A question of black and white influences

Are Oasis the new Beatles, then? Some would say Blur's more baroque, vaudevillian arrangements are more closely reflective of the late-period Beatles style, but there's no denying that when it comes to writing brilliantly simple pop songs, Noel Gallagher has Damon Albarn beaten hands down every time, writes Andy Gill.

Like John and Paul, Noel knows the worth of a good hook, though he doesn't have anything like their reserves of originality and inspiration, preferring to plunder his hooks from pop's memory-banks: when we respond to an Oasis song, we're usually responding at least in part to our memory of the original song which inspired it, which was never the case with The Beatles.

There's also the vexed question of influences: The Beatles were primarily influenced by black music, cover versions of which helped bulk out their first few albums; indeed, it was their "whitening" of black music which proved such a revolutionary breakthrough in the Sixties, opening the door for such as the Stones and Yardbirds. Oasis, by comparison, have no discernible black influence, which may account for their rather statuesque stage performances - they prefer the likes of Paul Weller and the Stone Roses, secondhand influences whose own grasp of black music traditions is, to put it mildly, heavily filtered.