.

Honestly, I tend to believe her. The part about a bunch of his songs originally being written for her is always going to be suspect, but the rest of it makes sense. Because if you know enough about Oasis and the Beatles you know they didn't rip them off AS much as people say they do. And most of his lyrics revolve around escaping the mediocrity of working class life and becoming famous.

Rock and Roll Star is openly about ... sitting in your room at night thinking about becoming a rock star. That's what he'd been doing. I don't think he was a hoodlum. I think he was a crotchety moody hermit who thought getting famous was the ultimate validation in life.

And I just started reading Tony McCarroll's book ... I'm sure there's more to come that I haven't read but so far I've read that Noel hated the Smiths and was ashamed of his Irish heritage contrary to what he was telling the press years later.

But here's the thing, I'm not bringing any of this up to denigrate him. I like hearing about his flaws and stories about him that he wouldn't necessarily want people to hear, because it makes him more relatable. I wish I'd known when I was a teenager that he started out as a timid shut-in who harbored big dreams of being a famous artist in a vain attempt to fill in whatever was missing. That would have been better for me to hear than this unrelatable tripe about being a street thug that he apparently made up.

People rip on Imagine as hypocritical because it doesn't reflect on John's personal life at all. I think it's still a beautiful song. Anyone can still listen to it and put their own meaning to it.

I guess what I'm saying is I know there's some unsavory facts about my musical heroes but I don't worry about it. I like getting a clearer picture of where the music came from but it's still meaningful to me in a personal way.

It was the ingredients: two frontmen with contrasting personas who were immensely photogenic and witty, whose voices were glorious in harmony, who aimed to breathe new energy into British music and who produced effortless-sounding melodies. That was all unignorably Beatlesesque and there is definitely plenty of Beatles influence in the actual music (even a number of erm stolen riffs), although it’s not the sole influence of course – after all a lot of time had passed and punk happened.

But of course you can’t actually compare anyone to The Beatles. None of Oasis' other influences would have existed without them. They were pioneers making up the whole rock star thing as it happened – they were changing the culture while the culture was changing them. That was never going to take place again. Oasis never had (or could have had) the extreme worldwide appeal or influence of The Beatles and Noel knows that. Doesn’t mean you can’t love Oasis more. Doesn't mean Oasis wasn't exciting for a different generation. But history is history.

Beatles & Stones.

Yeah