Noel Gallagher has said he still thinks Tony Blair is “great” and “the last person who made sense” after he became a close ally of the former Prime Minister during the mid-1990s.
The Oasis guitarist became closely associated with the former PM after he attended a Downing Street party in 1997, following Labour’s landslide victory in the general election that year.
The party, which became a defining image of the Cool Britannia era, came after Noel praised Blair at the Brit Awards and said “he was giving a little hope to young people in this country”.
Blair’s reputation has since come under fire since leaving power and the fall-out of the Iraq War, but Noel says he is still the last politician who “made any sense”.
He told GQ: “Because Thatcherism had coloured all our lives, which was still prevalent with John Major, when Tony Blair came along and I heard him speak I thought – and I still think to this day – he was great.
“He’s the last person that made any sense to me. The third way, or centrist politics, was a new thing. I was like, ‘That is fucking really clever.’
“I started meeting them at various awards ceremonies. John Prescott was a bit of a cartoon character, but I thought the rest of them were all right.”
He also looked back on Cool Britannia, describing it as a “great period” to be a musician.
“I loved the 1990s and a lot of it passed through my kitchen. I liked Damien [Hirst] and Kate Moss was a great friend,” he said.
“It was a great period, a great moment in time. No one will ever admit it and every time I say this it gets picked up by the wrong fucking members of the press and turned on its head, but we were all Thatcher’s children, who got off our arses and did it for ourselves.
“That will get picked up by the Daily Mail, but what I mean is that this all happened in spite of Thatcherism. We were all on the dole, all on benefits and it must have dawned on us all that we were not going to get anything and that nothing would be given to us, so we had better go and fucking find a way of taking it.”
He added: To me, the 1990s was a lot of working class intellectuals who were not really connected, who all came through at the same time in politics, music, fashion, photography, art, sport.”
Noel’s comments come hours after he confirmed that Oasis will release a documentary about their legendary Knebworth gigs to mark 25 years since the seminal shows took place.
The new documentary will feature footage from the band’s Knebworth shows in August 1996, when they played to a crowd of 280,000 fans across two nights.
It was also revealed earlier today that Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds are set to release a new Greatest Hits album to celebrate a decade as a band.
‘Back The Way We Came: Vol 1 (2011-2021)’ will come out on June 11 via Sour Mash Records, and features two brand new songs. The first of these, ‘We’re On Our Way Now’, is out now.
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