Noel Gallagher has always been a bit elusive when it comes to admitting who he borrowed from musically. Though he’s openly professed his love for The Beatles in numerous interviews, he was often cautious about revealing the exact sources behind some of his most iconic riffs.
Whether confessing to sampling Grant Lee Buffalo for “Some Might Say” or sneaking parts of The Beatles’ “Come Together” into “Roll It Over,” the Oasis sound was essentially one big Beatles tribute. However, one of Noel’s most obscure lyrics was lifted almost verbatim from John Lennon himself.
Throughout Oasis’ legendary 1990s discography, the Beatles comparisons could get a little excessive. Tracks like “Up in the Sky” seemed to echo the style of songs like “Rain” or “Paperback Writer,” and by the time Be Here Now came out, the band wasn’t even subtle about it. Dropping Beatles references like “I Feel Fine,” “The Long and Winding Road,” and “Fool on the Hill” into their lyrics was starting to feel like overkill.
However, during the making of What’s the Story Morning Glory, the Beatles influence was kept relatively low-key. Sure, there were a few nods to their musical heroes, but the most obvious homage on the album came in the form of the piano riff from “Imagine” that opens “Don’t Look Back In Anger.”
Despite Liam’s obsession with emulating Lennon’s voice, Noel took the lead vocals on the song that borrowed one of Lennon’s phrases. As Noel revealed in old interviews, he became fixated on a line from an unreleased Lennon tape he heard. Lennon had made a quip about his brains going to his head, and that single line stuck with Noel.
Speaking about it, Noel recalled: “It was a cassette of John Lennon in the Dakota building right before he died. In that cassette, John Lennon says, ‘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.”
In “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” Noel also sings about starting a revolution from his bed, likely a nod to Lennon’s famous bed-ins with Yoko Ono in the late ‘60s. Back then, people thought Lennon had lost his mind, trading his Beatlemaniac persona for eccentric political stunts.
While Lennon could effortlessly toss off profound phrases, Noel crafted those words into his lyrics with precision, like a master architect building a structure. The meaning of “Don’t Look Back in Anger” might not be crystal clear, but each line is chosen more for how it feels and sounds than for making perfect sense.
This wasn’t the last time Oasis would sample Lennon’s work. A decade later, Liam would return the favor by incorporating Lennon’s actual dialogue into the final moments of “I’m Outta Time.” John Lennon may be the main reason the Gallagher brothers got into music in the first place, but their genius lies in how they took the eccentricities of The Beatles and reshaped them into something entirely their own.
