Found out yesterday that George Martin had once called Noel Gallagher "the finest songwriter of his generation"

Yesterday was Noel's 59th birthday, and there were lots of posts from both journalists and fans citing what George Martin had said. I did some googling and discovered he said this in 1997, when a documentary about Air Studios was being made.

https://www.rockarchive.com/prints/o/oasis-oa011jf

It had also been in the Wikipedia article about Noel, which I hadn't looked at closely.

Noel of course usually has a much more modest assessment of his songwriting.

I ran across video of the very first performance of Wonderwall, an acoustic performance backstage at Glastonbury in.1995, the day after Oasis had performed there. This video has the entire song, unfortunately preceded by an intro by three people including two idiots:

The night before:




The year before at Glastonbury:




Live Forever was the song Noel said changed everything for them. Clip from the Supersonic documentary in 2016:




And what IMO is the best Oasis song where Noel took the lead vocal:




At the Rose Bowl last September, dedicating the song to a fan who'd been overcome by emotion:





Anyway, a belated happy birthday to a fine songwriter...