Noel Gallagher has branded Robbie Williams’ mega-hit ‘Angels’ “Oasis by numbers”.
The former Take That star had a long-running feud with Noel and his estranged brother and former Oasis bandmate Liam, which began in the mid-90s and escalated to a point where Robbie challenged Liam to have a boxing match with a £100,000 bet on the line at the BRIT Awards in 2000.
Noel – who infamously called the ‘Rock DJ’ hitmaker “the fat dancer from Take That” in one of many jibes – appeared to pay Robbie a backhanded compliment when he said he wishes he’d penned 1997’s ‘Angels’, as he compared it to the ‘Wonderwall’ hitmakers.
Speaking on ‘The Matt Morgan Podcast’, the 54-year-old rocker said: “I’ve heard it. And thought, ‘I wish I’d written that.’
‘Angels’ is Oasis by numbers.
“Add a f****** electric guitar on it and it would be.”
Although Robbie appeared to be a willing participant in the slanging match, he previously claimed that the sibling’s comments, which many of his musical peers seemed to agree with at the time, left him depressed and ultimately inspired him to quit Britain to move to Los Angeles in 2004.
Speaking in 2021, he said: “My particular brand of entertainment and my particularly brand of pop music at the same time as my peers wasn’t, and isn’t, deemed worthy. I read the same magazines and watched the same television shows and wanted to be in the same tribe that most people my age found themselves but because of what I did and because of my output, what I created and how I presented myself it was deemed unworthy.
“There was a culture of ‘Robbie Williams is not cool’, ‘Robbie Williams isn’t very good’ and ‘Robbie Williams is naff’ and ‘Robbie Williams is fat’ and ‘Robbie Williams, we all agree, is awful’. That was apart from the 3 million people that bought my album each time it came out in the UK. At the time it was unbearable.
“In music it was Liam Gallagher and Noel Gallagher, although it wasn’t just Liam and Noel Gallagher doing it.
“Liam said that I should be hung, you know. Famously, Noel said I was ‘the fat dancer from Take That’.
“I can name them because they go in my rucksack, they go on the list of people that I remember every single syllable of every single thing they’ve ever said about me.
“That was 20 years ago, and 20 years ago I just left the country because I couldn’t turn anything on or pick anything up without it saying, ‘This is a bad person, doing a bad thing, presenting himself in a bad way.’ I am far too sensitive to the job that I found myself doing.”
Although he is now cool with Liam, Robbie still has no love for Noel and insists his music is “s***”.
Robbie, 48, said: “I could talk for two hours about why Noel’s s***.
“But isn’t it interesting what a sentence of a few words can do to your whole life and your whole way of viewing the world.
“As a 46-year-old with four kids I have more perspective on it. I’m not saying I’m healed from all of that, because I’m not.”