October 08, 2016
Liam Gallagher
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Let us continue with Gallagher’s immortal thoughts:
Surely, he argues, pointing to my iPhone, new bands should be filmed getting up to mischief. But, I say, that’s the issue. They are afraid, as there’s nowhere to hide. “Yeah, but if I was a 20-year-old in a band and somebody stuck that in my face, I”d stick it up their arse, or mine,” he says believably. “There is no excuse for young bands to act like grown men. When you”re older and have kids, cool it out a bit, but I get up to more mischief in my butcher’s than they do on their fucking tours…. The shit-kickers aren”t breaking through…”
The crude nihilism of this hardly needs pointing out, and it is not easy to decide whether it would be worse if Gallagher were merely playing a part in this interview, like Marie Antoinette playing lout rather than shepherdess, or if he really meant what he said and wanted to be taken at his own profoundly uninteresting word. Is authentic uncouthness better or worse than the assumed variety?
The obsequiousness of the interviewer toward a man who is either horrible or wanting to present himself as horrible is itself horrible. For example, the interviewer writes of Gallagher that “off stage, he offers quotes as good as Oasis choruses.” (Oasis is the name of his former band.) Here is one of those marvelous quotes, in which Gallagher speaks of the late David Bowie:
“He’s great, and that. But he’s not that good to get in the way of my shit.”
This is the kind of statement that, in his own estimate, makes Gallagher interesting. In which case, he must be easily amused.
But by far the most depressing aspect of the interview is that The Sunday Times is directed at the upper 5 or 10 percent of the British population, by both education and income. Whether the editors have estimated the cultural interests of the readership correctly, I do not know; but if they have, the end of civilization, at least in Britain, is nigh.
