We used to have a term for the likes of the Gallagher brothers when I was growing up (quite close to where they live): common as muck.
Oasis held their yob mentality like a badge of pride and though lost in the States, it was the undercurrent in their war with resolutely middle class Blur.
Not unlike their heroes the beatlles -whose families aspired to middleclassdom.
The Beatles never lost their "the rest of you can just rattle your jewelry" and certainly Lennon for one approved of the finance based pecking order of the States.
So what gives with Noel today? From the tastefulness of his High Flying Birds band, to the strangeness of this comment to the BBC: " "I was a bit embarrassed… It's hardly the French Revolution is it? It wasn't politically motivated, you know, it wasn't particularly against anything… You know, it was for tellies and all that…
"When I was growing up, we were the working class and we were the lowest. There's a level underneath that now – they're the can't-be-bothered-working class, and they have grown up into a culture of benefits and all that. But there's many reasons for those riots.
"There's no excuse, but if you're constantly bombarding people with a lifestyle that they can't have, magazines for girls, with £2,000 handbags in, and The X Factor and all this kind of celebrity lifestyle – which is frankly what all young people want – if you constantly bombard them with that and then give them no hope of ever getting it, then a few of them get together and they are like, 'Shall we put (electrical store) Currys' window through? At least we'll get a couple of tellies out of it.'
"You can't expect them not to behave like animals when they are uneducated like animals."
Thiis is such a weirdly back handed comment: he seems to be saying, sure I was working class but at least I worked, look at these subhuan creatures. Class on class on class. Twenty five years ago, he would have been in the middle of it.
In another inbterview he embraced that most class conscious of beverages: "Oh, do you know what, the way to a man's heart is a box of Yorkshire Tea. Do you know, for our tour they've made me my own boxes with 'Noel's tea' written on them. I've got my own Yorkshire Tea, it's got 'Noel's tea' written on the front, and my backing band, who I've kind of just recently met over the last kind of six months, walked in and they were like … I was going 'Yeah, baby, yeah, this is how I roll.'
At first glance it appears that he was wanting to prove he's a grown up but just below the surface is the upward mobility Uriah Heepyness of the man who sucked up so bad to Tony Blair back in the day.
Of all the reasons to prefer Liam, add this one near the top of the list.