Noel Gallagher mourns ‘the death of the rock star’

Former Oasis songwriter Noel Gallagher has said the peak of Britpop in the mid-90s when his own band, along with contemporaries such as Blur, Pulp and Manic Street Preachers, dominated both the charts and the nation’s consciousness will never again be repeated.

Speaking to XFM ahead of his recent headline appearance at the iTunes festival in London, Gallagher described the 90s as the ‘end of the something’ rather than the beginning, and said his generation will prove to be ‘the last rock stars’.

“The 90s was not the beginning of something – it was the end of something,” he remarked. “It was the end of the music business as we knew it. We were the last rock stars.”

“I will argue it to my death; there will never be another time like it where any given time in the top ten there were bands who we all cared about – like Pulp and Blur and Oasis, the Manic Street Preachers – and they’re selling shitloads of records and shaping youth culture. That’s never going to happen again.”

Gallagher performed at London’s Roundhouse venue with his solo venture The High Flying Birds on September 12th.