Wednesday 24 May 2023 10:41 am | Updated: Wednesday 24 May 2023 10:46 am

Former Oasis frontman Noel Gallagher rips into Harry Styles in radio rant

Features Journalist

Former Oasis frontman Noel Gallagher has called Harry Styles and the current pop music landscape “embarrassing” in a rant on the radio.

He lamented the bygone era of the 1990s when he says bands on the radio, and in the mainstream media were “mavericks,” unlike today’s musicians who Gallagher implied had less control over their image.

“The music industry doesn’t live mavericks,” he said, speaking to Absolute Radio. “The reason there are no bands now is because in the 1990s Oasis and Primal Skream and Blur and Pulp, we were the mainstream. The music industry doesn’t like the mainstream being a load of fellas on drugs, drunk half the time, on a Tuesday.” .

“They don’t like that. They like people like Harry Styles. They said ‘wear this dress and shut it.’ Wear this, and sing that, and go home. That’s kinda what happened. The mavericks are still there, it’s just they’re not in the mainstream. Unfortunately where we brought up when Top of the Pops and the charts was everything, and I listen to the charts and it’s just embarrassing I think.”

Noel Gallagher has developed a reputation for sharing provocative opinions ever since the peak of the Oasis days in the 1990s.

He has spoken out plenty of times on his distaste for the current pop music landscape, as well as criticising modern cultural changes. In an interview with the Irish Independent he recently disparaged the idea of non-binary identities, saying: “They/them? Fuck off.” And Gallagher misgendered Sam Smith earlier this year, referring to the singer as “he” and calling them a “f***king idiot.”

Plenty of Styles’ fans have taken to social media to call Gallagher out for the way he spoke. “Noel Gallagher needs to keep Harry Styles’s name out his f***ing mouth,” wrote one.