Don't Look Back At Me In Anger You Cunts

 

This one is for my best mate, Nick, who loves Oasis. 

It's also for my mate Ray and others who hate Oasis. So there's a little something in it for every cunt. Ray specifically asked for this one. See, we do take requests. 

 

In fact, there have been plenty of requests over the years: James Corden, Ed Sheeran, James Corden, Dua Lipa, James Corden, Kasabian, James Corden... You get the picture. There are more deserving people to UNCUNT than the Gallagher brothers. But we're not here to people please or go for the obvious choices. (Puff Daddy). We're here to call people cunts.

 

One of our newer readers told me last week, after the Charli XCX debacle, that UNCUNT was "speaking truth to power". It's true. With great power comes great responsibility. If some fucker abuses that privilege, it's our duty to pillory them. We will deliver on that promise. So buckle up, Nick! Let's get into it. 

I've been looking back in anger recently...

 

I know, I know. You're not meant to. I just slipped inside the eye of your mind. Or was it my mind? I'm not too sure now. The senior Gallagher brother wasn't particularly clear on whose mind one was meant to slip inside of. 

 

I suppose it doesn't really matter now. It's all completely and utterly irrelevant now isn't it? Just like every Rolling Stones tour post 1972, every embarrassing Sex Pistols reunion and every Shed Seven Christmas concert, the renewal of Oasis's love affair with the British public is an irrelevance in 2025. 

 

Don't get me wrong, Oasis were absolutely fucking brilliant from 1993-97. But not now! Morrissey once said a similar thing about his idol David Bowie. He's a cunt isn't he, Morrissey?

 

But let's not get sidetracked just yet.

This is a difficult one for me. Like my mate Nick, I bloody love Oasis. They're an important part of our childhood. They're national treasures. In a way. 

 

So, pinpointing when exactly they became cunts is tricky. First off, let's dispose of the facts. Are they actually cunts? While it's important to fact check, it's also a bit late to be asking that now. I've already called them cunts. 

So, on that basis, let's just crack on. 

 

Calling them cunts will of course be problematic for many of you. We know that. If you want the Samaritans helpline at the end and a disclaimer about being affected by any of the issues raised, you've come to the wrong place I'm afraid. Grow up.

But, genuinely, this one has had me questioning myself. It's a bit like when we asked which of the Strokes are cunts, all those years ago. Spoiler alert: it was all of them, but still, that never obstructed us from accessing the unrestrained joy of their first three albums. 

 

The 'first three albums' thing is key here. It applies to Oasis too. In fact, many bands fall into the 'first three albums' category. Three great albums get made, and then they fall off a fucking cliff. They've spunked their load. 

 

Why don't they just leave it there? "Our work here is done," sort of thing. When you think of great bands of the past – the Beatles, the Jam, the Smiths – their legacy has remained pristine, unquestionable, near perfect, because they quit while they were ahead. They didn't carry on flogging the horse until it died. They got off the horse and did other things. They sealed their legacy in the tomb marked eternally brilliant.  

 

Oasis didn't do that, did they? They rode the horse into the ground, like those donkeys you see on holiday in Spain where you've a good mind to report the owners for animal cruelty and contact a donkey shelter back home. 

 

Liam on a donkey. That's a lovely image, actually. Whipping it with a stick he's ripped from a palm tree. Liam as Jesus of Nazareth riding into Jerusalem. What would Liam do? He'd probably call someone a cunt. Not sure how that would have gone down in the Bible. Full of cunts isn't it, the Bible.

 

But let's not get sidetracked. 

 

Very few bands continue to be good after the first three. However, sadly, that doesn't often mean they stop there. Having spunked their loads, they continue wanking away, hoping for a dribble of seminal fluid to leak out. But they've dried up. They suffer the music version of erectile dysfunction, but instead of going celibate, they reach for the Viagra and somehow bust another nut. Another release. Another issue. 

 

Don't worry, I'm not doing the bukkake analogy. We did that last week. Instead I'm imagining a mentally ill person of no fixed abode compulsively masturbating in public. A vagrant fisting away at his withered penis. Liam, as a deranged hobo running around the streets of Burnage, flashing. A metaphor perhaps for the Oasis reunion tour.

 

Not sure where that came from. But anyway, let's move on. 

 

This one is also similar to when we listed all the bands who don't know when the fuck to quit. Although, to be fair to Oasis they did quit! After smashing each other in the face with a cricket bat. 

 

In that old edition of UNCUNT, we said that REM releasing 15 albums was too many albums and described it as "like sitting on the toilet and doing a large and satisfying poo and then getting greedy and trying to poo out more and more until eventually you get piles." Well, Oasis have released seven studio albums, five compilations (money-grabbing cunts) and two live. That's 14 albums. Someone pass Noel the Anusol, drop his pants, and splay his rectum. Not for a pegging; to deal with the haemorrhoids.

When I asked my long-term collaborator to contribute to this one, I wasn't expecting an illustration. Better still, I wasn't expecting an illustration of Liam and Noel with their little willies out. But here we are. There's no turning back now is there. Their cocks are out. The dicks are exposed. 

 

Small, leathery, wrinkled, flaccid penises. Pissing in your face. Cos that's what they've done isn't it, with those ticket prices? Come on, you know it. You're all going, I don't need to namecheck you. Nick. You've all opened up, gargled, and swallowed their wee. Sorry to be crude, but you have.

Right, that's the piss-gargling analogy done. I might return to that later. But for now, let's get under the skin of these cunts.

When you think about the 'first three albums' rule, what happens with some acts is that they then go on to do other things. They explore the range of their creative imaginations. They don't just keep plugging the Fender guitar back into the Marshall amp and turning it up to 10. 

 

In fact, often there's the inverse rule. Some great bands' first three albums aren't their best, but they grow into themselves and push to get better and better. The Jam's earliest albums aren't great. Fuck it, the Beatles' early albums aren't the finest records ever committed to vinyl! Nor the Rolling Stones' or the Kinks'. Radiohead's debut is ropey. But the Beatles, the Jam, the Kinks, Radiohead, the Who, the Stones and, indeed, Oasis's biggest rivals Blur, all went on to experiment. 

 

They tried new instruments, they went in different artistic directions, they made concept albums. In the case of the Beatles – Oasis's biggest influence and heroes – they went on to reinvent popular music as we know it; ushering in an era of limitless possibilities that created whole new genres. Blur's main songwriter went on to make music with musicians from Mali and animated cartoons! 

Did Oasis do that? Did they fuck. The nearest Oasis ever got to innovation was when they appeared as guest vocalists on other artists' dance tracks. The Chemical Brothers and Death in Vegas come to mind. They may have felt that covering the Jam's glowering discordant lo-fi masterpiece Carnation was a great leap forward. It wasn't. It had Steve Craddock on guitar for a start. Craddock has never really leapt forwards has he. He's always leapt backwards if anything, by many decades. 

That was one criticism of Oasis at the time. And there weren't many, by the way. It was hard to say anything bad about such a force of nature; about the juggernaut they were in those heady days of Cool Britannia. But the few quiet dissenting voices said Oasis were derivative of the 60s and 70s; ripping off the Beatles, Slade, T-Rex and the Sex Pistols. I never went along with that. 

 

Sure you can hear some Slade and T-Rex in there. Yes, Shakermaker, was a wholesale copy of an advert jingle that became a children's nursery rhyme to sing at school. But, like all great bands that emerge to change things, to rip up the rule book, Oasis sounded like the future while making you feel like you'd heard them before in some distant déjà vu. 

 

When you chucked in the facts of them fighting with West Ham's ICF firm on a cross-channel ferry, getting deported from the Netherlands, the wibbling rivalry interview about Johnny Cigarettes and Noel staying in his room reading books and all that, it was an electrifying time to be alive as a young teenage indie music fan.  

So, where did it all go wrong? Having fused the brilliance of the Stone Roses with the blunt force of Nirvana, why did they then resort to churning out rock-n-roll-by numbers for the next three decades, under the Oasis banner, Noel's High-Flying Birds and Liam's utterly embarrassing Beady Eye? 

 

Why not test yourselves? Push the boundaries? The answer is that they couldn't. They still can't. That's why they're playing songs from 30 years ago that don't really mean anything any more.

Speaking of Nirvana, the first sign of Oasis being cunts was the day the news was announced that Kurt Cobain had died. Oasis were on tour in Middlesborough and Liam said, onstage, that Kurt was "a sad twat who couldn't handle fame". It's hard to find these remarks on the internet but they were reported in that week's music press. Here are Liam and Guigsy talking about Kurt a few months later. 

Not long after that, Noel said he wished Alex James and Damon Albarn would "catch AIDS and die". Now, that's not very nice, is it? Would Paul McCartney have said that about Mick Jagger and Keith Richards? No. No, he wouldn't.

At the time of course, all of that was part of the controversial schtick that made Oasis exciting. The days when they called each other "our kid" like characters off Coronation Street but with massive cocaine habits. 

 

Noel gave up drugs when he woke up one morning at Supernova Heights, his house in Primrose Hill, and instead of having breakfast, got a can of Red Stripe out of the fridge and chopped out a line. Nowadays, you're more likely to hear Noel talking about a microwave meal he's heated up, or a pint of real ale he's had in his local, or the school catchment areas in his borough, or the guarantee of the triple-lock pension, than doing drugs or cussing people. 

 

He did cuss The 1975 fairly recently, to be fair to him. So he hasn't completely lost his edge. 

 

By the way, watch the video below to the end and you'll see the NME 'music writer' (there are no music writers anymore, except here at UNCUNT, speaking truth to power) saying that he "rates" The 1975. Yet another example of why we started UNCUNT. Cunts like that, writing about music, who think that The 1975 are good. Utterly disgraceful.

 

 

I'm not saying that Noel is boring now or trying to paint a picture of a depressed middle-aged man. But he is recently divorced. Which is why this whole reunion is happening. He's probably lonely for a start. His therapist will have told him he needs to keep himself busy. More than that, his divorce is costing him £12 million. 

 

You're paying for Noel's divorce, Liam! And all you fans! It's a lovely gesture, but bloody hell it's cynical of Noel. 

Aside from speaking ill of the dead, stagnating the rock scene, flattering to deceive, wishing AIDS on people and ripping us off, my main gripe with Oasis over the years has really been their refusal to use their platform and influence to say anything helpful or influential when it comes to politics, society, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and so forth. 

 

Just one little example. We can plausibly guess that at least, hmm let's pluck a number, 52% of Oasis fans voted Leave in the EU referendum, right? So, what if the Gallaghers had said something to persuade them that actually being part of Europe is brilliant and that people from other countries coming here is actually brilliant? I'm not saying Oasis could have stopped Brex... wait. Actually I am. That's exactly what I'm saying. Oasis could have stopped Brexit. And the cunts chose not to. Shame on Oasis, the Brexiteer cunts!

 

Look at their heroes the Beatles, who promoted peace and love, vegetarianism, the legalisation of marijuana and other worthy causes. Okay, Ringo voted Brexit, the daft cunt, but you get what I mean. 

 

Look at their hero Paul Weller and his radical anti-Thatcher, Red Wedge, socialist movement in the 80s. 

 

Look at their hero Morrisey and ... okay let's not get sidetracked. 

He's a cunt isn't he, Morrissey?

Fuck it, let's wrap this up. My heart's not in this. Neither is Noel's to be fair. He'd rather be doing anything than this reunion tour. Playing Scrabble, watching Gardener's World, decorating the bathroom. And yet, he'll still be doing reunion tours in the year 2047, when he's 80, just like those cunts Jagger and Daltrey (he voted Brexit too), boring their grandchildren to death. Because he can't do anything else now. He's pigeon-holed himself. 

Old dears will be chucking their knickers at Liam. When I said this to my mate Nick, he replied, "I'll be there, throwing my incontinence pants 😂"

 

Fair play. I might join. If only to gargle their piss. And there will be piss. Thrown in plastic cups. Showering the faces of the OAPs. Shower is the collective noun for cunts by the way.  

 

Let's leave it on a positive note. For those of you going to see them at Wembley this weekend, here's a useful guide. UNCUNT's Oasis Reunion Tour Survival Tips: 

 

 

1. Don't look back in anger. If you do, the cunt behind you will knock you spark out in front of your kids*

2. Don't live forever. It's impossible for a start, unless the Gallaghers have invented a time machine or corporate-branded anti-ageing serum

3. Don't look up in the sky, or you'll get a mouthful off piss that's been chucked towards the stage in a plastic cup

4. Slide away (preferably before the encore, so you can beat the crowds on Wembley Way)

5. Cast no shadow. If you do, some cunt standing behind you will knock you spark out in front of your kids*

6. No morning glory please. There are kids around. Plus, all that Stella Artois and 25% cheap cocaine has the effect of dampening sexual arousal. Look at the Gallaghers' willies. Go on, look at them!

7. Don't stand by me. If you do, I'll knock you spark out in front of your kids*

8. Be here now. Or get there earlier, if you want to see Richard Ashcroft going through the motions as main support

9. Tell yourself it's getting better (man) as the gig goes on. Or just head to the bar for your sixth pint of Bud piss. Cos it's really not

10. Look back in anger. You've earned the right. You've paid for this shit. Look back really fucking furiously. Then knock the cunt behind you spark out in front of his kids*

*Only joking, it will be a nice family friendly vibe. We went to Liam Gallagher at Knebworth a few years back and it was all peace and love. A scouser even offered us ecstasy and bought my nephew a pint. Peace.