“Fuck off”: Noel Gallagher’s awkward first encounter with Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie
Knebworth, 1996: Hundreds of thousands of music fans bake in the summer sun, having travelled for miles to witness a group of lads from Manchester play rock and roll music. As a helicopter flies overhead, the feeling of musical history being written increases by the second. By the time Oasis launch into their first number, ‘Columbia’, their position as the biggest rock and roll band in the world is cemented. In all that chaos, it is easy to forget that the Liam Gallagher-fronted outfit did it all with an independent record label.
Independent labels have been around since the dawn of music publishing, but they came to form a much more definable ‘scene’ in the wake of the punk rock boom in the 1970s. The DIY spirit that had been ushered in by bands like the Sex Pistols and Buzzcocks spurred countless young people on to form their own bands and, in many cases, their own record labels. These labels weren’t bound by the same profit-driven manifestos of the major labels, so their output was often much more experimental, subversive, and – for want of a better word – cool.
By the mid-1990s, once Manchester’s Factory Records had gone down the pan, the coolest independent record label around was Creation. Founded by Alan McGee in 1982 as a means of supporting the underground bands he loved, Creation rose to prominence thanks to Scottish acts like The Jesus and Mary Chain and Primal Scream. However, McGee’s most successful move came in 1993, when he signed Oasis after seeing them perform at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow.
Oasis had already been around for a few years, playing odd gigs in Manchester and struggling to gain much traction in a city dominated by acid house. It was signing for Creation that gave the Gallagher brothers their big break, and thrust them into the heart of the indie music scene, setting them on a path to performing those historic dates at Knebworth three years later.
At the time they were signed by McGee, Primal Scream was Creation’s flagship act and, according to Noel Gallagher, one of their only redeeming artists. “When Oasis signed to Creation, they took us to the warehouse where all their stock was. They said ‘You can choose anything you want’ and we just started laughing. We were just like, ‘We’ve already got Screamadelica. The rest of it’s shit.’”
Despite Gallagher’s appreciation for the band’s 1991 masterpiece album, the songwriter’s first encounter with frontman Bobby Gillespie didn’t quite go to plan. The Oasis guitarist once recalled, “The first thing Bobby Gillespie said to me, which I’ll never forget, was ‘What’s your favourite Bob Marley B-side?’ and I thought ‘Really? Fuck off. Fuck. Off.’”
Gillespie, much like Gallagher, is a self-confessed music obsessive with an endlessly broad taste and a deep knowledge of different sounds, styles, and genres. Whether his Marley-based query was rooted in genuine curiosity or a sense of sizing Gallagher up as Creation’s fresh meat, the pair quickly moved past the initial awkwardness of their meeting.
“Someone handed me a guitar that night and said, ‘Play me your favourite song,’” Gallagher remembered. “I played ‘This Guy’s In Love With You’ by Burt Bacharach. He didn’t fucking say much after that, and we were firm friends ever since.” Tragically, though, Gillespie never did find out what Gallagher’s favourite Bob Marley B-side is, our money is on ‘Every Need Got an Ego to Feed’.
