Mick Jagger never connected with the Britpop movement despite the similarities between the bands of the day and his era. Many felt he removed himself from the title and was seemingly unhappy with it.
You can count a lot of Britpop bands who really defined the genre. Certainly, names like The Beatles and Blur come to mind, both in their respectful eras, but there wasn’t anybody more prominent than Oasis in Britain throughout the 1990s, and The Rolling Stones were not willing to greet them with welcoming arms. Instead, the Gallagher brothers were regularly chastised by elder statesmen.
While Mick Jagger was put-off by Oasis, there was another band who didn’t like them either. The Beatles. The surviving members also partook in insulting the group. George Harrison savagely quipped: “The music lacks depth, and the singer Liam is a pain, the rest of the band don’t need him”. Meanwhile, Paul McCartney added: “They’re derivative and they think too much of themselves. They mean nothing to me.”
Jagger’s complaint of Oasis was essentially to do with their live show, and the lack of movement from Liam Gallagher was a source of confusion for The Stones frontman. Jagger is a firm believer that rock ‘n’ roll has to be packaged in a certain way, and Gallagher doesn’t fit his mould. Jagger thinks a singer has to be the life and soul of a party who should be buzzing with energy throughout the concert, an objective the Oasis frontman failed to fulfil.
In an interview with Absolute Radio in 2010, Jagger praised the success of Kings of Leon and put this down to their killer arena show which he believed was the biggest downfall of Oasis.
He said: “Well that’s what they do, they don’t move – that doesn’t mean to say they don’t connect – they do connect sometimes, sometimes they’re not always good ways What was that famous story when they were in New York, and they didn’t think the New York audience was loud enough, and they said something like ‘You’re rubbish’ or something, ‘New York, you’re a load of crap’ or something like that – which is not what you do anywhere really, especially in New York.”
This incident wasn’t the only time Jagger directed negativity towards Oasis, and he critiqued them in the ’90s for similar reasons. “You can’t dance to it, the new album’s impossible,” he said about their third album, Be Here Now, in 1997.
