When Noel Gallagher called Arcade Fire “shit disco”

Posted On February 14, 2025February 14, 2025

It’s a modern badge of honour for Noel Gallagher to slate your musical endeavours with a humorous but equally cutting remark. Whether it’s System of a Down who Noel got creative for: “Do you ever look at the sky and think, I’m glad I’m alive? After I head System of a Down, I thought, I’m actually alive to hear the shittiest band of all time” or just himself, “I’m average at fucking best”, he holds no punches when sharing his opinions.

Such is the sharpness of Gallagher’s tongue. You never know who is next in the firing line, nor what they might do to receive such abuse. Within that, it’s hard to truly pinpoint his taste and where the line of innovation and idiocracy, in his mind, exists.

For instance, his own discography, combined with his love for bands like The Stone Roses hints towards an inclination for the more outwardly conventional-looking bands. Yet, he beholds a very public adoration of the definitive innovator and pusher of aesthetic boundaries, David Bowie.

“I’m a big fan. I was a big fan anyway, but he’s more of an influence on me now than he ever was. He’s one of the all-time greats” he once told Sky News. He continued by claiming the Bowie’s creative looseness informed his own recording process on Who Built The Moon? remembering that his producer “was kind of like, ‘listen to interviews by him, saying you’ve got to put yourself out there and be slightly unsure of what you’re doing’”.

The interview hints at Gallagher’s renewed sense of open-mindedness and as though he may taper down his scathing remarks about esoteric artists particularly when their genesis as a band is largely thanks to Bowie’s influence, which in the case of Arcade Fire is the truth.

But the Canadian five-piece joined a healthy alumni of bands who received the wrath of Gallagher, who labelled their music as “shit disco”. In an interview with The Guardian, Gallagher quickly took aim at the band for he clearly took insult to their then-recent collaboration with Bowie on their track ‘Wake Up’.

His scattergun assault continued as he said: “Anybody that comes back with a double album, to me, needs to pry themselves out of their own asshole”.

Stepping away from the music, he took aim at their dress scene, claiming, “everybody’s dressed as one of the Three Musketeers on acid. ‘What was the gig like?’ ‘I don’t know, everyone was dressed as a teddy bear in the 70s.’ ‘Yeah, but what was the gig like?’ ‘Ah, fuck knows, man, I have no idea. I was dressed as a flying saucer”.

It’s a particularly odd angle to take, considering Bowie’s role as the conduit between the two artists. An artist who defined what it meant to marry aesthetic esotericism and progressive musicians held in high regard by Gallagher, yet artists who are the apparent result of such innovation are deemed below par.

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