Oasis and the shift in the press: the rise of lad mags; Britpop as the tabloids' first musical victims
Had some thoughts on the change in the attitude of the press around the time Oasis started coming up... and thoughts on lad culture, lad mags and the tabloids. It got too long for the main post I was writing, so for those of you that like to think, “holy shit, two cakes!” here's the second cake. I am still baking the first but you'll see it soon.
The twin blow of the British tabloid press and the rise of lad magazines was potent and career-ending, sometimes life-threatening, and the Gallaghers were the first time their harsh glare was turned to the world of music. In particular, indie music, because initially, Oasis were no Madonna; none of these bands were. Rock music hadn't been important since the 1970s. Why would anyone care about these underground figures that only the music press and their dedicated followers would know?
No, it changed with Britpop, with lad culture, with Oasis. Sure, Oasis didn't invent lad culture (a point an extremely frustrated Noel Gallagher has argued many, many times, and sometimes, so has Liam. In fact, their latest hitbacks at the Simon Price article are just another in a long line of pushing back on the narrative that Oasis were somehow responsible singlehandedly for all the yobbish, misogynistic, homophobic and leery behaviour up and down the country from the 90s onwards). But slowly, there did begin to emerge undeniable evidence of the Britpop obsessed, slightly nationalistic, women-demeaning, drunk-bantering lad who believes that British culture begins and ends with the pub and public misbehaviour and hooliganism; all that is just banter and makes you a legend, and if you object to it, you're ruining the lads' fun.
It just so happens they're also an Oasis fan, because Liam went out and loudly proclaimed that he's a real lad (to Noel's protests). That violence and destructive behaviour was rock n roll, yeah? And notably, Oasis were one of the first bands in UK pop culture to wear their football allegiances on their sleeves out loud and proud; before them, football—sport in general—was not as closely associated with music, the team you supported as a musician or music fan was more like an an afterthought or an aside fun fact. By 1996, you could count on a musical celebrity charity football match to reliably raise a lot of funds.
To go back to the beginning, one of Oasis' first big headlines (for non musical reasons, before Definitely Maybe ever came out) was because they got arrested off the ferry to Amsterdam. Why? Because the band members got into a fight with rival West Ham football fans. Another was when hooligans in Newcastle had heard the stories of Oasis being hooligans and had assumed they were up for a fight and pummelled Noel onstage. There's also the (slightly exaggerated) story of Noel smashing Johnny Marr's guitar on another troublemaker's head when they were making to attack Liam. And all this was just 1994, the very beginning of their career. Football hooliganism and violence had become inextricably linked with Oasis gigs. The damage was done. Oasis were the de-facto face of lad culture, and all the mayhem that followed made for sensational stories that scandalised those who weren't involved and thrilled those who worshipped it. But either way, fucking hell, did it shift millions of papers.
The Gallagher effect on the press would keep the tabloids' eyes on the UK music scene for the next 20 years and consequently go on to ruin not only the lives of other Britpop stars and their partners, including Lisa Moorish, who was victim to a phone hacking incident that outed the fact that Liam was her kid's dad, and became a big scandal about the invasions of privacy on the private lives of celebrities, and I'm pretty sure the added scrutiny from the tabloids and lad mags added so much of its own strain to Damon Albarn and Justine Frischmann's very public, frontperson-to-frontperson relationship that Justine quit music altogether soon after Elastica broke up. I'm also pretty sure it was the exact same emboldenment of the tabloid press, the anything-for-a-snap recklessness that led to Princess Diana's death in 1997, hounded by the very same British tabloids, but even in mourning her death there came no reflection.
In the decade after Britpop, the tabloids would continue to prowl about and stick their nose into musicians' private lives. I just came across a harrowing video this week of the press standing in wait as Pete Doherty of the Libertines was released from prison for a drugs possession charge, give the man a second to breathe! It really hit me when after talking to a few journalists who were asking questions that he was probably not in any shape to be answering immediately about his two weeks in prison, he was handed a phone to talk to his mum— the press couldn't even wait until he'd privately talked to his own mother before beginning their inquisitions. They tried to tape his conversation with his mum too, of course. I couldn't find the exact video again, but here's another from the same day. It made me squirm.
They hounded and worsened the lives of Pete Doherty, Lily Allen, Johnny Borrell and most notably, Amy Winehouse. Yup. No one ever learns to step back until its too late and someone is dead. We're only lucky Pete is still with us. The only reason we haven't seen anything as bad within indie music today is because no one is yet big enough for the press to chase for clicks, and social media has changed the power balance between musicians/celebrities and journalists a bit. And believe you me, they are trying with Kneecap. They haven't succeeded yet beyond once ‘revealing’ that they lived with Móglaí Bap's granny ‘because Belfast landlords won't rent to them anymore’, to which they said, “yeah, she's cool, we love living with granny :)”.
So yeah, the press scrutiny can be intense, and the Gallaghers were the first to feel its harsh gaze. It began with them.
