The Beatles are still the most-successful musical act of all time. It is harder to measure success now in the streaming era, but based on sales and No. 1 hits on the charts, no one has passed The Beatles. Every musical act wants to achieve the same success as the Liverpool band, but that’s almost impossible. Paul McCartney says it’s a mistake for any band to think they could be “bigger than The Beatles.”
Oasis’ Noel Gallagher claimed they were bigger than The Beatles
Oasis was a successful band formed in 1991 and was active until 2009. In the 1990s, the band had a massive jump in success which might have caused the band to become cocky. During a 1996 interview with MTV, Oasis’ lead singer Noel Gallagher claimed the band was “bigger than The Beatles.” He later admitted to being intoxicated during the interview.
The truth is that Oasis never came near The Beatles in terms of success. The band did have a couple of hit albums and hit singles like “Wonderwall”, but the British band never even approached the same level of The Beatles. Speaking at a preview screening of The Beatles: Get Back, Gallagher said it was “embarrassing” that the band was ever compared to the Liverpool band.
“When Oasis started, we were so big we were compared to them size-wise and musically, embarrassingly, compared to them as well,” Gallagher said via NME. “(It’s embarrassing) because we weren’t as good as them.”
Paul McCartney says bands should never compare themselves to The Beatles
Paul McCartney took notice of Oasis’ comparisons to The Beatles and knew this was a red flag. In an interview with Q, McCartney said Oasis was a good band but never should have compared themselves to The Beatles. The singer-songwriter didn’t believe the fab four were better than everybody else, but the level of success The Beatles achieved is basically impossible for anyone to match, let alone surpass.
“Oasis were young, fresh and writing good tunes,” McCartney explained. “I thought the biggest mistake they made was when they said ‘We’re going to be bigger than The Beatles’. I thought ‘So many people have said that, and it’s the kiss of death.’ Be bigger than The Beatles, but don’t say it. The minute you say it, everything you do from then on is going to be looked at in the light of that statement.”
McCartney knew his second band would not match The Beatles
Paul McCartney knows bands shouldn’t try to exceed The Beatles from first-hand experience. After The Beatles broke up in 1970, the “Let it Be” singer formed his second band, Wings, in 1971. While Wings had plenty of success with records like Band on the Run, Wings still never accomplished what The Beatles did. In an interview with NPR, McCartney said he knew nothing he did would ever be as good as The Beatles, but that didn’t stop him from trying.
“The Beatles had a very special combination of talents … as has been proved by its longevity,” he said. “The stuff we did together still sounds good and still lives today. So it was a question of how can you get better than that? And I think I just have to say, ‘Well, you can’t. But if you want to keep going, you should maybe think about starting something else.’ So I did.”
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