Noel Gallagher - The last of the anthems

Icon Number 02 – Ltd 45 prints

Most songwriters write for a room.

Noel Gallagher wrote for a field of eighty thousand people who'd never met each other and felt like family for one night.

He had a gift that's almost extinct now — the ability to write a song so simple, so direct, so completely sure of itself that strangers would link arms and sing every word like it had always existed.

Live Forever. Don't Look Back In Anger. Champagne Supernova. Songs that didn't ask permission. Songs that didn't care if the critics thought they were clever.

That was never the point.

The point was the moment a whole crowd takes a breath and sings the same line back at you. The point was belonging. The point was that a kid from a council estate in Manchester could write something that made the rest of the country feel ten feet tall.

He made guitar music feel important again. He made being from nowhere sound like the best place to be from.

Plenty of bands had bigger ideas.

Nobody else made you believe you were going to live forever.