Stars Who Can't Stand Oasis

British rock band Oasis, led by guitarist-songwriter Noel Gallagher and vocalist Liam Gallagher, are famous for two things, only one of which is being a hugely successful outfit. Sure, they were definitely huge — their 70 million-plus album sales, pair of Grammy nominations, immortal hit single "Wonderwall," legendary status in the U.K., and still-rabid fan base can all attest to that. But the Gallagher brothers are arguably even more famous for having personalities that can be just a wee bit abrasive — to the point that they feuded constantly during their career and broke up in 2009 largely because they simply could not get along.

As one might expect, the Gallaghers themselves were not the only ones who harbored this sentiment. Over the years, the always-outspoken duo have never been shy about igniting controversy — which in this case pretty much means "trashing their peers in the press" — and as such, all of their fellow celebrities who wouldn't mind giving one or both brothers a swift kick in the keister could get together for a pretty crowded party.

The truth about Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke is that he's never been shy about expressing himself, and in a 1995 interview with London Calling, as Oasis were on the cusp of international fame, he didn't hesitate to offer his scathing opinion when asked about the newcomers. "They're a joke, aren't they?" he deadpanned. "[They] act stupid and write really primitive music and people say 'oh it's so honest' ... It's a freak show" (via Citizen Insane). 

Of course, the Gallaghers did not remain silent on Radiohead in a number of subsequent interviews. Most notably, Noel Gallagher absolutely trashed the band (while pumping up his own songwriting skills) during a 2015 Esquire interview. "Technically, there's better songwriters than I am," he said. "Have other people's songs ever really touched a generation, though? Radiohead? When do people listen to them?" He went on to describe giving the band "one more chance" by checking out their Coachella set a few years prior, deciding once and for all that they were "not for us" as soon as Yorke started singing. Somewhat ironically, Yorke had long ago used the vocal skills so maligned by Gallagher to offer his definitive statement on Oasis. During a 1996 session for the CBC, Radiohead and members of the Posies broke out into an impromptu version of "Wonderwall" that saw Yorke doing his best, most mockingly nasal Liam Gallagher impression; at its conclusion, he snickered, "It's always good to make fun of Oasis."

Among the many false things you might believe about the Rolling Stones is that guitarist Keith Richards is actually immortal, but he has been making music long enough to have earned the right to his opinion about any band in existence, and his opinion of Oasis is... well, unfavorable. In 1997, he famously and bluntly opined that the band was "crap" (via the Irish Times), and in the ironically titled 2003 book "The Rolling Stones: Off the Record," Richards was moved to elaborate. "These guys are just obnoxious," he said of the Gallagher brothers. "Grow up, and then come back and see if you can hang. I don't hear anything there, it's all just retro to me."

That same tome quoted the comically belligerent response of Liam Gallagher, who apparently was a little tired of his idols trashing his band. "All these snakes coming out the closets, all these old farts," he said. "I will beat the f****** living daylight s*** out of them. That goes for ... [Keith] Richards ... I'll hold you up with a good right hook." Funnily enough, during a conversation with Absolute Radio, Gallagher recalled an encounter with Richards at a bar in the Bahamas in more recent years that was slightly less antagonistic. "[Richards] suddenly turns around and says, 'Ah, you're still around, are you?'" Gallagher remembered. "'Your band, you were quite interesting there for a while.' And I was like, 'I could actually say the same to you'" (via WMMQ).

It's no secret that Oasis is musically indebted to the Beatles, the consensus greatest band of all time, to an even greater extent than — well, pretty much all rock bands. There are Beatles references aplenty to be found in their tunes — references that tend toward the overt, and that usually consist of simply dropping the titles of Beatles songs such as "Fool on the Hill" and "Yellow Submarine" into their lyrics. They've also commented on the similarity directly, unfortunately, with Noel famously telling MTV in 1996 that Oasis were bigger than the Beatles (a remark that he has since walked back, saying he was high at the time) and Liam telling Little White Lies in 2016 that Oasis "did in three years [what] took the Beatles eight."

It may not surprise you to learn that Sir Paul McCartney was never much for these comparisons. In 1997, at the height of Oasis' success, McCartney flatly stated that they were "derivative and they think too much of themselves. They mean nothing to me" (via Irish Times). McCartney revisited the subject in a 2016 interview with Q Magazine. "I thought the biggest mistake they made was when they said 'We're going to be bigger than The Beatles.'" he said. "So many people have said that, and it's the kiss of death ... The minute you say it, everything you do from then on is going to be looked at in the light of that statement."

Paul McCartney's relationship with Beatles lead guitarist George Harrison may have been a bit contentious, but when it came to Oasis, they were on the same page. Harrison publicly registered his distaste for Oasis on several occasions, and his critiques may well have hurt the Gallagher brothers the most. You see, technically, the first solo album by a Beatle was a rather avant-garde 1968 LP by Harrison called "Wonderwall Music" — the soundtrack to a little-seen art film from that same year. That album's title inspired Noel Gallagher to come up with a far more interesting title for Oasis' biggest hit, which he had written as "Wishing Stone." Throughout the late '90s, Harrison slagged the band in various interviews as being uninteresting and outdated, saving his harshest comments for Liam. 

Speaking with Independent Radio News in 1996, Harrison said, "I think it was proven when you see the band without [Liam] singing ... I mean, he is just excess baggage, I think. All he does is make people think what a bunch of prannies they are." Liam, of course, was none too happy about one of his idols trashing him. Speaking with MTV News that same year, he said that while he still loved the Beatles and Harrison as a songwriter, "as a person I think he's a f****** nipple ... It goes to show, all that time in the Beatles and all that f****** stuff that he's still f****** stupid" (via Rock and Roll Garage).

The relationship between Oasis and their mid-'90s Britpop peers Take That has always been a bit complicated. Frontman Robbie Williams was buddies with Liam Gallagher for years, but their relationship turned sour when Noel, as is his wont, saw fit to publicly trash Williams by calling him the "fat dancer from Take That." A not-so-friendly competition between the two bands ensued, with Williams taunting the Gallaghers over his band's success and publicly offering to fight Liam at the 2000 Brit Awards.

In 2022, during a conversation with Apple Music, Williams went into detail about his distaste for Oasis, saying, "They were gigantic bullies ... to the whole industry, everybody in it, and I didn't like that." While acknowledging that the brothers may have grown as people in the intervening years, Williams admitted that he found it hard to put his feelings about the pair behind him. "A lot of that still remains inside me," he said. "There's a lot of me that's like, they're f****** bullies, them. I don't like bullies" (via Cosmopolitan). To his credit, and perhaps due to the fact that they were once friends, Liam Gallagher responded with a surprisingly thoughtful post on X (formerly Twitter). "I've never bullied anyone in my life," he wrote. "I'm a massive p*** taker for sure and probably gone a little too far sometimes but if I've ever hurt anyone's feelings I apologize."

The U.K. band Elastica only made a minor splash in the United States, but in Britain, they burned brightly, if only for a short time. Their self-titled 1995 debut album shot to No. 1 on the U.K. charts, and charismatic frontwoman Justine Frischmann managed to also become a staple of the tabloids by way of her romance with Damon Albarn, the frontman for Blur (a band which famously had beef with Oasis that has since been squashed). Frischmann's problem with the Gallagher brothers, though, was due to an unsurprising circumstance — a crude remark made about her in the press by Liam.

It seems that the singer made a comment to British mag Smash Hits along the lines of how he would not kick Frischmann out of bed for eating crackers, which perked her ears right up. "Next time I see Liam Gallagher he's for it," she retorted in a subsequent interview. "What a sad c***. I mean, I'd think he was being ironic if he wasn't so f****** thick" (via The Guardian). Decades later, Frischmann demonstrated that her feelings about the Gallaghers had not changed. In response to a since-deleted 2016 tweet from Liam Gallagher that was seen as homophobic — one which drew plenty of blowback from his celebrity peers — she responded simply, "Oasis and homophobia are both outdated."

The Stone Roses, formed in the early '80s, were a towering influence on Britpop in general — and perhaps particularly on Oasis, as both bands were from Manchester. The Gallagher brothers have openly spoken about their admiration for the band, and Liam Gallagher even formed a supergroup with the Roses' John Squire, a partnership which produced the well-received album "Just Another Rainbow" in 2024. When it comes to Roses frontman Ian Brown, though, the admiration decidedly is not reciprocated, and for a pretty understandable reason.

The Roses broke up in 1996 when Squire, whom Brown said had gotten heavily into cocaine, abruptly departed the band with nothing more than a phone call. In a 1998 interview with the Daily Record, Brown said that he had warned Oasis about their own cocaine use, which was quickly becoming legendary — and that they had ignored the advice. He went on to opine that, perhaps as a result of this, the band were failing to challenge themselves artistically. "It's 1998 — what's the sense in trying to be the Beatles?" he asked rhetorically. "Liam is a young kid who has looked up to me ... [but] they are boring now. They don't have anything to say." Brown, having stuck the knife in, then proceeded to twist it, saying, "Musically, they do nothing for me. The Stone Roses, at their height, were capable of reaching places that Oasis can only dream about."

Scottish singer-songwriter Lewis Capaldi burst onto the scene in 2018 with his single "Someone You Loved," which scored him a No. 1 U.S. hit and a Grammy nomination, and he's done pretty well for himself in the intervening years. His second single, "Before You Go," also cracked the top 10, pushing his debut album "Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent" to double-platinum status, and his 2023 release "Broken By Desire to Be Heavenly Sent" also yielded a Hot 100 single in "Forget Me." These achievements, however, failed to impress Noel Gallagher.

In a 2019 interview with Radio X, Gallagher curtly dismissed Capaldi as an "idiot" when the young singer was offered by the interviewer as an example of a talented modern artist from the U.K. In response, Capaldi took to Snapchat with a few comments of his own. "What a day. It's Father's Day and I'm getting slagged off by a man who's old enough to be my [dad]," he said. "I've never been more happy. Happy Father's Day, Noel." A few days later, Capaldi wore a T-shirt emblazoned with Gallagher's face framed by a heart during a performance and later posed for a photo with Liam (with whom Noel was still bitterly feuding at the time). Noel shot back with a profane rant in which he inexplicably referred to Capaldi as "Chewbacca," prompting Capaldi to... change his social media profile picture to one of the famous Wookiee (via BBC). Hard guy to rattle, that Lewis Capaldi.

The Kaiser Chiefs released their first album in 2005, and while they never made a huge splash stateside, they quickly became adored in the U.K. Noel Gallagher made enemies out of the band when he (wait for it) trashed them in the press in 2008, coming with an admittedly pretty sick burn during a conversation with the BBC. "The Monkees haven't split up, they're just going under the name of the Kaiser Chiefs," he said. "I did drugs for 18 years and I never got that bad as to say, 'You know what? I think the Kaiser Chiefs are brilliant.'" (Of course, the untold truth of the Monkees is that they kind of were.)

It didn't take long for a response from Chiefs drummer Nick Hodgson, who shrugged it off, calling the remarks "a bit of sport" — before noting that Oasis seemed to single out another band to insult every time they're about to put out a new album. "When I was 17 and Noel was going on about Blur, I was watching it," he said. "And now I'm 30 and he's 50 and he's talking about us, it's brilliant" (via Irish Examiner). The following year, Chiefs guitarist Andrew White was not quite so gentle when asked about the exchange of disses. "We have no time for him. Music is an art but he doesn't appreciate music for what it is," White said of Noel. "It shows what a bitter old man he has become" (via Digital Spy).

If one were to get the idea that the boys in Oasis get a lot of their peers peeved at them by spontaneously offering up their negative views of every band not called Oasis during interviews, well, one would not be far off the mark. Yet another case in point: Tim Rice-Oxley of Keane, whom Noel Gallagher snidely remarked on during a 2005 sitdown for NME's print edition. Asked about the band, Gallagher said, "Traditionally speaking, the three biggest t**** in any band are the singer, the keyboardist, and the drummer. I don't need to say anything else." As the keyboardist for the band in question, Rice-Oxley did have something else to say.

Speaking with NME's digital edition for himself and presumably his band's singer and drummer, Rice-Oxley said, "The biggest t**** in a band? We don't really care. I think he's a c*** to be honest. He was in a band that was very brilliant in the mid-90s and now they're just not important anymore. No one really cares." While Oasis continued to sling arrows at Keane over the ensuing years, Rice-Oxley's remarks were the closest any member of the band came to engaging them. After Oasis broke up in 2009, Keane even covered the band's "Cast No Shadow" at that year's V Festival, which the brothers had pulled out of. 

The feud between Oasis and indie rockers Bloc Party was a musician feud that got right out of hand, and it started off in familiar fashion in 2005; someone asked Liam Gallagher what he thought of them, and he responded rudely, which was par for the course. What he didn't count on was frontman Kele Okereke being a walking dictionary who holds onto a grudge for dear life. Speaking with Uncut in 2007, Okereke let loose his formidable vocabulary in trashing the Gallagher brothers. "I think Oasis are the most overrated and pernicious band of all time," he said. "They have made stupidity hip. They claim to be inspired by the Beatles ... they have failed to grasp that the Beatles were about constant change and evolution. Oasis are repetitive luddites."

As fate would have it, Bloc Party were performing at the Rock en Seine festival in 2009, which Oasis was to have headlined before pulling the plug on their band — and Okereke was happy to make the announcement. "Oasis have cancelled. So I'd like to take this moment to say, that's a shame, isn't it guys?" he deadpanned. "So, I guess by default, we are headlining." Then, as guitarist Russell Lissack began to strum the opening chords to Oasis' "Supersonic," Okereke moved in for the death blow. "I'd like to dedicate this next song," he said, "to anyone who really, really wanted to see those inbred twins." Safe to say that Bloc Party won that one.