Many vintage Stratocaster fans will have a favourite year, and 1963’s features tick a lot of boxes. Of course, having a famous owner never does any harm to a guitar’s value and – although not best known as a Strat guy – Noel Gallagher owned and played this one. Gardiner Houlgate’s dedicated guitar auctioneer Luke Hobbs takes up the story.

“The Strat has had a body refinish and a replacement pickguard. There are some body stamps under the ’guard with four numbers and the initials ‘BK’. Somebody suggested to me that they might indicate a factory refinish, but I don’t believe that.

“The electrics are largely original and there’s no evidence that the pickups have been rewound, but the volume pot has been replaced. The original has been retained in the case, and the potentiometer codes are dated the ninth week of 1963. The saddles and tuners are original, but the strap buttons have also been changed, and it comes in a 1990s-era tweed hard case bearing an Oasis stencil.

“Besides the Noel Gallagher connection,” Luke continues, “it’s basically a player-grade ’63 Strat, but it benefits from a really good refret with larger than vintage wire that enhances playability. The neck profile is absolutely classic for the year and the one that everybody seeks. It has a bit of chunk, but nothing too much, and it’s just edging towards the bigger ’64 profile.

“We have no information about what records it may have been used on. The guy who is selling it was after an early 1960s Strat, went into Vintage ‘n’ Rare in Bath and the guitar just caught his attention. There was no mention at all of Noel Gallagher when he was trying it out and it was only after he had paid for the guitar that they brought the case out and he saw the stencil.

“The shop told him that it had allegedly been one of Noel’s guitars, but they hadn’t mentioned it since he was an older gentleman and they didn’t think he’d have any interest in Oasis. Later on, Andy Lewis at Vintage ‘n’ Rare was sent a letter from a company of solicitors with an attached photograph purporting to show Noel Gallagher’s Stratocaster propped up against a Marshall stack.”

“They also apologised for taking so long to locate the photo and hoped that it could be passed on to the new owner. The photo has the guitar’s serial number inscribed on the back, along with a note saying ‘demos for the new LP’. Also inside the case is a hand-written Bill Puplett job ticket that shows the guitar’s serial number and the name of Jason Rhodes; he was Noel’s guitar tech at that time.

“So with the case stencil, solicitor’s letter, photograph and job ticket, we think it’s highly probable that it was Noel’s guitar. Through people I know who have done work for him, I have tried to make contact with Noel’s camp to glean some further information, but as always with these famous-artist things it’s like hitting a brick wall.”

“Funnily enough, when the owner first contacted me a couple of years ago, he just said he had a ’63 Strat he was thinking about selling and I gave him a hammer price estimate of £6,000 to £8,000. He didn’t even mention Noel Gallagher until he brought it in for evaluation and that’s when I had to raise my estimate quite substantially.

“He was also moving on an ES-335, and when I gave him my initial estimate he wasn’t that interested in selling the Strat because it does sound excellent and he thought he’d have trouble finding another one that good. But with a potential hammer price several thousand pounds higher, he changed his mind.

“Oasis are hot at the moment [due to the 2025 tour], and a lot of Oasis-related gear has come up for sale. So you could argue that the market has been a little diluted by excess stock, but there can’t be that many pre-CBS Strats that were owned by Noel.”

Höfner 500/1 Violin Bass

Höfner violin basses will forever be associated with Paul McCartney, but as with so many of the Fab Four’s iconic instruments, the Beatles association has never resulted in stratospheric market values or collector frenzies.

Very decent and original Gretsch Duo Jets, Tennesseans or Country Gentlemen, Epiphone Casinos or even Gibson J-160Es can still be purchased for less than the cost of pre-CBS Strats or early ’60s ES-335s.

With Fender’s first electric bass appearing in 1951 and the Gibson EB-1 following in 1953, Höfner wasn’t too far behind. Höfner was a long-established maker of violin family instruments and Walter Höfner had the idea of marrying a maple guitar style neck to a bass viol-shaped body.

The resulting 500/1 Violin Bass was launched at the 1956 Frankfurt Muiskmesse in Germany, and glossing over its physical resemblance to Gibson’s EB-1 is probably the most diplomatic option.

Bodies were made from laminated wood pressed into arches both front and back – although earlier backs were flat. On the back the outer layer was generally figured maple (or possibly sycamore) and on the front it was spruce. Early models had an oval control plate, but by the time the future Sir Macca acquired his, 500/1s had the better-known rectangular version with two volume control knobs and three switches.

If you’ve never played a 500/1, the switches can be somewhat baffling. The Bass On switch actually turns the bridge pickup off, and the Treble On switch turns the neck pickup off…

The uninitiated may assume that these switches should be in the ‘on’ position in order to hear both pickups together, but there won’t be any sound at all.

To get these bass pickups working together both switches must be in the off position. The Rhythm/Solo switch promises a bass boost in the solo position, but in actuality it merely bypasses the Rhythm mode’s preset bass cut.

Earlier 500/1s had closely spaced single-coil pickups with black plastic covers before Höfner introduced metal-covered ‘toaster top’ pickups around 1960. The following year Höfner changed to a ‘diamond’ top design, and in 1962 the pickup spacing was widened to give each pickup a more distinct voicing and increase the tonal range.

The 511 pickup arrived in 1963, with distinctive ‘staples’, threaded steel pole screws and Alnico magnets. In 1967 Höfner introduced the “high efficiency” 513 ‘blade’ pickups with ceramic magnets for increased output that are fitted to this example.

Violin basses started out with traditional dovetail neck joints and they are prone to failure. No doubt Höfner became aware of the problem because sometime during the 1960s the joint was changed to a mortice and tenon design with a greater surface area for the glue.

Most modern bassists would probably regard Höfner 500/1s as novelty instruments that can provide a distinct sonic flavour once in a while, but not everyday players. But their short 762mm (30-inch) scale, lightweight construction and engaging unplugged tone makes them ideal for the guitarist who likes to dabble with bass.

This pictured bass was formerly owned by Damon Minchella, of Ocean Colour Scene fame, and used on the Moseley Shoals and Marchin’ Already albums.

“The main bit of provenance, however,” Luke Hobbs tells us, “is that Minchella used the bass at Abbey Road Studios on a recording of Come Together [for The Help Album], a 1995 charity album Paul McCartney was putting together. McCartney was playing and producing, and the band included Paul Weller, Noel Gallagher, Steve Cradock and Steve White, performing as supergroup the Smokin’ Mojo Filters.

“There’s a video of the session and the Höfner bass Minchella was using had blade pickups just like this one. He was also able to confirm that Paul McCartney autographed the body at the session. The signature and the fact it was used on a charity record with links to The Beatles adds more to the value than anything else in the Höfner’s history.

“It’s actually a 1970s 500/1 model with its original Selmer case in good unmodified condition. Everything works and it doesn’t appear anything has been changed. There are a few dings and marks, along with some minor fretwear. It is what it is and this type of instrument tends not to get battered.”

Both instruments sold at Gardiner Houlgate’s December 2025 auction with the 1963 Stratocaster achieving a hammer price of £9,000 and the Höfner bass £7,200.

• Guitarist would like to thank Luke Hobbs and Gardiner Houlgate
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Inflation is in the news a lot this weather, so just imagine our surprise when a news alert pinged to say that an Epiphone acoustic guitar just sold for $96,000 – but lo, false alarm, this was no ordinary Epiphone guitar.

No, this EJ-200, the Epiphone version of the storied Gibson SJ-200 jumbo, belonged to Noel Gallagher, and the Oasis guitarist not only used it during the writing sessions for the Manchester, England rock superstars' über-smash debut album, Definitely Maybe, but played it in the video for Wonderwall, too. And the guitar has been signed by the Chief himself.

It was sold at auction via Sotheby’s. Guitar World brought you the news when the auction first came online. The initial estimates had this big-lunged acoustic pegged somewhere between $60,000 and $80,000.

It is being called the Wonderwall acoustic because of the video, but the guitar that Gallagher recorded the actual track with met a different fate. If you cast your mind back to the pre-reunion days (well, actually to the pre-breakup days) you might remember Oasis being one of the more volatile beat combos on the indie scene.

The brothers Noel and frontman Liam Gallagher would often have it out. During one ruckus, an acoustic got turned into kindling and it didn’t even belong to them – it was the engineer Nick Brine’s.

“It was the morning after a heavy night and Liam was worse for wear,” said Brine, speaking to the BBC last year. “Noel had said something about him in the papers and Liam kicked off.

“I’m in Abbey Road’s famous Studio Two setting up equipment and hungover myself, then looking up I saw a guitar come flying over from the control room. It was Noel’s Fender Jag and it smashed to bits. I ran to the control room and Liam also made a big dent in Abbey Road’s mixing desk.”

Brine took cover. What was coming next.

“Then I see another acoustic guitar flying over the top and in a thousand pieces on the floor,” he says, “and realize that’s my guitar.”

Brine was well recompensed. The brothers gifted him the actual acoustic that tracked Wonderwall as compensation.

As for this one, well, it’s a pretty sweet Epiphone build. Epiphone doesn’t carry that model in the 2026 catalog, but the Inspired By Gibson Custom 1957 SJ-200, all-solid wood build, with figured maple to impress your gran, could be yours for $1,499. And that is a pretty sweet deal.

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has unveiled its yearly list of inductees, and the class of 2026 comprises Phil Collins, Billy Idol, Iron Maiden, Joy Division/New Order, Oasis, Sade, Luther Vandross, and Wu-Tang Clan, all in the Performer category.

Other inductees include Celia Cruz, Fela Kuti, Queen Latifah, MC Lyte, and Gram Parsons, who will be honored with the Early Influence Award.

Producers Jimmy Miller, Rick Rubin, and Arif Mardin, alongside songwriter Linda Creed, will be presented with the Music Excellence Award. Rounding off the list is American television host and impresario Ed Sullivan, who will be posthumously bestowed with the Ahmet Ertegun Award.

“Induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is music’s highest honor,” said John Sykes, Chairman of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. “We look forward to celebrating these remarkable artists at this year’s ceremony – it’s going to be an unforgettable night.”

Nominees who were snubbed this year include Melissa Etheridge, Jeff Buckley, Pink, Mariah Carey, Lauryn Hill, INXS, and Shakira.

While Phil Collins was inducted as a member of Genesis in 2010, he has now received the nod as a solo artist. As for Billy Idol, he was overjoyed when he heard the news, telling Rolling Stone, “We’ve been building towards this, and it’s a perfect payoff. You couldn’t have dreamed it better, really.

“It’s absolutely perfect…To be recognized by your peers is incredible. You don’t really know what people think about you, but this gives you an indication.”

After three nominations, Iron Maiden have finally made it to the Hall of Fame. “We’d like to thank the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for including us (and former members who were all part of our story) in the 2026 roll call of inductees,” commented Iron Maiden manager Rod Smallwood.

“Iron Maiden have always been about our relationship with our fans above anything else, including awards and industry accolades. However, having said that, it’s always nice to be recognised and honoured for any achievements within the music industry too!”

Oasis have previously expressed skepticism about the Hall of Fame, with Liam Gallagher issuing controversial statements to The Sunday Times in a 2024 interview, “As much as I love Mariah Carey and all that, I want to say: Do me a favor and fuck off.

“It’s like putting me in the rap hall of fame, and I don’t want to be part of anything that mentally disturbed. Besides, I’ve done more for rock & roll than half of them clowns on that board, so it’s all a load of bollocks.”

However, Gallagher changed his tune upon the announcement, as he tweeted, “Reverse psychology vibes in the area Oasis RnR hall of farmers I mean famers.”

“I wanna thank all the people who voted for us it’s a real honour ever since I was a little kid and singing in the shower I’d dream about 1 day being in the RnR hall of fame it’s true what they say anything is possible if you have a dream.”

Meanwhile, Joy Division co-founder and bassist Peter Hook took a more heartfelt approach and dedicated the induction to the sorely missed Ian Curtis. He also confirmed he’ll be attending the ceremony.

“Hi. I’d just like to say how wonderfully pleased I am to be finally accepted into the Cleveland Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame,” he said in a video posted to social media, while notably wearing an Oasis T-shirt.

“I’ve been looking forward to it for years, so I definitely am gonna make the most of it. I’d like to say that this is for Ian Curtis, and for all our fans of both bands. Without you, we would be nothing. So thank you so much.”

While it remains to be seen who else will attend the ceremony, it will take place at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on November 14 and air on ABC and Disney+ the following month.

Last year, Bad Company’s Paul Rodgers was forced to drop out of the 2025 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, after previously confirming reunion plans.

The acoustic guitar that Noel Gallagher used during the writing sessions of (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? is mooted to sell for £60,000 (approx. $81,000) as its online auction goes live.

Released in June 1995, Oasis’ second album continued the Manchester band’s huge rise, after 1994’s Definitely Maybe, and Noel’s Epiphone EJ-200 was central to its creation.

The guitar is one of three Oasis auction items being sold by Sotheby’s, with the guitarist’s 12-string Rickenbacker, his loyal servant for a decade, and a handwritten lyric sheet for Don’t Look Back In Anger rounding out the power trio.

As its name suggests, the Epiphone EJ-200 is a wallet-friendly take on Gibson's esteemed SJ-200 acoustic, which has been adopted by seminal artists like Brian May (he dropped a signature model with a touching tribute to Freddie Mercury last year), Mark Knopfler, and the Beatles duo George Harrison and John Lennon.

Speaking to the Guardian ahead of its auction, Sotheby’s New York-based pop culture specialist Craig Inciardi sees the acoustic guitar as a symbol of the band's inspired mid-‘90s period.

“It was quite extraordinary how they managed to record it in such a short period of time,” he says. “He [Noel Gallagher] was just so prolific at the time, with the amount of songs that were coming out of him, it’s almost unprecedented. And if you look at that album and you look at the track listing, it looks like a greatest hits album.”

The guitar’s lucky new owner will also receive an all-important letter of authenticity that confirms the guitar’s prominence in the making of Oasis’ UK chart-topping sophomore.

It's quite the looker too, boasting a decorative vines and flowers inlay on its pickguard, and crown inlays across its fingerboard. It's said to be in excellent condition.

While the guitar was one of the select few featured in the Wonderwall music video, the guitar used to record the track was gifted to one of their engineers after his acoustic was smashed to smithereens during a Gallagher brothers row.

See Sotheby's for more.

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has announced the nominees for its Class of 2026.

Heavy metal legends Iron Maiden spearhead the ballot for this year’s potential nominees, and have been joined by a diverse cast of music legends that span Britpop icons and post-punk pioneers to rap and hip-hop heroes.

Other big names on the ballot include Oasis, whose reunion tour last year was billed as the “biggest of all time”, as well as The Black Crowes, Billy Idol, and Joy Division/New Order.

Melissa Etheridge has also been given the nod, along with the late, underrated guitar great Jeff Buckley, Genesis drummer Phil Collins, Wu-Tang Clan, Shakira and New Edition. Mariah Carey, Lauryn Hill, INXS, Sade, P!NK, and Luther Vandross complete the list of nominees.

As per the Rock Hall’s rules, artists and bands become eligible for inclusion into the Hall of Fame 25 years after the release of their first commercial recording. Iron Maiden’s selection for the 2026 ballot, then, arrives 22 years after they first became eligible for nomination.

In other words, it’s been a long time coming, and for fans who have long-pointed out the Rock Hall’s aversion to giving heavier bands their flowers in these inductions, Iron Maiden’s inclusion will be welcome.

“Iron Maiden created the blueprint for how heavy metal bands should look, sound, and tour,” the Rock Hall writes in its promo. “Throughout the 1980s, the British group released seven high-octane albums that solidified them as one of rock & roll’s biggest bands.”

Oasis has also been re-nominated after failing to enter the Hall of Fame following the band’s inclusion in the 2025 ballot. The snub likely wouldn’t have bothered the Gallagher brothers, though. Liam once said he wasn’t interested in receiving recognition from “some geriatric in a cowboy hat” (via BBC).

Fans will also be pleased to see Jeff Buckley’s name involved in the running. The iconic singer-songwriter is widely regarded as an unsung guitar hero whose genius defies categorization; the mastermind behind 1994’s Grace, with a highly individual style that blended a number of nuanced inspirations.

A ballot for the fan vote has been opened. Inductees will be announced later this year, and a full induction ceremony will take place in autumn.

Head over to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for more info on each nominee.

When Epiphone unveiled the Noel Gallagher Riviera in 2022, all Oasis fans instantly recognized the guitar.

This was the spitting image of the 1983 Riviera from the Don’t Look Back in Anger video; this was the Don’t Look Back in Anger Riviera. And it was one of the most important electric guitars in the history of the Manchester rock ’n’ roll institution. No question.

But, speaking to Guitar World, Oasis guitarist Gem Archer reveals that it’s not actually a Riviera that we hear Gallagher play on Don’t Look Back in Anger. Gallagher might have been Gibson all the way on this blockbuster Oasis reunion tour, but he switched codes here. This guitar came out of Corona, California.

“Yeah – I think it was a sunburst Strat,” says Archer of the Don’t Look Back in Anger guitar. “One of the first times I met Noel, I was round his house and he went, ‘Do you wanna come upstairs and see some guitars?’ And he went, ‘This is what I played on Don’t Look Back in Anger.’ I was like, ‘What?’”

Don’t Look Back In Anger was a big moment for Gallagher. It was the first time he sang lead on an Oasis single. It scored their second number one. It arrived at the last minute.

If he first got the idea for the song in Paris, it was a soundcheck before their first arena show on April 22 1995 in Sheffield when the song took shape; strumming chords onstage, some to and fro with his brother, Liam, a nonsense lyric opening up the verse and a chord progression that presented the Beatles influence writ large – they had the tune.

No time to waste, Gallagher decided to throw Don’t Look Back in Anger into the set, one of three songs he performed on acoustic guitar that night, and giving a shout out to music journalist Paul Mathur. A few weeks later, they were in Rockfield Studios, Wales, committing it to tape during the (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? sessions.

So why doesn’t Gallagher use a Strat more often with Oasis? Archer, who also plays alongside Gallagher in High Flying Birds, says it's horses for courses.

“He plays Strats with High Flying Birds, but in Oasis that’s not his thing,” explains Archer. “He doesn’t need all the bells and whistles live – it’s a direct thing, and he’s not gonna go from his wall-of-sound Les Paul to suddenly playing a Strat. It’s not needed.”

As for Archer? He uses his signature Sheraton to play lead on Don’t Look Back in Anger.

“For Some Might Say you just don’t dig in as much, and it cleans up. It feels alive in my hands,” he says. “With Bring it on Down I lay into it, and it’s sitting between Noel’s ES-335 and Bonehead’s Epi. The Sheraton has a lot of definition that I need for picking out lead lines – like on Don’t Look Back in Anger, which was done with a Strat on the record anyway.”

Earlier this year, Archer and his fellow Oasis co-guitarist Bonehead both teamed up with Epiphone for a pair of signatures that revived some of their most iconic instruments.

Guitar World's full interview with Gem Archer will be published in the coming weeks.

Deep breath, everyone. We made it. 2025 is drawing to a close, and what a wild ride it’s been. It seems like only yesterday we were knee-deep in the annual NAMM gear avalanche, but a lot has happened since then – and it seems high time to sit back and take a look at what made ’25 such a great year for guitar.

Because there’s no doubt about it. 2025 was a great year for the guitar. There were some historic shows, a once-in-a-lifetime reunion, the emergence of generational guitar talents, a complete tonal revolution, some watershed gear drops… we won’t spoil it at all here, but a lot has happened.

In a year that wasn’t without its sad moments – we lost many guitar and music greats in 2025 – we head into 2026 off the back of a genuinely inspiring 12 months, which will live long in the memory.

So pull up a pew, grab a brew, and take a jolly through our guide to the 25 reasons why 2025 was a great year for guitars – as assembled by Team GW. Starting with…

1. Ozzy Osbourne went out in style – and made a music event a global phenomenon

In July, Ozzy Osbourne headlined Back to the Beginning, a generational farewell concert featuring, deep breath, Metallica, Pantera, Halestorm, Slayer, Alice in Chains, Jake E. Lee, Nuno Bettencourt… this could take all day. Barely two and a half weeks later, he was gone.

My GW online colleague, EIC Michael Astley-Brown, noted at the time that although it was Ozzy’s chance to say goodbye, the evening was also a tribute to Tony Iommi’s singular impact on guitar music, and I couldn’t agree more.

I’m hardly a Sabbath fanatic, but when I heard Ozzy confidently declare, one last time, “we are Black Sabbath!” as the leviathan opening chords of War Pigs rang out around him, I was shocked by how emotional I became.

Mentally, I found myself in my best friend’s basement at 12 years old, him playing Paranoid on his Epiphone SG, me doing Ozzy, then him showing the riff to me (“look how easy it is!”) The freaks storming the castle. “Back to the Beginning”, huh? – JM

2. Guitar solos are big business in pop again – just ask Olivia Rodrigo

‘Move over Taylor Swift: Olivia Rodrigo is this generation’s Eddie Van Halen – her Glastonbury performance proved it’.

Of all the headlines I expected to write this year, this was not it. But that proves the sheer guitar magnetism of Rodrigo’s set at one of the world’s biggest music festivals: session vet Arianna Powell shredding a Jackson Soloist at every opportunity, extended riff breakdowns, Rodrigo herself busting out a Mustang and duetting with the Cure’s Robert Smith. This was no polished pop performance: this was a legit rock show.

Oh, and before you @ me without reading the article, lemme break down that headline: EVH inspired people to pick up the guitar in the ’80s. Taylor Swift was hailed by The Internet as doing the same in the 2010s. And I think Rodrigo will do that for 2020s kids. She is promoting visibility of the electric guitar and its musical lineage at the highest level – and I think that’s pretty rad. – MAB

3. Amp modelers continued to level up – and 2025 was a watershed moment

Every year, something raises the bar in the amp modeling market. But 2025 felt different. It felt bigger. Part of that was the arrival of Helix 2 – AKA Helix Stadium – which reinvented one of the world’s premier floorboard modelers from the ground up with new tech. Part of it was also down to the various updates introduced by Fender, Neural DSP, and Kemper to their own hardware, and the huge strides made by more affordable companies.

But, if we’re being honest, the biggest wave in the modeler market was caused by John Mayer, who created a rip tide when he partnered with Neural DSP for a signature plugin. It is a watershed moment for the industry. A tube amp loyalist putting his faith in digital modeling? A true sign of the times. Expect even more people to make the switch now. If it’s good enough for Mayer, it’s good enough for anyone. – MO

4. Geese and Y2K nostalgia are keeping the dream of the guitar band alive

If you frequent music TikTok – specifically, #indierocktok – chances are you've probably come across Geese. The Brooklyn-based indie-rock band reached new heights this year, arguably becoming “America's most thrilling young rock band” (according to GQ at least).

The Y2K and indie sleaze nostalgia are rife with Geese – you'd be forgiven for mistaking them for a band billed alongside The Strokes at a festival in the early to mid-aughts.

But the band, led by frontman Cameron Winter, are dominating the algorithm and introducing indie rock to a whole new generation, while also keeping the dream of the guitar band alive. – JB

5. People still want their guitar heroes to be worthy of the term

If the whole sorry saga of Giacomo Turra has taught us anything, it’s that originality and credibility are still qualities that we want from our guitar heroes.

The sad fact is that not every guitarist we encounter is technically gifted, exuberantly creative, and treats others with kindness and respect. But let’s just agree not to accept one out of three, OK? Especially, if you’re going to take to social media and portray yourself as a pastel-clad international playboy.

Social media is a delivery mechanism and, used well, a levelling force in championing new music and musicians. On the other hand, you could also argue it’s an unpoliced hellhole and an ecosystem that encourages profile over providence – that need for a reality check has never been more apparent to players. – MP

6. Bad guitar tone is a thing of the past

2025 was the year bad tone got good, and we have mk.gee to thank. The trailblazing tonesmith is not only a leading gen Z guitar hero, but he’s also Eric Clapton’s favorite new guitar player – and he recorded all his anthems with a Tascam 424 preamp. You know, like in that Portastudio you used to own/read about in history books.

Cue two big-brand reincarnations of the recently reappraised preamp via JHS Pedals and Benson Amps, plus one philosophical John Mayer demo, and suddenly, the guitar world found itself reevaluating its sense of tone. Or, at least, GW staff did.

As I posited in my own thesis, ‘Does ‘bad’ guitar tone even exist anymore?’, you could argue that it’s too easy to get a pro-level guitar tone with plugins and modelers these days. Adopting a traditionally maligned one might be the quickest way to stand out. And that’s A Cool Thing: every tone is valid! – MAB

7. The blues is in remarkably good shape, and was the musical driver of a box office smash

“Yeah, that was Buddy Guy! He’s, like, the last of the original bluesmen. He’s a legend!”

I’m in a bar with my friends after we’ve just seen Sinners, the (literally) barnstorming Ryan Coogler-directed horror smash set in early ‘30s Mississippi. Though it’s primarily a vampire movie, Sinners is true to its setting with a score heavily inspired by the haunting acoustic blues of that era and region – with a joint cameo from Christone “Kingfish” Ingram and Buddy Guy linking two generations of the genre together.

I can’t fully explain his role without revealing too much of the story, but Buddy Guy isn’t just our last living line to the real origins of the blues – he’s a hell of an actor, too!

The highest-grossing fully original film in the United States since 2010 (!), Sinners brought the blues to new audiences far and wide.

“They had me play a little spot in a movie,” Guy told Guitar World earlier this year in reference to Sinners, “and I still get more calls about the movie than I do my records!” – JM

8. The Oasis reunion no one thought would happen actually happened

If you asked the Gallagher brothers three years ago whether there’d ever be a chance we’d see them on stage together again, they’d have called you a naughty word and laughed you out the room. Well, we got the last laugh, because that’s exactly what happened. 2025 will forever be remembered as the year Oasis got back together.

Did it help put the spotlight on guitar music? The instrument was in rude health well before the Oasis reunion, but Liam’s son sure thought so. Whatever the case, the Oasis reunion was a cultural and musical phenomenon like no other.

It was also a goldmine for guitar fans. Noel started playing solos again. He had a mystery Les Paul built for the shows, and it broke the internet when it was released as a signature model. Gem Archer and Bonehead also got signature guitars. The biggest music event of the year – Back to the Beginning aside – had guitars at its heart. That alone makes it worthy of praise. But for fans like me, who never thought we’d see the day, it was a helluva ride. – MO

9. Guitar brands are leveling up their budget guitar game

Buying a budget guitar hasn't meant settling for subpar specs for a while now. But some of this year's standout releases were, in fact, guitars at the lower range of the price spectrum – and, frankly, we're here for it.

The T-style PRS SE NF 53 was perhaps this year’s most impressive release, blowing away our reviews team, who described it as “a workingman’s tool pure and simple: any guitar player could use one, which might well qualify it as the most essential guitar yet of 2025”.

The Cort G200SE, Spira T-450, Sterling By Music Man's Intro Series Cutlass, and Jet Guitars' JT-350 BKM H and JJ-300 P90 SFG are also among 2025's standouts. – JB

10. The year hardcore went mainstream – and embraced guitar solos

Yeah, I hear you, ‘hardcore has been going mainstream’ for about five years now, but 2025 feels like a new zenith.

At the head of the pack, still, are Turnstile who returned with Never Enough (tied with Broncho’s Natural Pleasure for my personal album of the year). It got laden with more glowing reviews than an Amazon drop-shipper; enjoyed a previously unthinkable profile on late-night TV; received five Grammy nominations; they played in front of enormous crowds worldwide – and were even asked to rep Fender’s new American Professional Classic line.

They also made a video with a vocalist on a jet ski, a drummer in the desert, and Pat McCory ripping a whammy-laden guitar solo in an alpine valley. The hardcore tag is now largely irrelevant: Turnstile are now looking like a solid bet to be one of the biggest rock bands in the world.

And Turnstile might have broken the mould but they’re not alone. Look at Drain’s Cody Chavez bringing the thrash riffs and shred solos to their last album …Is Your Friend. Hardcore is a changed beast that’s for sure. And all this from a scene in which the biggest flex used to be what kind of van you had… – MP

11. One of the best – and biggest – indie-guitar albums in years arrived

moisturizer confirmed that tongue-very-much-in-cheek Brit-rockers Wet Leg are one of rock’s most exciting new talents. Their second record is a masterpiece: it has the catchiest guitar hooks of the year and the sharpest indie-pop songwriting, tapping into the sweet spot between Pavement and PJ Harvey I never knew I needed.

It’s subverting the genre’s norms, too: Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers have been repping B.C. Rich and Kramer shred sticks onstage – and yes (trigger warning, Kevin Shields acolytes), one of them is being used for shoegaze whammy dives. Myles Kennedy and Steve Stevens told us this was their most-listened to album this year. It was mine, too. – MAB

12. TikTok – still kicking, and bringing new audiences to guitar innovation of days past and present

As the sun rose on 2025, it seemed like TikTok would be banned from the US app market, but after a round of rope-tugging between outgoing US President Joe Biden and incoming President Donald Trump, the app lived to see another year – and now it’s bigger than ever before.

Last year, it brought the Darkness’s seminal I Believe In A Thing Called Love, 20 years later, back to the top of the US Rock charts, and this year, it brought a three-decade-old slow-burning Radiohead ballad that nearly broke the band up back, improbably, into the Billboard Hot 100.

It also brought my personal favorite guitar riff of the year – the nasty, nylon-string one that drives Hudson Freeman’s If You Know Me – to the attention of John Mayer. Everyone and their brother has a take on whether TikTok is a force for bad or good, but its power to elevate tunes, riffs, and players into – or back into – the limelight, is indisputable. – JM

13. The metal offset campaign reaches its conclusion

“Are we still talking about metal offsets in 2025?” I hear you ask. Well, yes, we are, because although it’s been a topic of conversation the past few years, the campaign to have them back in the mainstream finally came to a head in 2025.

After spending over a year ogling at Misha Mansoor’s Surfcaster, and drooling over Mike Stringer’s Charvel, our thirst for an accessible offset was quenched when Jackson revived the Surfcaster as an ultra-affordable model at NAMM. Lee Malia was then given a signature version. Aristides also unveiled its STX collection, designed with Stringer.

Sure, some brands have been doing this for a while – Balaguer for one – but before 2025 these things were always a rarity, reserved only for high-end or signature models. The democratization of the metal offset came to the forefront this year. Long may it continue. – MO

14. The notion of the guitar hero is far from dead – it's just being redefined

Who says the concept of the “guitar hero” is dead – or a long-forgotten relic of the past? Like any other notion, it has simply transformed and adapted to the 2020s and the digital age.

Yungblud immediately springs to mind: the Ozzy Osbourne protégé and Aerosmith collaborator has proven he's the embodiment of a 21st-century rockstar. His Back to the Beginning performance was perhaps the most defining “passing of the torch” moment – but rest assured, he's not on his own.

Thomas Raggi, Grace Bowers, Diamond Rowe, Yvette Young, Tim Henson, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, Sophie Lloyd, Yoyoyoshie, Mateus Asato, Geese's Emily Green and Spiro are just a few of the younger generation of guitarists who are challenging the traditional notion of “guitar hero,” and proving to everyone that, while it may look slightly different, rock ’n’ roll is far from dead. – JB

15. Collaboration not confrontation

It would be a brave writer proclaiming that the guitar industry is not somewhat cutthroat in its business dealings, but it does feel that in the face of adversity in the last 12 months, we’ve seen it pull together in a new way.

NAMM have been directly lobbying Washington over the impact of tariffs, pedal builders (who admittedly have a more fraternal approach among those in the boutique clique) have been highlighting their own plight, and firms of all stripes are realizing they’re in it together when it comes to raising awareness of the cost implications of changing import policies.

On a similar-but-different note, guitar-makers seem to be taking a much more pluralistic approach to their signature deals (Cory Wong’s signature Strat and StingRay, for example) – understanding that it’s better to have the right artist’s name on some of their gear, than force them to commit completely and risk it being on nothing.

I don’t think we’re going to see Gibson and Fender falling out of a bar together anytime soon, but the idea that an iconic guitarist might want to acknowledge that they play both a Strat and a Les Paul no longer seems unthinkable in the eyes of the corporate machine. – MP

16. We got a new contender for Mayer-level feel

Put me in a (gentle, please) headlock, and ask me to name the most lyrical guitar players on the planet, and Mayer and Trucks would be the first names out of my mouth. Buck, if you need a third. But Maya Delilah would be next.

The Fender-backed 25-year-old’s first album on storied jazz label Blue Note dropped this year, and highlights her off-the-charts feel – the dynamic control and soul-searching note choices are pure storytelling. No wonder, given how intertwined she finds lyrics and leads. “If I’ve said exactly what I want to say lyrically, I feel like I need to mirror that with feeling when I play the guitar,” she told us.

It’s not all aching neo-soul solos, though: Delilah does a mean line in sleazy Prince funk and skronky fuzz, too. We can’t wait to see where she goes next. – MAB

17. Jake Kiszka and Chris Turpin conjured old-school guitar magic on Mirador’s debut album

Back in May, Greta Van Fleet’s Jake Kiszka and Ida Mae’s Chris Turpin stopped by Guitar World’s NYC headquarters to discuss their influences and how their six-string chemistry developed, and to play through a selection of the heaviest (and sweetest) tunes featured on the self-titled debut album from their new project, Mirador.

With their partnership hardly public knowledge at that point, I didn’t quite know what to expect when I joined my GW colleagues in the studio for the session. Seeing them plug in and rip from a few feet away, though, showed clear as day the unique wavelength these two found together. Listen to the thundering Mirador standout Fortune's Fate – with its whirlwind Kiszka solo – to hear it for yourself. – JM

18. Jacob Collier’s five-string revolution opened up new ways to think about playing

If 2024 was the year Jacob Collier became known for his guitar chops, 2025 was the year he put in a serious case for being a modern-day guitar hero. He might not be shredding at the speed of light, but he’s doing something even more important: he’s encouraging people to approach the guitar in new ways.

He’s doing that through his five-string guitars, and a symmetrical open tuning that makes playing chords hugely accessible. It also opens up whole new paths for exploring the instrument, and is a reminder that, when we think everything there is to discover has been discovered, there’s still room for so much more.

The proof is in the pudding. Collier’s five-string Strandberg was more popular than the six-string. Players are buying into the five-string. We dare say it could soon be a mainstream option. Viva la revolución. – MO

19. Guitarist biopics are all the rage

2025 has been the year of music – and specifically guitarist – biopics.

The Bob Dylan biopic (and a big shout-out to Joan Baez as well), A Complete Unknown, was released in 2024 but continued buzzing all the way through 2025 with eight Oscar nominations – not too shabby!

Bruce Springsteen’s Deliver Me from Nowhere followed, with high hopes to replicate the success of Dylan’s biopic, albeit to mixed reviews.

Hollywood is also betting big on director Sam Mendes’ four (yes, four) Beatles biopics, while finally shining a long-overdue spotlight on Sister Rosetta Tharpe in an upcoming film starring popstar Lizzo. Oh, and did I mention that the first – and only – authorized biopic of B.B. King was just announced? – JB

20. The redemption of Jake E. Lee

Back to the Beginning was an emotional experience for a lot of reasons, but for me, one of the most compelling parts was the long-overdue redemption of Jake E. Lee in the eyes of Ozzy fans and the wider guitar community.

The man’s main sin of the last 40+ years has essentially been the fact that he was not Randy Rhoads, which is an affliction that I think we can all relate to. But the fact is he was there when he was needed, he did fine work in a tough situation with Bark at the Moon and he – quite literally – did not get the credit he was due.

More miraculously, he mostly refused to badmouth the Ozzy camp, chalking a move that would have destroyed lesser players up to ‘business’.

To see him take to the stage, and to his shock, be greeted by a stadium full of Ozzy fans, led by Nuno Bettencourt, all chanting his name was incredibly moving. – MP

21. It’s easier than ever to practice guitar – and it’s never sounded better

Bit of a personal one, this: I became a dad this year and am therefore legally obliged to tell you about it. My new arrival has made me not only value every spare minute I can find to play guitar, but also realize how fortunate we are to have so many handy practice doodads. I have become reliant on headphones and extremely low-volume mini amps whenever my newborn blesses us with 10 minutes of sleep.

There were some big shifts in that arena this year: Positive Grid brought the price of guitar amp headphones way down with the Spark Neo and Core, and Blackstar and IK Multimedia dropped some serious guitar-jack units that offer proper big-rig tones. It’s devices like this that can keep your skills ticking over when you have to fit the guitar around the people that you love. – MAB

22. Legacy bands gave the people what they want

Each of the last five consecutive decades, guitarist extraordinaire Robert Fripp has completely reinvented the sound and onstage repertoire of his band, King Crimson, and he’s never apologized for it.

With that in mind, one might assume that he’d regard the idea of a group devoted to performing the band’s knotty ‘80s material with disdain. Quite to the contrary, he was delighted by the formation of BEAT – a group comprised of two Crimson alums – vocalist/guitarist Adrian Belew and bass maestro Tony Levin – Tool drummer Danny Carey, and none other than Steve Vai. Fripp even offered some tips to Vai as BEAT worked through their first gigs.

Former frontman John Lydon (Johnny Rotten) has been much less enthusiastic about punk legends the Sex Pistols reuniting with Frank Carter in his place, but the band’s shows have proven to be a rousing success.

Age hasn’t dwindled the audiences for these and countless other legacy acts, and as long as they’re there, many of these bands and artists will be happy to give fans new and old what they crave to hear. – JM

23. Gear nostalgia hit new heights

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. That means, for every step taken in the direction of a futuristic digital utopia, there is also a move to embrace the gear and tones that have come before us.

That force was particularly apparent in 2025, especially through the gear drops that took place and the playing habits of guitarists. JHS Pedals released the Tascam-aping 424 Gain Stage. Gibson and Epiphone launched a Back to the Future ES-345. MXR’s MX100 Rockman repurposed cult classic ’80s tones.

And everyone went nuts for it. Reverb’s end of year stats show the MXR topped its new-to-2025 best-selling pedals. The Epiphone did the same for the guitar list. As companies use cutting edge tech to push the boundaries of guitar gear, it seems an appetite for cult kit of yesteryear is gaining traction. – MO

24. Movie and TV soundtracks are prioritizing guitar

Guitarists have long lent their chops to movie soundtracks. Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood has carved out a niche for himself as a composer, scoring the likes of 2021's The Power of the Dog and 2017's Phantom Thread, while Jimmy Page leveraged his session musician days to write, produce and record an array of instruments for the Death Wish II and III soundtracks.

The tradition continues with each generation of guitarists – in 2025, Yvette Young, Tim Henson, and IDLES played key roles in soundtracks for blockbusters Superman and F1, and Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing, respectively – while shows like Cobra Kai continued to recruit top guitar talent to their musical dojo.

As Young herself told Guitar World earlier this year, in an increasingly oversaturated (and expensive) touring environment, “it's really difficult to figure out how to monetize certain things, especially with streaming being so ass at paying.”

Therefore, soundtracks are proving to be one of the remaining solid avenues where guitarists (and musicians at large) can flex their creativity and still get fairly compensated. – JB

25. AI in music gear = good, AI in music-writing = bad

“Create a statement of 150 words on why AI is good and bad for creativity in 2025.” Oh, hello. My apologies, I was talking to someone else…

AI is now, officially, all-up in just about everything. Gear-wise, it’s gone from ‘press release-worthy’ to ‘accepted norm’ in the space of a year. The debate rumbles on, but I think we can broadly define the conclusion of the musician community thus far as ‘AI in gear = useful’ and ‘AI in writing music = bad’.

The fundamental point of the tech, of course, is to offload all of the boring, repetitive, and fiddly stuff that we don’t want to, or cannot deal with, to leave us free to focus on the things we do want to do. I have a hard time accepting AI will replace musicians, because music is the thing we do for fun, whether listening, or consuming it. It’s, quite frankly, the last thing I’d wish to automate, or direct towards all my copyright material.

The point of music, and any culture, is to express emotions and connect people, to create literal and emotional resonance between humans. I think that process is broken by AI writing or song generation.

On the other hand, browsing and creating patches on a modeler? For me, that often gets in the way of playing, so if I can ask AI to knock a patch together as a starting point, then, I for one, welcome our new robot overlords. – MP

After touring the globe for 41 shows with the reformed Oasis, Gem Archer is ready for a rest. Before the band announced its return in August 2024, fans had begged for it but weren’t holding their breath – and when the word came, people wondered if Liam and Noel Gallagher could keep it together.

Against all odds they did, and then some. Archer says he knew the Live ’25 tour was going to be biblical. “Those songs, played in that order, are just unbeatable,” he states. Now everyone wants to know what Oasis will do next.

“I still don’t know my ass from my elbow,” Archer says. “It’s time to decompress.” His sentiments echo the band’s official line: “There will now be a pause for a period of reflection.”

Denying knowledge of any future plans, the guitarist adds: “It’s not just something you can flick on. We’ve all said we won’t know what this was ‘till next year. It really was a bit of a whirlwind.

“I’d be up for more,” he continues. “But right now, it’s only a couple of weeks since we were doing a gig in Brazil. I’ve got stuff laid all over the floor that’s from the tour. It’s still kind of like, ‘What just happened here?’”

When you found out Oasis was back together, did you know you’d be a part of it straight away?

I got the call that the band was getting back together and I went, “Right – and who’s in it?” They said, “It’s the band, but with Bonehead.” Immediately I went, “Wow, this is gonna be different – but the same, really.”

I knew for months and months before everybody else, which is the weirdest thing to be sitting on when people are asking you the question. Then, on the morning it was announced I got a text from my daughter, saying, ”You lied to me!” and a text from my son, saying, “That’ll be you changing your number then!”

The dynamic with Bonehead is of particular interest, as you more or less replaced him when he left Oasis in 1999. What was it like getting to know him?

I’ve met him many times over the years and always thought he was a great guy. My wife used to be really close with him, so I just thought, “Alright, perfect!” And now I know him so much better – it’s almost like I know him like a brother.

What can you say about Bonehead as a guitarist?

I joined in ’99, but with how things played out, I wasn’t replacing him; it was just taking a different turn. Obviously Oasis needed two guitars, but it certainly wasn’t like Noel said, “You’ve gotta play barre chords and that’s it.” It was completely open when I joined.

At the first rehearsal, when we didn’t even have a bass player, we were in a tiny room running through about six songs, and Noel said, “You know the bit in Cigarettes and Alcohol? Can you do that?” I was like, “Well, this opens everything up.”

We developed that side of Oasis. They’d just recorded Standing on the Shoulder of Giants and the first single was Go Let It Out. I ended up playing the lead lines on that live. And songs like Gas Panic! were just different; it had taken a different turn.

So it wasn’t replacing Bonehead because it was different. Now, playing with him, it’s like he’s the bedrock – he’s the glue that makes everything else sound great. He’s overlooked as a rhythm guitarist in a way ’cause he has this feel.

I don’t want to speak for him, but it’s like he’s playing acoustic with a really gainy electric sound. He just has his own way. Whereas some of us, if we put that guitar through those amps, you wouldn't play with the kind of freedom he does.

There was a lot of speculation about how Oasis with three guitarists would play out – but it really came together beautifully. You were able to capture the guitar layers as they were on the records.

It really did open up; it opened everything up. During our first get-together Noel said, “Have you ever been in a band with three guitars?” I’m like, ”Are you kidding?” He said, “We’ll let Bonehead do Bonehead, and we’ll fit around it.”

And you’re not trying to capture every nuance anyway. You don’t want to get in the way of the songs. Like on Cast No Shadow I’m playing slide guitar. In the past, there never would have been any space to do that.

You played some fabulous leads on Whatever, too.

We worked things out like that between us, where Bonehead might be grabbing an acoustic or an electric. And when we were doing Morning Glory I was doing this thing on the chorus, and Noel went, “Have you always done that?” I went, “No – but now that we’ve got three guitars, I can!”

It was just an overdub, and as we know, there’s a million overdubs; that’s Noel. He’s amazing at layering up guitars. It’s everything, and it’s cleaner than you’d think, though there’s some dirt in there, too.

Noel has a huge sound anyway; if you hear him in soundcheck his rig is colossal. But it works because of the way he plays; it’s not out of control. In my in-ears I have Bonehead on the left, Noel on the right and I’m up the middle.

And I’m a lot cleaner than you’d think. I’m not playing as much as you’d think. Bonehead is the bedrock, so I don’t need to add more. If we’re doing a song we’ve done forever, like Don’t Look Back in Anger, I’ll do the fills and Noel does the solos, and he’s also singing.

If we do Slide Away I can do the arpeggio intro, but Noel does the solo. With Stand By Me I’m just tickling around the vocal until the chorus comes in, and then it’s just flat-lining it. There’s a lot of dynamics.

Dare I say that everybody thought Champagne Supernova was the best it’s ever been? It had a whole dynamic and a real good feel to it. It all worked backward from Liam’s vocal – the way he was singing it, you can do that. It had an epic-ness to it but also a poignancy, so we let it be itself.

Back in the day, you played a lot of Firebirds, but your gear seems to have changed a bit this time around. For example, there’s an Epiphone Sheraton you got from Noel.

Just for the record, Noel never gave me that guitar – It’s still Noel’s guitar! Everybody thinks he gave it to me, and it is the guitar I used to play back in the day. When I joined High Flying Birds I said to Noel, “Have you still got that one?” He said, “Oh, yeah,” and I’ve played it at every gig since. It’s a ridiculously good guitar.

What else has changed in terms of tone-shaping compared to the old days?

It really wasn’t about my old Oasis rig because we used to be pretty flat out. When Noel used to play Wonderwall, he’d be on a pretty dirty Fender Telecaster. There was that side of it. Now I was like, “I need to go from completely clean to Armageddon and everything in between.” All of that comes down to what guitar to use; I’m lucky that I had some fucking great guitars for this.

How did you and Noel end up settling on Hiwatts for amps?

There were a few ideas for amps, and we decided on me and Noel both using the same Hiwatt. Compared to High Flying Birds, it’s a lot more in-your-face. The clean stuff had to be bell-like, almost like a DI sound but with warmth, like for Half the World Away, Talk Tonight and bits of The Masterplan.

It’s all gain stages from there; tons and tons of different gain stages. I didn’t use any modulation – it was all reverb, delay and tremolo on top of the gains. Except for the start of Morning Glory, which has one of those Boss poly-octave things. But everything else, there was maybe a clean boost or a dirty boost, working through the ballsy humbucker sounds that are bright and full.

For Some Might Say you just don’t dig in as much, and it cleans up. It feels alive in my hands. With Bring it on Down I lay into it, and it’s sitting between Noel’s ES-335 and Bonehead’s Epi. The Sheraton has a lot of definition that I need for picking out lead lines – like on Don’t Look Back in Anger, which was done with a Strat on the record anyway.

Was it really?

Yeah – I think it was a sunburst Strat. One of the first times I met Noel, I was round his house and he went, “Do you wanna come upstairs and see some guitars?” And he went, “This is what I played on Don’t Look Back in Anger.” I was like, “What?”

He plays Strats with High Flying Birds, but in Oasis that’s not his thing. He doesn’t need all the bells and whistles live – it’s a direct thing, and he’s not gonna go from his wall-of-sound Les Paul to suddenly playing a Strat. It’s not needed.

Before the tour kicked off, you probably had an idea that it was going to be massive.

There’s two answers here. None of us expected it to get this kind of reaction. It’s kind of unprecedented that the feeling between us and the crowd was the same in every city. Every gig was just this joyous celebration.

At one gig, just before Don’t Look Back in Anger, Noel said to the crowd, “Now you’re gonna feel what it’s like to be in the band,” or something like that. And that’s what it was – 80,000 people in the band at that moment. That didn’t really hit us until maybe three gigs in.

But the other answer is that I knew as soon as I saw the first setlist. I couldn’t believe it. I was like, “Wow – and we haven’t even gotten to Supersonic yet!” It was just ridiculous from there. The boys had been sorting it out for ages. It got amended; we’d started with, I think, 27 songs, and it ended up being 23.

What was it like seeing Noel and Liam come together again as brothers and musical partners?

I hadn’t seen them together until the first day we all rehearsed. Just looking over and seeing them like five feet apart; it really felt like we’d never split up. But of course I’ve got a guitar in my hand, we’ve got stuff to get on with, so that was it. It wasn’t all lovey-dovey or, “What do you want for Christmas?” or any of that stuff! It was serious business we were getting down to.

As the tour progressed, everyone could see that Liam and Noel were genuinely having fun and enjoyed being together on stage.

Absolutely; they really did. They’d immediately start cracking each other up on the ramp while we were walking up. It’s almost like they were just in each other’s ears and faces. But when the curtain opens it all changes; it becomes the show. But they’re brothers – and that’s tangible.

By the end of the tour, it became obvious that the world wanted more. With that in mind, are there future plans for Oasis?

I don’t know anything about what’s coming up. It’s not my place to say. Anything could happen, which could include nothing. If stuff was happening, I think I might already know about it. But Noel has said, “No rest for the immensely talented” – so take that how you want!

Oasis have undoubtedly had one of their biggest years since the inception of the band.

Their global comeback tour, which Johnny Marr called the “biggest reunion of all time,” has been a musical and cultural phenomenon, and is estimated to have contributed over $1.2 billion [£940 million] to the UK economy alone.

As for the band members themselves, Gem Archer and co are ready for a rest – but the end of the tour might not quite spell the end of Oasis.

“I still don’t know my ass from my elbow,” Archer says of the post-tour exhaustion in a new Guitar World interview. “It’s time to decompress.”

Fans are desperately hoping for more shows, and hopefully, more music, but Archer remains cryptic. He asserts that he doesn’t know “anything about what’s coming up” and that the Oasis machine is “not just something you can flick on”. That doesn't mean there's no hope, though.

“It’s the weirdest thing,” Archer admits. “It’s all a blur. We’ve all said that we won’t know what this was ‘till next year. When all the wheels stop spinning, you know, there’s just so much to take on board. It really was a bit of a whirlwind, you know?”

He does say, however: “Anything could happen, which could include nothing. But this was quite a thing… if stuff was happening, I think I might already know about it, if you know what I mean? It’s not something you just flick on. But Noel has said, ‘No rest for the immensely talented,’ so take that how you want.”

It seems like Oasis fans and those pining for more ’90s nostalgia will have to wait. Archer’s thoughts line up with Oasis’ official social media statement – “There will now be a pause for a period of reflection” – and, by the word “pause” instead of “period,” there’s a glimmer of hope that this is just the beginning of Oasis’ return.

Guitar World's full interview with Gem Archer will be published in the coming weeks.

Noel Gallagher’s love of the Les Paul spans all the way back to a pre-fame Oasis, where – as is the case for many aspiring rock stars – he toted an Epiphone Les Paul Standard as his main guitar.

With a record deal under his belt, you might expect that to have changed in an instant, but check out the video for Oasis’s first single, 1994’s Supersonic, and you’ll see the Cherry sunburst Epiphone taking pride of place.

However, Noel, who had struck up a friendship with former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, was ‘gifted’ not one but two Les Pauls from Marr himself. The first is a Standard, which began life as a Goldtop and had the honour of being owned and smashed by Pete Townshend before Marr acquired it, and the second is a Les Paul Custom.

The Custom features an additional toggle switch for splitting the coils, which at first appears curious, but Noel removed the humbuckers and replaced them with P-90s, lifted from one of his Gibson Firebirds. In 2023, he told That Pedal Show: “It was only [years later] that [Marr] said, ‘Oh, that’s The Queen Is Dead guitar,’ and I was like, ‘Could you have fucking told me that earlier, before I butchered it?!’”

Which brings us to the Noel Gallagher Les Paul Standard, which is based on the Made To Measure Gibson Custom guitar that Noel has been playing on the Oasis Live ’25 dates. If you weren’t one of the 25 punters with the readies to splurge on one of the £17,500 replicas, this is a much more ‘real world’ opportunity to get close to Noel’s stage guitar.

With a pair of P-90s, it’s from the same tonal lineage as the ‘Marr’ Les Paul Custom, initially causing some fans to set the online comments sections alight with comparisons to the Custom – as well as legitimately pondering whether this was Noel’s homage to the ‘Old Black’ Les Paul of his hero Neil Young.

Down The Riviera

Gibson and Epiphone semi-acoustics play an integral part in the band’s golden era sound, particularly Paul ‘Bonehead’ Arthurs’ Epiphone Riviera; it’s certainly a constant of the Oasis guitar canon.

From some of the band’s smallest gigs at ‘toilet-tour’ venues like Camden’s Water Rats to the record-setting Knebworth gigs in front of a collective quarter-of-a-million fans over two nights, find a picture of Bonehead on stage, and you can, with confidence, bet your 335 that he’ll be clutching his Antique Burst Epiphone Riviera.

The story, as told to That Pedal Show in 2023 (before Oasis confirmed they would reform in 2025), goes that Bonehead and Noel paid a joint trip to Manchester institution Johnny Roadhouse Music to look for guitars.

“We were such Beatles fanatics, we were into Epiphones,” says Noel. “We both bought Epiphones [Rivieras]. He’s got a brown Tobacco one, which, funnily enough, when the band split up, he didn’t take with him – so I’ve got it now.”

The guitars in question were both made in the ’80s and are often referred to by Epiphone fans as ‘Matsumoko’ models, owing to the fact that they were produced by the manufacturing company of the same name.

Both guitars forgo the traditional Riviera configuration of mini-humbuckers and a Frequensator tailpiece, in favour of a tune-o-matic/stopbar and full-size ’buckers, bringing this era of Riviera more in line with Gibson’s ES-335. Noel’s Riviera remains ‘stock’ to its factory build, which included Maxon MMK-61 pickups, with Bonehead’s Riviera very likely to have featured the same models.

Noel’s Riviera, famously used as one of his main guitars during the What’s The Story…? sessions, was recreated as an Epiphone signature model in 2022, and while the Wine Red model from the Don’t Look Back In Anger video makes less frequent appearances, Bonehead has been using his Riviera since joining Liam Gallagher for the Definitely Maybe 30th anniversary dates, and once again in Oasis for the reunion tour.

Hidden Gem?

Gem Archer has continued the Oasis tradition of semi-hollow guitars, both as Bonehead’s replacement from 1999 to 2009, his tenure in post-Oasis band Beady Eye, as a member of Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds and once again as a member of the three-guitar line-up in the reunited 2025 incarnation of Oasis.

During this time, one of his most-favoured guitars was a US-made late-’60s – according to Gem’s tech with NGHFB, Dave White, when we interviewed him in 2018 – Epiphone Sheraton, which was actually (and remains) one of Noel Gallagher’s guitars.

Despite a few years away from the Sheraton, Gem was reunited with the guitar when joining NGHFB in 2017. “He just goes, ‘What guitars do you want to borrow?’” Gem told us in 2018. “I was like, ‘Well, I’ve played that one and it’s incredible.’ It’s ’60s, but I’m not sure of the exact year. I was going to buy one, but it was about seven grand!”

It is, of course, this guitar that forms the basis for the Epiphone Masterbilt Gem Archer model, which, like the original, features a trapeze tailpiece, rather than the Frequensator or vibrato‑equipped models. Luckily for Gem (and the rest of us), we don’t need £7k to bag the recreation.

• "Not only is this Riviera the most Oasis-relevant guitar of the recently launched trio, it’s the most affordable too": Epiphone Bonehead Riviera review
• "Some might say this is far from a valid Oasis signature guitar, having only come into play earlier this year": Gibson Noel Gallagher Les Paul Standard review
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Having been in the industry for over 40 years, Johnny Marr knows a thing or two about how the guitar world – and, by extension, the music industry – operates. While many may have been introduced to his work through his early years with ’80s indie rock legends The Smiths, he has since carved a path that traverses genres and labels.

That path has seen him work with a diverse spread of artists from The Pretenders to Modest Mouse, The Cribs, The The, and even Hans Zimmer. In short, a true chameleon – with the guitar serving as the unifying throughline in all his various endeavors.

When he released his first signature Jaguar with Fender 13 years ago, it was clear that Marr had put his years-long experience on stage and in studios worldwide – along with his in-depth knowledge of what makes a guitar tick – to good use. The result? One of Fender’s best-selling signature models.

Fast-forward to 2025, and he took this one step further with the recently released, limited-edition signature special Jaguar, which expands the model’s tonal palette into Strat and even P-90 territory.

“My original signature guitar does so many sounds,” he enthuses. “[For this new one, I've lost count], and the thing I'm most proud of is, it's not active. There’s no batteries living in it.

“Aside from the radius and it being a bit more of a rock sound in quite a few positions, it sounds very much like a Stratocaster, which means that when you play at high gain, it almost does a kind of blues rock sound, which is unusual from a Jag, because a Jaguar is notoriously difficult to get a decent rock sound out of.

“I wouldn't say it’s for metal or for shredding, but you never know!” he quips. “Maybe I'll do a third one that you can shred on.”

What motivated you to create a second signature Jaguar model, and how does it differ from your original design?

[The original] has been really commercially successful, and has continued to sell and sell, which makes me really proud, because other guitar players like it, and of all different kinds of music – it's not just an indie rock machine.

I wanted to continue to do what I do on my [first] signature Jag, but make it for people who wanted a bit more of a conventional feeling guitar – [for example,] make the radius a little bit different [9.5” as opposed to the original’s 7.25”]. It's not me improving my original signature Jag. It's just an alternative to my original Jag.

The new one has a pretty unique pickup selection system, and it also has lipstick pickups, as opposed to the first’s custom-wound Bare Knuckle single-coils. Can you walk us through the thought process behind all this?

For nearly 40 years, I had the same guitar luthier, whose name was Bill Puplett, who sadly passed away a couple of years ago. I don't use the word genius a lot, but there are some people who worked with Billy who would use that word.

Bill got very excited about the idea of the lipstick pickup. And I have to give him credit for putting that idea in my head. And then I had the burgundy Jag, which I thought was a really good-looking guitar, and so we used that as a prototype. So, between Bill and myself, we started to try these different lipstick pickups. But really, it was Bill's ingenuity that came up with the configuration of the pickups.

So, my original signature Jaguar does a lot. It has a Telecaster blade switch [that] gives you four different scenarios: the bridge pickup, the two pickups together, the neck pickup, and the bridge and middle pickup in series.

But with the new Signature Special, you have all of that – but then you also have all of that with the middle pickup added, and then also just the middle pickup.

What the other switches do is all of the above, but with a high-pass filter, which is what I retained from the original ’60s design. And then the third switch [is] a slider switch [that] when it's in series position is an extra notch filter, because when the pickups are in series, they are so fat-sounding that they just take it away from the Fender realm, and they almost sound more like a P-90.

Would you consider it a tribute to Bill?

Yeah, that's right. And we all felt that because it was the last project that Bill was involved in, and he was very passionate about it. The wiring is really ingenious.

This year, I got to collaborate with Gorillaz and also with Franz Ferdinand. Because I've got the prototype, I wanted to see how it would work with a different kind of music to my own, and the fact that it's so versatile has really come up pretty good.

Your first signature Jaguar inspired a new generation of players. What do you hope this new version communicates to younger guitarists?

There are people who bought my signature Jaguar because of its reputation – and because they don't necessarily have to be a fan of my music – but what I feel I did with both my signature Jags [is that] they are more efficient than the original ’60s design. That's to do with the change in the blade switch and the way the bridges behave – staying in tune, the saddles, and all of those things that I felt were necessary improvements.

So I want for that to continue, but also maybe a new person coming along who thinks that they want to do all of that, but also for it to be more of a rock guitar. I think that was my original idea, to not lose anything of my signature Jag, but for it to behave better as a driven guitar.

You've lent a lot of guitars to other musicians in the past, like Noel Gallagher, of course, and Radiohead. Do you still lend your guitars out these days?

Well, I think most of my friends actually own my guitars now [on a sort of] a permanent loan [laughs]. I tend to encourage my friends to try different things. So, for example, when Radiohead were making In Rainbows, I couldn't believe they'd never used a Les Paul before. I think I loaned them an SG for the album. And Thom [Yorke] ended up buying an SG himself.

Who, in your opinion, are some of the artists or bands right now who are really shaping the guitar scene?

I feel a little weird even bringing this up, because I've been around for so long, but I can't help but celebrate the fact that we're just now so used to female bands.

When I was starting out in the early ’80s, particularly when I started with the teenage bands in the late ’70s, women in rock, certainly playing guitar with bands, either as the lead singer or lead guitarist, were nowhere near as common. You had Chrissie Hynde, obviously, Bonnie Raitt, Joni Mitchell… but there were few rock guitar players.

And now, you only have to look at social media for a couple of minutes, and you see all these girls playing dazzling guitar.

I know the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have been around a long time, but I always really, really like whenever they put a new record out, because I think Nick Zinner is a really, really exciting guitar player. I like The Last Dinner Party – [Emily Roberts] is a good guitar player. And also, I'd say Fontaines D.C.'s latest record's [Romance] got the type of guitar playing that I just really like.

Speaking of influential guitar players, what are your thoughts on Oasis’ recent reunion shows?

From the minute the reunions were announced, in the UK, at least, almost three-quarters of the country were cheered up. Because Noel's my friend, to give you a serious answer, I'm very happy that he's reunited with his brother. That's a great thing, obviously, but the concerts had such an elevated atmosphere and a real positive message of the power of music.

When I was in America, because people know that I play with Noel, so many people were telling me that they went to the concerts and how amazing these concerts were – and, sometimes, it was people who you wouldn't think were fans of Oasis.

So it became like a cultural phenomenon, with the main inspiration being about unity. That's something that is very much in need in today's world. So they've done something really great, not only for themselves, but really, for a lot of people. They brought a lot of people joy. And it's something I've never seen in my lifetime. Biggest reunion of all time.

Did they ask you to guest star?

There were three very, very loud guitar players up there, because Gem [Archer] has got a big sound as well, and between Bonehead [Paul Arthurs, bassist] and Noel, I think they've got plenty of decent jackets up there. They don't need me in a good jacket! [laughs]

And finally, which guitar players have inspired you over the years – particularly ones people might not expect?

You know who I think was a really, really interesting guitar player? John Lennon. Some of the things that people don't quite realize he was doing on the White Album... I can go down rabbit holes.

And John McLaughlin. Whenever I mention John McLaughlin, I think people are surprised because I come out of the indie rock scene. But you know, when I started out, I would be talking about Nile Rodgers. And at the time, I remember that all those boys who were working in the British music press couldn't believe what they were hearing when I was talking about Nile Rodgers.

But now, everybody can understand that me and Nile Rodgers have got a lot in common – mostly to do with the way we make music: collaborating with other bands, producing and arranging, and using the guitar as a kind of hook.

The idea of someone standing behind a mixing desk working on vocals with the singer, but with their guitar around their neck, while still being known for playing the guitar – Nile was a bit of an example for me, really. It's [all] an evolution.

• The Limited-Edition Johnny Marr Signature Special Jaguar is available now from Fender retail partners. For more information, visit Fender.

What is it?

Of the three recent Oasis signature electric guitar models there’s little doubt that Noel’s Gibson Les Paul has been the most polarising and most expensive. Gem Archer’s Epiphone Masterbilt repro of a well-used 1966 Sheraton loaned to him by Noel has seen plenty of Gallagher action and really might be the one for the cork-sniffing tonehounds. But neither of those guitars come close to this repro of Oasis’ original co-founder Paul Benjamin ‘Bonehead’ Arthurs’ 1984 Riviera: a guitar that powered the first two albums.

“Epiphone Rivieras have been with me from the early rehearsals at the Boardwalk in Manchester all the way up to those historic shows at Knebworth and on into Liam’s solo career,” says Bonehead. “I’m still playing my original 1984 guitar on the Oasis 2025 tour, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Specs

• Launch price: $899 | £849 | €999
• Made: China
• Type: Double-cutaway, centre-blocked thinline electric
• Body: Five-ply maple laminate body with maple centre-block
• Neck: Three-piece maple w/ volute, SlimTaper ‘C’ profile, glued-in
• Fingerboard/Radius: Single-bound rosewood /12”
• Scale length: 24.75” (629mm)
• Nut/width: Graph Tech/43.2mm
• Frets: 22, medium
• Hardware: LockTone tune-o-matic bridge and stud tailpiece, diecast tuners w/ oval metal buttons – nickel plated
• Electrics: 2x Epiphone Alnico Classic PRO humbuckers, 3-way toggle pickup selector switch, individual volume and tone controls
• Weight: 8.6lb (3.9kg)
• Left-handed options: No
• Finishes: Dark Tobacco Sunburst only – all gloss
• Case: Hard case
• Contact: Gibson

Build quality

Build quality rating: ★★★★★

In terms of outlay this Riviera is the most affordable guitar of the Oasis trio but it’s no slouch when it comes to the apparent quality. The Riviera launched back in the early sixties, made by Gibson in Kalamazoo, and was pretty much a re-badged ES-335 with a few Epiphone-isms like its Frequensator tailpiece and mini-humbuckers.

That style of Riviera is still offered by Epiphone but Bonehead’s original, from 1984, was not only made by this time in Japan but also more generic, more ES-335, as the mini-hums had switched to full-size ‘buckers and a stop tailpiece replaced the antique-looking tailpiece.

So, the new Chinese-made build has few surprises: its body is five-ply laminated maple with a chunky centre-block but a good weight for the style at 8.6lb. The neck here replicates the original, which is a longitudinal three-piece laminate of maple with a rear volute to strengthen the weakest part of the neck behind the nut. It’s a robust construction, arguably stronger than one-piece mahogany, not least with the long ‘sloped dove-wing’ headstock.

Obviously, we don’t get the gloss nitrocellulose of Noel’s Les Paul or the duller and more vintage-y finish of Gem’s higher-ticket Sheraton but the gloss polyester here is faultlessly applied, and if one function of a finish is to protect the instrument then this’ll survive a nuclear attack.

It’s a cool color too; a really rich and dark ‘burst, the perfect backdrop to the very sixties-looking, white ‘E’ logo’d pickguard and truss rod cover.

The hardware which looks to be chrome-plated rather than the specified nickel, includes the neat LockTone bridge and tailpiece that stay on the guitar when you whip off the strings, the tuners certainly do their job and like Noel’s Riviera we get a pair of Alnico Classic PROs, this guitar’s secret weapon.

Playability

Playability rating: ★★★★★

The Riviera’s body, like the ES-335, is considerably bigger than a Les Paul which looks like a ukulele in comparison. Yes, strapped on or seated it’s more like a thinline acoustic which, centre-block aside, is almost what it is. The neck’s profile is quoted as a SlimTaper ‘C’ and of the three Oasis guitars it’s, by a slim margin, the thinnest from front to back, the profile slightly flatter-backed too.

The fretwork here is really rather good with a slightly wider and higher gauge than used on the Gallagher Les Paul. Sorry Noel, but Bonehead’s plays a bit more positively. It’s more than fit for strum-a-long Oasis – and there’s nothing wrong with that – but it’s actually a really engaging player which like a good ES-335 can pretty much cover anything.

Sounds

Sounds rating: ★★★★★

A few unplugged strums on this and it’s very much game on. There’s a roomy, acoustic-y response that’s not overly damped by the centre-block, certainly good enough for some quiet, or quite raucous practice. Plugged in, you’re in for a treat. Played cleaner there’s quite a snappy response that’s just as good for a bit of articulate timeless jangle and, certainly at neck, some much older-sounding bluesier colours.

There does seem to be a little edge to the slightly hot-Patent Applied For sound that helps the neck from sounding too smooth and at these lower gains the mixed pickup voice is quite a stand-out.

The bridge pickup might need a little tone roll-off taming for some tastes but as we crank up the gain things take off: there’s a punky edge that’s not only very Oasis but has a real sixties garage-rock vibe: attitude in spades.

But reinforcing the stylistic flexibility, if Bonehead ever did a blues album, hey, he wouldn’t need another guitar! At high volumes, just lean into your amp for a bit of Neil Young feedback chaos. Some might be tempted to retro-fit a Bigsby.

Verdict

Not only is this Riviera the most Oasis-relevant guitar of the recently launched trio, it’s the most affordable too. As a modern repro of a design that was launched back in 1958 as the Gibson ES-335 it’s not bringing anything new to the table either but that’s not the point. It’s simply a celebration of a guitar that launched a phenomenon and, as Bonehead states, is still in his hands today.

Step away from the Bonehead/Oasis connection, however, and this Riviera remains a very good and very functional ES-335-alike. The playing, the songs and the style are down to you!

Guitar World verdict: It might be marketed as Oasis-specific but this Riviera is a timely reminder that Epiphone’s builds are setting new standards. High-quality retro!

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• "Some might say this is far from a valid Oasis signature guitar, having only come into play earlier this year": Gibson Noel Gallagher Les Paul Standard review

What is it?

No sooner had Oasis begun their Live ’25 reunion tour on 4th July 2025 than chatter started about a mystery guitar Noel Gallagher was wielding, a black Les Paul. Was it the fabled Custom he was loaned from Johnny Marr?

As the dates continued, so did the speculation until Gibson announced a 25-piece limited run, at a mere £17,500, that “paid tribute to the instrument that Noel Gallagher has been using at Oasis reunion shows,” technically a Made To Measure Les Paul that Noel had been working on with Gibson for the previous 18 months.

Surely a production version would follow, and just before Oasis kicked off their five-date run in Australia, it was announced: the Gibson USA Noel Gallagher Les Paul Standard!

Specs

• Launch price: $2,999 | £2,699 | €3.099
• Made: USA
• Type: Single-cutaway, solidbody electric
• Body: Mahogany (no weight relief) with carved maple top
• Neck: Mahogany, SlimTaper profile, glued-in
• Fingerboard/Radius: Single-bound Indian rosewood /12”
• Scale length: 24.75” (629mm)
• Nut/width: Graph Tech/43.5mm
• Frets: 22, medium jumbo
• Hardware: Tune-o-matic bridge, aluminium stud tailpiece, Grover Rotomatic tuners w/ kidney buttons – chrome plated
• Electrics: 2x Gibson Soapbar P-90 single coils w/ chromed metal covers, 3-way toggle pickup selector switch, individual volume and tone controls
• Weight: 10lb (4.56kg)
• Left-handed options: No
• Finishes: Ebony nitrocellulose only
• Case: Hard case
• Contact: Gibson

Build quality

Build quality rating: ★★★★ ½

Now, rather than any radical re-design of the Les Paul this new signature comes across as a pimped-up hot-rod. Gibson already has its Les Paul Standard 50s P-90 and really this is the same guitar with some tweaks: first off, instead of the ‘50s Vintage neck profile it swaps to Noel’s preferred SlimTaper.

The gloss nitro-cellulose Ebony-only finish is not only nicely done but is the perfect backdrop for the all-chrome hardware instead of the 50s P-90’s nickel. The specs (and some Gibson images) tell us we should have an ABR-1 tune-o-matic bridge, although our sample uses the aluminium Nashville tune-o-matic with its slightly wider-travel saddles – as used extensively in Gibson USA’s Modern Collection – along with a lightweight stop tailpiece and Grover Rotomatic tuners. Further pimps include both a chromed-metal jackplate – as used on certain Modern models too – and toggle switch surround aka the ‘switch washer’.

Under the moody exterior there are no changes to the Standard’s mahogany back/maple top construction or its one-piece mahogany neck with a mid-brown, single bound rosewood fingerboard and time-honored acrylic trapezoid inlays.

While the actual soapbar P-90 pickups are the same specification as that 50s model, the difference here are the unique chromed-metal covers, a nod to the chromed dog-ear covers of another Noel favourite, the Epiphone Casino. There are no changes in the controls either, it’s the standard Gibson modern-wired control circuit that’s typically neatly done with Gibson logo’d pots and Orange Drop capacitors. Overall, it’s a pretty tidy contemporary Les Paul.

Playability

Playability rating: ★★★★☆

If the five-ply pickguard is a nod to that loaned Johnny Marr Les Paul Custom, so is our Standard’s heft. There’s no weight relief here and our sample tips the scales bang-on 10lbs. That aside, it’s obviously very similar to plenty of other USA Les Pauls: it’s very familiar, nothing to get used to.

That said, Gibson’s so-called ‘medium jumbo’ fret wire feels more like a smaller ‘medium’ and our sample’s felt and measured a little low. Bends feel a little less positive and you can certainly feel the fingerboard face: it’s almost a built-in vintage-y played-a-lot vibe. The frets could also benefit from a bit more polishing and the fingerboard needs a little conditioning, if only to deepen the color.

In some quarters the SlimTaper gets some flak, not least from the ‘big is best’ fraternity. But that’s taste: the profile here isn’t exactly skinny, quite a classic ‘C’ with a little more shoulder.

Sounds

Sounds rating: ★★★★½

There’s nothing remarkable in the guitar’s unplugged response either, a good typically pushy ring. But it’s the single coil P-90s, that with the exception of that Les Paul Standard 50s P-90, differentiate this from the mainly humbucker-loaded USA LP models.

Using an original 1957 Les Paul Jr as a sonic benchmark, the NG doesn’t disappoint. It retains some of that Jr’s bite and mid-range attitude but smooths it a little adding seemingly both depth and clarity.

Switch off the obvious crunch and gain on your amp and go clean and there’s quite strident jangle at bridge, jazztastic smoothness at neck and a little sparkle with both pickups voiced that works in more soulful, funkier styles. But then bring back a little hair and crunch and the single-coil texture eases into Americana and a whole lot more. If only there was a Bigsby option…

But the humbucker was invented for good reason. Single coils pick up noise and hum that in certain situations can ruin the fun. It’s why numerous Gibson artists, most recently Warren Haynes, choose hum-canceling P-90 DC soapbars for his signature. In the short time we had the guitar though it was well-behaved. The pickups have the same magnetic polarity so aren’t hum-canceling in the mix position and we simply ran out of time [Gibson UK needed this example back fairly urgently] to test what effect, or not, those covers have on the sound and any noise reduction.

Potential pitfalls aside, the quality of sound, that different texture and bite ain’t to be sneezed at.

Verdict

Some might say this is far from a valid Oasis signature guitar, having only come into play earlier this year. It’s simply based on a custom-spec’d guitar, a tool for Noel’s day job, admittedly a ginormous world tour, but is Noel even still using his versions?

All of that aside, as we said, it’s a slightly different, pimped-up take on an existing USA Les Paul that quite simply might entice players to taste, or remind themselves of the P-90s different, less-smooth fat single-coil voice that has way more sonic potential than merely playing covers of the signature artist’s band. It’s quite the rock’n’roller: old or new.

Guitar World verdict: Forgot the backstory; this is a good USA Les Paul pairing a SlimTaper neck profile with P-90 single coils and rock ’n’ roll dress.

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The Oasis reunion tour has been a surprising hot spring for signature guitars. First, Noel Gallagher got an ultra-exclusive Murphy Lab recreation of his Les Paul, which today (October 30) was re-launched as a Standard model.

Now, Gallagher’s two guitar foils – Gem Archer and Paul 'Bonehead' Arthurs, both of whom are involved in the reunion tour – have been given signature Epiphones of their own, and they’re both based on classic Epi designs steeped in Oasis history.

Archer has the slightly more expensive $1,299 Masterbuilt Sheraton, offered in Cherry Red. Bonehead has a $899 Dark Tobacco Sunburst Riviera. Both are based on the ES-335 body shape, and both are very pretty indeed.

Archer has opted for a slightly more regal Epi build, which looks to faithfully recreate the 1966 Sheraton that has been by his side throughout his work with Oasis, Beady Eye and Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds. The original was, in fact, gifted to Archer by Noel, and has remained a staple in his collection since.

The Sheraton is laced with gold hardware, a raised diamond trapeze tailpiece and a pair of Gibson USA Mini Humbuckers. The semi-hollow build is made from a five-ply layered maple/poplar body with a maple centerblock, and a one-piece mahogany neck that’s topped with a 22-fret rosewood fingerboard.

The headstock comes with some appropriately decorative tree of life inlays, with Archers’ signature present on the rear. Seven-ply top, three-ply back and five-ply fretboard binding give the Sheraton a suitably Britpop-approved aesthetic.

“Originally gifted to Gem by Noel Gallagher, the vintage Sheraton has remained a staple in his collection, and this new release pays tribute to that cherished instrument,” Epiphone writes.

“The Epiphone Sheraton first came into my world when I borrowed Noel’s for Oasis tours and recording,” Archer says. “When I started playing with him again in the High Flying Birds in 2017, this was the guitar I asked if he still had.

“It’s got a ring and a clang to it, with loads of definition and clarity that I haven’t found in any other model.”

Oasis co-founding guitarist Bonehead, meanwhile, has opted for something a tad more rugged, a bit more rough-and-ready. It’s based on the 1984 Riviera that served as his most trusted companion during the band’s early days, and that helped shape the sound of Definitely Maybe, (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, and the wider Oasis sound.

As such, it’s still based on the ES double-cut body shape, but dresses its five-ply layered maple body and three-piece maple neck with a sunburst finish and more subtle single-ply cream binding.

Full-sized humbuckers are put to use here – a pair of Alnico Classic Pros, to be precise – with the Riviera sticking to some of its usual spec sheet suspects. That includes a SlimTaper C neck profile, 22-fret rosewood fingerboard with parallelogram inlays, and Black Witch Hat knobs.

“Epiphone Rivieras have been with me from the early rehearsals at the Boardwalk in Manchester all the way up to those historic shows at Knebworth and on into Liam’s solo career,” notes Bonehead.

“I’m still playing my original 1984 guitar on the Oasis 2025 tour, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“Few guitarists embody Epiphone’s For Every Stage philosophy quite like Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs,” Epiphone notes. “From intimate early gigs at The Water Rats to the historic Knebworth concerts, Bonehead’s Epiphone Riviera was a constant companion – delivering the driving, textured rhythm work that helped define Oasis’s unmistakable sound.

“His most legendary instrument, a 1984 Riviera, was front and center during the recording of Definitely Maybe, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory, and throughout the band’s meteoric rise in the 1990s. Now, Epiphone is proud to offer a faithful recreation of that iconic guitar.”

Both guitars are available now. Head to Epiphone to find out more.

In related Epiphone news, the company recently launched a replica of the Back to the Future ES-345 – examples of which have been snapped up by scalpers, with prices on the secondhand market hitting the $7k mark.

Gibson has released a Standard USA version of arguably its most talked-about Custom Shop build of the year, bringing Noel Gallagher’s highly sought-after Oasis reunion Les Paul to the masses.

When Oasis kicked off their reunion tour earlier this year, guitar fans were considerably intrigued by Noel’s electric guitar of choice. The ebony, chrome soapbar pickup-loaded build was unlike anything else on the Gibson books.

Speculation surrounding the build rightly pointed to the inevitable conclusion that, yes, Noel had worked closely with the Gibson Custom Shop to produce a newly spec’d guitar that could meet his tonal requirements for the reunion.

Then came talk of a potential signature run, which was (somewhat) satiated by the launch of an eye-wateringly exclusive Murphy Lab reissue. Only 25 were made, each representing a particular Oasis hit. A price wasn’t listed. Those interested had to contact the Gibson Garage London directly.

Naturally, there were more than 25 Oasis fans who wanted a Noel Les Paul of their own – one, preferably, that wouldn’t carry a reported five-figure price tag – and so Gibson has answered the prayers of the masses by launching the Noel Gallagher Les Paul Standard.

At $2,999, it’s more in line with the rest of the firm’s Standard artist offerings, but retains the vibe of the original. It doesn’t have the subtle Murphy Lab aging, but it does have those anachronistic P-90s with chrome covers.

According to Gibson, the originals found on Noel’s guitar took “a lot of time getting right”, and were specially voiced to accommodate his guitar tone at exceptionally high volumes without compromising on clarity or sonic integrity.

Gibson says the Standard version is “built to Noel Gallagher’s specifications for the Live ‘25 tour”, so it sounds like the same pickup recipe is used here – or, at the very least, closely inspired by them. The chrome pickups are joined by chrome hardware – poker chip toggle included – to keep it in line with the source material.

Elsewhere, it boasts a five-ply pickguard – something usually reserved for Custom models – as well as a non-weight-relieved mahogany body with a bound maple cap, a SlimTaper mahogany neck, and 22-fret fingerboard. Grover Rotomatic, an ABR-1 bridge and Noel Gallagher’s signature on the rear of the headstock can also be found.

“This guitar is simply too iconic and cool not to be released more widely and made available for more fans to get their hands on,” says Lee Bartram, Head of Commercial and Marketing EMEA at Gibson.

“Noel’s original Gibson Custom version of this Les Paul was the first guitar he played during the biggest rock ’n’ roll reunion of the 21st century. This Gibson USA version embraces that legacy, capturing a historic moment in British and global live music.”

The Noel Gallagher Les Paul Standard is available now for $2,999.

Visit Gibson for more.

The 1960 Gibson ES-355, damaged during a heated argument on the night that Oasis broke up in 2009 – however, the band's Wonderwall acoustic guitar, which represents a huge part of the Manchester band’s folklore, failed to sell.

The two instruments were the headline pieces in a bumper sale of Oasis memorabilia as part of Propstore Auction's Music Memorabilia collection. The pre-sale interest in the two guitars, though, failed to hit the heights once bidding began.

The ES-355 was part of Noel Gallagher's rig when the band travelled to Paris to headline the Rock en Seine festival in August 2009. But, as tensions between the Gallagher brothers – which had been bubbling for some time – came to a head, the ES-355 felt the brunt of their frustrations.

“[Liam] goes to his dressing room and picks up a guitar [the ES-355], comes back and starts throwing it around like an axe,” Noel said of their band ending bust-up. “He’s swinging this guitar around, and he nearly took my face off with it. It ended up on the floor, and I put it out of its misery.”

Ironically, the Bigsby-loaded guitar had been bought from a Parisian guitar shop in the late 1990s. It has since featured on the road and extensively in the studio. It sold for £289,900 (approx $386,000) after nine bids, having had an estimate of £250,000-500,000 (approx $266,00 - $665,000).

The Takamine FP460SC acoustic used to record one of the band’s biggest hits, meanwhile, was gifted to an engineer after his Fender acoustic was caught in the crossfire of another Gallagher fallout.

“It was the morning after a heavy night and Liam was worse for wear,” Nick Brine, the engineer, told the BBC. Noel's Fender Jaguar was first smashed to bits by his brother, before he turned his attention to an acoustic, without realizing it wasn't Noel's. The Takamine was then gifted to Brine as a peace offering.

Despite its prestige, it failed to sell at auction. It had an estimated value of £200,000 - £400,000 (approx $266,00 - $532,000). According to Popstore's site, offers are still being accepted for the guitar.

In related news, the mystery Les Paul that Noel Gallagher has been playing during the band’s latest reunion shows has been launched as a signature model on a limited run.

The guitarist has also satisfied the gear nerds by revealing what's currently on his pedalboard.

This year’s Oasis reunion tour has been widely cited as a musical phenomenon, with many calling it the event of the year.

And after reuniting for their first shows in 16 years, who could blame fans – and those in search of a good dose of nostalgia – for the palpable excitement, really? Among Oasis’ many fans is Johnny Marr, who famously loaned a struggling Noel Gallagher a 1960 Gibson Les Paul and, later, a black 1978 Gibson Les Paul Custom, when the band was starting out.

Now, in a new Guitar World interview, Marr gives his two cents on the resounding cultural impact of the Oasis reunion tour.

“It's an amazing thing that I saw, from the minute the reunions were announced in the UK, at least three quarters of the country were cheered up,” he notes. “Because Noel's my friend, of course, to give you a serious answer, I'm very happy that he's reunited with his brother. That's a great thing, obviously, but the concerts had such an elevated atmosphere and a real positive message of the power of music.

“When I was in America, because people know that I play with Noel, so many people were telling me that they went to the concerts and how amazing these concerts were, and sometimes, it was people you wouldn't think were fans of Oasis,” he relates.

“So it became like a cultural phenomenon, with the main inspiration being about unity. That's something that is very much in need in today's world. So they've done something really great, not only for themselves, but really for a lot of people. They brought a lot of people joy. And it's something I've never seen in my lifetime. Biggest reunion of all time.”

As for whether he ever got the call to, perhaps, guest star at one of the shows, Marr replies with a laugh. “Well, there were three very, very loud guitar players up there, because Gem [Archer] has got a big sound as well, and between Bonehead [Paul Arthurs] and Noel, I think there's plenty of decent jackets up there as well. They don't need me in a good jacket either!”

In more recent Oasis news, band co-founder and rhythm guitarist Bonehead recently announced he's temporarily pulling out of the rest of the reunion shows following his cancer diagnosis.

Oasis guitarist Paul 'Bonehead' Arthurs has pulled out of a portion of the band’s reunion tour after being diagnosed with prostate cancer.

The guitarist co-founded the group in the early 1990s and contributed to their first three albums before departing in 1999. He has returned for their 2025 reunion, but his cancer diagnosis has put his plans on temporary hold.

Revealing his diagnosis in an Instagram post, Arthurs says his need for treatment rules him out of shows in Seoul, Tokyo, Melbourne, and Sydney.

“Early this year, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. The good news is I'm responding really well to treatment, which meant I could be part of this incredible tour,” he writes. The portion of the tour he has already been involved in included a five-date homecoming in Manchester, where they are believed to have played to over 400,000 fans.

“I'm really sad to be missing these shows, but I'm feeling good and will be back ready to go in time for South America,” he continues. Their South America tour is due to start in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on November 15.

During Oasis’ hiatus – which came after a guitar-smashing bust-up between the Gallagher brothers in 2009 – Arthurs was a key figure in Liam Gallagher's solo band. He also filled in for Gem Archer in Beady Eye in 2013 and 2014.

The latter years of that period were blighted by his battle with tonsil cancer. He was welcomed back into the band in light of the Gallagher brothers rekindling their once fractured relationship, and it has been a tour of high points so far.

A fill-in guitarist to cover Arthurs’ leave of absence has not been confirmed at the time of writing.

Noel Gallagher’s Murphy Lab-aged Oasis reunion Les Paul has been released as a limited-edition signature guitar. The guitarist’s pedalboard has also been revealed in all its glory.

Gallagher has been embracing guitar solos across the tour, as part of a three-guitar tandem with Arthurs and Gem Archer.

A 1960 Gibson ES-355 that was “smashed up” by Liam Gallagher on the night the band split in 2009 is heading for auction alongside the Takamine FP460SC acoustic guitar used to track Wonderwall.

The two guitars symbolize the highs and lows of Manchester’s biggest band. They’re part of a 150-strong collection of Oasis items set to be sold as part of a Propstore auction.

The Cherry Red, Bigsby-appointed ES-355 tells a tale of the fractious side of the Gallagher brothers’ relationship. There was no brotherly love lost on that fateful night in Paris, and it all came to a head just before they were due to step out on stage at the Rock en Seine festival.

“It’s with some sadness and great relief to tell you that I quit Oasis tonight,” Noel Gallagher wrote on the band’s website that night. “People will write and say what they like, but I simply could not go on working with Liam a day longer.”

In 2011, Noel had claimed his brother had wanted free advertising spaces in the band’s programs to promote his Pretty Green clothing brand as the straw that, slowly but surely, broke the camel’s back. In truth, things hadn’t been harmonious in the Oasis camp for some time. This was the inevitable final outburst.

“He was quite violent,” Noel said of his brotherly bust-up. “He storms out of the dressing room and picks up a plum. He threw it across the dressing room and it smashed against the wall. I kind of wish it had ended like that because it would have made a great headline, ‘plum throws plum and finishes Oasis,’” but it didn’t end like that.

“He goes to his own dressing room and picks up a guitar [the ES-355], comes back and starts throwing it around like an axe. He’s swinging this guitar around and he nearly took my face off with it. It ended up on the floor and I put it out of its misery.

“There were people who were in the band, not saying anything. We were all involved in it and nobody was saying anything. So I thought, ‘I’m fucking out of here.’’

The guitar’s history, even if tainted, means it is expected to sell for £500,000 (approx $671,000).

The Wonderwall acoustic, which was gifted to one of the band’s sound engineers after another guitar-smashing argument between Noel and Liam saw his Fender obliterated, is also headed to the auction block, with an estimate of £200,000 - £400,000.

For more information, head to Propstore.

Oasis made their long-awaited comeback this summer, with the Gallaghers expected to pocket £400m for burying the hatchet.

Noel Gallagher has already revealed what’s on his Oasis pedalboard and has worked with Gibson for a Murphy Lab-aged Les Paul, which is getting a very limited run.

After weeks of speculation, Gibson has released a supremely limited run of electric guitars based on the mystery Les Paul that Noel Gallagher has been playing on stage during the ongoing Oasis reunion.

When Oasis reunited for their first show in 16 years earlier this year, gear fans quickly took note of Noel’s new guitar of choice: an elusive Gibson Les Paul, which sported nickel P-90 pickups and a relic’d ebony finish.

It was the six-string that has helped Noel re-embrace guitar solos as he slips back into the role of lead guitar player, and after much discussion surrounding what the guitar actually was, Gibson shared some telling details about the origins of the instrument.

Then, to the delight of many Oasis fans, Gibson teased a signature guitar release may very well be on the cards.

Well, that has finally arrived, with Gibson announcing the Custom Noel Gallagher Les Paul Standard – a meticulous recreation of the OG Murphy Lab Custom Shop model.

Limited to a mere 25 examples and available exclusively from the Gibson Garage London, each instrument is said to represent “one of the classic Oasis tracks performed during the Live ’25 tour”, thanks to accompanying handwritten lyric sheets composed and signed by Noel himself.

The Gallagher LP features Light Aging from the Nashville Murphy Lab, and comes equipped with custom nickel-covered P-90 pickups – a rare, relatively unheard of appointment that Gibson spent “a lot of time getting right”.

As per Gibson’s Lee Bartram, the pickups were designed to accommodate Noel’s guitar tone at exceptionally high volumes without compromising on clarity or sonic integrity.

Other appointments include a ’60s Slim neck profile, a mahogany body with a maple top, Grover tuners and, on the rear of each model, Noel Gallagher’s signature.

“Gibson is honored to support Noel Gallagher in what has become one of the biggest music reunion tours in recent history,” says Lee Bartram, Head of Commercial and Marketing EMEA at Gibson.

“When he reached out, the challenge was to create a guitar with a striking, unique look while ensuring it produced the sound needed for the Live ’25 tour. Based on the feedback from fans so far, the team has certainly nailed it.”

What’s even more intriguing is the fact Gibson has hinted at more Oasis-themed releases to come from its partnership with Noel. Could the firm revisit its ‘trickle down’ release model a la Greeny and Adam Jones, and produce Gibson USA Standard and Epiphone variants of the Live ’25 Les Paul?

Bartram continues, “To kick off what is going to be a very exciting few months for our partnership, we have this truly unique collector’s package with each guitar accompanied by handwritten lyrics from Noel representing an Oasis track, meaning no two guitars will be the same. It’s the perfect way to start our Live ’25 celebrations, with more to come.”

A price hasn’t been confirmed, but owing to the sheer exclusivity of the model and all the accoutrements that come with it, we imagine it won’t be cheap.

It arrives as one of 2025’s most anticipated signature launches. As Bartram himself stated previously, “At the time of initial designs, I had no idea what the guitar was intended to be used for – I think it’s safe to say it has become the talk of the town every time it is used.”

The Noel Gallagher Les Paul will be available in-store from August 21.

Visit Gibson Garage London for more.

In related Oasis gear news, Noel Gallagher recently gave fans a close-up look of his high-end pedalboard and amps of choice.

Oasis’ return to the stage for the first time in 16 years has understandably grabbed the headlines but in guitar circles, Noel Gallagher’s mystery Gibson Les Paul has been a riveting sub-plot.

After relentless online speculation, the firm's Head of Commercial, Marketing & Cultural Influence, Lee Bartram, finally revealed the guitar's backstory. Chief picks include its nickel-covered P-90 pickups, a SlimTaper neck profile and its Murphy Lab relic work.

“I think it’s safe to say it has become the talk of the town every time it is used,” he had said. “I’ve had so many people reach out wanting to know what it is and if we can build one for them.”

A week later, the firm has dropped its biggest clue yet to the fact that the electric guitar might be more than a one-off custom job. An Instagram post showing Noel signing the back of a black, aged Les Paul, with the caption, “Available at the Gibson Garage London, 21 August 2025,” has got fans understandably excited.

Whether this will materialize in the form of a standard production run or an ultra-exclusive Murphy Lab drop (we suspect the latter) remains to be seen.

However, astute onlookers will note that the guitar that Gallagher is signing doesn’t look to be as heavily aged as the one he’s been sporting in UK stadiums. That suggests a signature guitar release proper is indeed right around the corner.

Gallagher has also been embracing guitar solos on the latest run of shows with Oasis, and recently satisfied gear oglers by revealing what’s currently on his pedalboard.

And in related news, Noel Gallagher once bought one of Peter Green’s Les Pauls – but erased Green’s signature to get back at the store owner who sold it to him.

Now Oasis’ hotly anticipated reunion is well underway, the details behind Noel Gallagher’s mystery Les Paul have finally been revealed.

Many gear oglers have been drooling at Noel’s high-end pedalboard, which was revealed via an Instagram post last month, whilst simultaneously scratching their heads as to what the story (ahem, morning glory) was behind the mystery Gibson Les Paul that has been a star performer during the band's return.

After plenty of speculative guesses, Gibson EMEA's Head of Commercial, Marketing & Cultural Influence, Lee Bartram, has now revealed all about the electric guitar, which has been in development for “at least 18 months.”

“It came from a conversation around creating a Les Paul that would accommodate P-90s at high volumes, without compromising on the sound and tone of the pickup,” he tells Gibson Gazette.

“At the time of initial designs, I had no idea what the guitar was intended to be used for. But, as development continued, it was important to create a guitar that would give different sonic layers to a lineup of three guitarists [with Gallagher augmented by Gem Archer, and Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs] playing to stadium-level attendances.

“The guitar needed to be loud and capture the vibe of those earlier shows, without compromising the output and tone of the pickups.”

Based on a 1960 Les Paul Standard (pickups aside) with a maple top on a mahogany body, it features a SlimTaper neck profile and Grover tuners. And yes, as many suggested, its ebony finish has been gone through a light aging process in Gibson’s Murphy Lab.

“The pickups are Gibson Custom P-90s as stock, with no additional wiring,” Bartram adds. “Noel has a great understanding of what he wants from a pickup. He knows that Gibson invented the P-90, and we didn’t want to mess with a winning formula.

“Having aged nickel covers on the pickups is relatively unique, however, and something the Gibson Custom Shop spent a lot of time getting right. The results look great, and the pickups sound amazing at volume.

“Not knowing originally where that guitar was going to end up, it’s been quite emotional to see it being used during the biggest reunion tour ever,” he adds. The band played to 300,000 people across their five Manchester shows alone.

“I think it’s safe to say it has become the talk of the town every time it is used – I’ve had so many people reach out wanting to know what it is and if we can build one for them.”

Gallagher's Definitely Maybe Les Paul Standard smashed its estimate when it sold at auction in September. More recently, one of the band's engineers has explained how he ended up with the Wonderwall acoustic in the wake of a Gallagher brother bust-up.

Sound the A-lister pedalboard klaxon. Noel Gallagher has shared details of his touring rig for Oasis’s long-awaited reunion shows, and in the parlance of our times, it is biblical.

Gallagher’s ’board features some stompboxes any of us might own. Heck, hands up who’s got a TC Electronic Polytune 3 guitar tuner. There’s a Keeley Electronics Compressor, aka, the industry standard, and a Dunlop Cry Baby Mini wah pedal.

Okay, there’s a strip of masking tape across this Boss digital delay pedal but that looks like the high-functioning but readily available DD-7, and it is good to see the hard-working Boss RV-3 Digital Reverb Delay in a top pro’s signal chain, too.

But Gallagher has sold some records, and a whole bunch of concert tickets; he's flush at the moment. So of course there are some museum pieces here, too. Pedals that you can’t buy anymore. Like the BSM Finest Treble Booster Model OR 2004. David Gilmour fans might recognize this one. It is based on the Orange Treble & Bass booster that he used with Pink Floyd back in the day. It’s a connoisseur’s pick.

Sadly, the mastermind behind BSM pedals, Bernd C. Meiser, died last year, and the company has since closed.

There are some other high-end units. Gallagher could pare this setup down to just his Strymon TimeLine multi-delay, Strymon El Capistan tape echo pedal, the Empress Echo System and the reverb, he’d have the makings of a seaworthy worship guitar rig. That would be biblical.

But the pedal we’d kick a hole in a stained glass window for is the SIB Echodrive. The big yellow tape reads 117V, and that is because this thing isn’t working off his pedalboard power supply; it’s a tube-driven, powered by the mains, echo/delay that changes hands for ridiculous money and sounds incredible [just listen to it below].

Designed by Rick Hamel, it has a 12AX7 preamp tube in the circuit, a heap of controls, a tone of mojo, and you’ll have to part with a grand – easy – if you find one second hand. Reverb recently did a segment on it, ‘Is this the best delay pedal? There was a lot of evidence in the affirmative.

Gallagher, however, is said to use it for its preamp mojo – that's one very expensive tone-sweetener, if true, but then given the amount of money (and time) we put into tone seeking, maybe it works out in the long run.

Okay, what else is here? Gallagher likes his boosts and tastefully structured gain stages (and the custom switching system to keep all of this in order). There is a Kingsley Amplifiers Page boost pedal, another stompbox driven by a 12AX7 tube. Another mainstay of Gallagher’s live sound is his Pete Cornish Soft Sustain 2 – he has been leaning into his guitar solos for these shows, and this drive pedal will give them serious oomph. Again, nothing too high-gain.

He also has a trio of ZVEX Lo-Fi Loop Junkies, which judging by the masking tape across them are pinch-hitters, each set up for Champagne Supernova, Rock and Roll Star and Do You Know What I Mean. And that completes a serious board.

His backline comprises four tube amp combos, with a pair of Marshall JTM45s, and a pair of Hiwatt Custom 50s. That's a pretty good time right there.

Noel Gallagher's guitar rig isn't the only thing that has caught our attention this early on in the Oasis reunion – he's also re-embracing his role as a lead guitar player.

It was a historic weekend for music fans, not just because of Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath’s Back to the Beginning farewell show – but because Britpop legends Oasis played their first shows together in 16 years.

Liam and Noel Gallagher’s hugely anticipated reunion was one of the biggest musical and cultural stories of 2024. The two brothers put aside their bitter rivalry, ended their decade-long feud and made every guitar fan's dream come true when they confirmed – after much speculation – they’d be reuniting for a staggering 41-date tour.

Now, the dust has settled on those first few Oasis reunion shows, which took place over the weekend at the Principality Stadium in Cardiff, Wales, and the message from those in attendance has been received loud and clear: the Gallagher brothers sound better than ever.

You need only watch the thrilling pro-shot footage of the pair belting out Acquiesce in front of thousands of emotional fans to fully grasp the gravity of the reunion, and if there were any remaining doubts over whether Oasis still had after all these years, they have now been well and truly put to bed.

Part of the reason Oasis have managed to make such a fine comeback and return with such an incredibly revived sound is, of course, down to the stellar OG musicians recruited for the job – Gem Archer and Andy Bell among them – but also Noel Gallagher himself, who seems to be something of a guitar player reborn.

One of the biggest talking points to emerge from those first few shows is that Noel is already looking – and sounding – seriously confident behind the guitar, and while his rhythm chops have never been in question, it’s his lead playing that has left a mark.

Noel looks like a lead player reborn going into this new era of Oasis, and after taking a step back from the role during his High Flying Birds days – during which he’d largely delegate lead duties elsewhere or forego them entirely – Gallagher is clearly relishing his return to guitar solos.

Indeed, some of Oasis’ catchiest solos and licks were crafted and executed by Noel, whose simple-yet-melodic mastery of the pentatonic box resulted in cuts such as Don’t Look Back in Anger, Champagne Supernova and Some Might Say.

Noel, by his own admission, took a step back from solos when Oasis split, but his passion for lead playing never left.

Speaking to MusicRadar in 2011, following the launch of his solo debut, Gallagher admitted, “In Oasis, I was doing a completely different thing than what I’m doing now. I was playing lead guitar. And… I do miss that. I miss being at the end of the stage and just turning up my fucking amp as loud as possible and kissin’ the sky. I do miss that, I have to say.

“[What] I'm doing now, yeah, it's different, so I have to rein in my natural urges to go for it. I'm part of the rhythm section now, so I've got to hold things down. I can't just go off on the guitar. But I'm enjoying that, really. I've got to say, I'm a much better rhythm guitarist than a lead guitarist."

Because of the nature of the gig, Noel never answered his heart’s call to resume this role in High Flying Birds, instead largely taking up the rhythm guitar. Gem Archer, who joined the lineup, often took on solos on stage, while engineer Paul Stacey recorded some in the studio.

There was also that unfortunate video that went viral of Gallagher fluffing his lines while performing Don’t Look Back in Anger back in 2023.

With the return of the Oasis, though, Gallagher is now well and truly re-embracing his solo side, and has even gone as far as to venture outside the box of his usual plucky, pentatonic-heavy style, pulling in some new techniques and licks to boot.

From a guitar fan's perspective, seeing Gallagher rekindle his passion for leads is, as mentioned, one of the reasons why the Oasis reunion has got off to such a high-flying start.

From the mountain of fan-filmed footage available, a goosebump-inducing, vibrato-heavy riff through the Live Forever solo – his first time performing it in years – is a particular highlight, while the pick scrape that launches the band into Slide Away is another indicator of a man thoroughly enjoying the return to a role he held down all those years ago.

Noel’s Champagne Supernova solo, though, is what sums up this new lease on lead-playing life that Gallagher is going through. Hair-raising bends, and some tremendous whammy bar work on the Bigsby, are utilized with impressive effect.

That Noel is playing more solos for an Oasis reunion shouldn’t come as a surprise, really, but given the length of time between the break-up and make-up, it’s nice to see Noel isn’t just tentatively picking up the reins again; he’s fully leaning back into the role of lead guitar player – and the Oasis reunion is all the richer for it.

Liam Gallagher’s son believes that guitar music is making a comeback, and its return could have something to do with Oasis' impending reunion.

Speaking to W Magazine, Gene Gallagher, who fronts the indie band Villanelle, reckons music fans have long been without guitar music, but all that is now starting to change.

“People have been deprived of guitar music,” he says (via Guitar.com). “But now it’s coming back, and everyone’s getting excited about it.”

Of course, the guitar had been in perfectly fine health prior to any word of Oasis' reunion, and as Gallagher alludes to, its presence throughout all corners of the music world has been keenly felt for years now.

Indeed, as recently as last weekend, Glastonbury 2025 was packed with stand-out electric guitar moments from act who are – and have been – flying the flag for a new generation of guitar artists for some time. Wet Leg and Wolf Alice are just two examples, but the list is far longer than that.

Elsewhere, Olivia Rodrigo has even been labelled as her generation’s Eddie Van Halen for how she is shoving guitar music back into the limelight and inspiring new generations of players to pick up the instrument in the process.

Then there’s Chapelle Roan injecting guitar solos into chart-decimating pop bangers, and of course, Taylor Swift’s influence cannot be underestimated either.

Outside of the popular music sphere, players such as Tim Henson and Tosin Abasi have catapulted the progressive contemporary guitar landscape into a new era with their unique playing style. In fact, the Polyphia virtuoso recently pointed to another unlikely hero: Machine Gun Kelly.

The guitarist, who raised eyebrows with his Chibson-esque razor blade Schecter, started his career as a rapper, but pivoted to the guitar for his more recent releases – another example of the instrument's evergreen presence in the music world.

Henson muses, “...MGK got a number one record with a guitar on the cover, [2020's Tickets to My Downfall], which is really cool.”

And, on the topic of guitar music’s resurgence, Sleep Token have to be involved in the conversation. The band's mix of R&B, gospel, pop, and prog metal is helping introduce a legion of new fans to the majesty of the electric guitar.

Justin Hawkins, meanwhile, sees a through line between Polyphia and Sleep Token, noting that there has also been a steep rise in the interest for technical playing.

“People have more respect for bands like Sleep Token, who are doing something really interesting, complex, and difficult to pull off,” Hawkins explains. “There’s a new appreciation for virtuosity, and I’m all for it. That’s why bands like Polyphia and Sleep Token have exploded. The way we think about the guitar and what the instrument is supposed to do has changed.”

Gene Gallagher is also a musician to enlighten his father on some of the heavier acts that rose to prominence at the same time the Manchester indie rockers were conquering the world. It’s steady progress.

“Heavy guitar music – that’s what I like,” he says. “My dad wasn’t fond of the grunge stuff, but I made him come around to it as he got older.”

Bands inviting fans on stage can be wonderfully endearing. We’ve seen Yungblud jam with fans time and again, while Pearl Jam recently celebrated a fan travelling 7,000 miles to watch the band by inviting him on stage to play Yellow Ledbetter with them – but one fan has used his moment in the spotlight to troll Green Day.

The punk rock legends chose to bring a fan on stage during a recent open-air show in Luxembourg on June 30, with the acoustic guitar staple Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) next up on the setlist. The chosen fan, however, had other ideas – and their wicked sense of humor got the better of them.

The young fan had Bille Joe Armstrong’s acoustic slung over his shoulder, but when he was prompted to start playing the 1997 hit in front of the 16,000-strong crowd, he chose to play Oasis’ Wonderwall instead.

Armstrong’s groan of “Oh, fuck me!” amidst a mixed reaction from the crowd – whoops and boos intermingling – hits hard. He knew he’d been duped.

The guitarist, though, swiftly unarmed his guitar-playing assailant, who put his hands to his head in disbelief. There was then a brief exchange between the pair, which likely saw the fan pleading his case before being ushered off stage, leaving Armstrong to finish the song himself.

He may have proven more forgiving if he hadn't played the long game in his bid to drop the punchline. There'd been an exchange just beforehand, with the young fan playing a chord progression that was definitely not Good Riddance, prompting Armstrong to laugh awkwardly and say, “You told me you could play this song!”

Still, Liam Gallagher found it funny at least. He commented on a clip of the prank on X with “Best song of the night.”

Green Day have been making a tradition of ending many of their sets with the help of their fans – Good Riddance's simple chord progression really lends itself to the opportunity – but this might be the first instance a fan has dared to go off-piste. The band may reconsider their vetting process in the future.

It’s been a busy few months for Armstrong. He was in Liverpool in January watching a fan cover a Green Day classic at the Cavern Club, unaware that the man who wrote it was in the room. In April, he showed his guitar solo chops by shredding Crazy Train with The Coverups, and joined the Go-Gos on stage for a Coachella guest spot, and last month they headlined Download Festival.

Green Day released their latest album, Saviors, last year, with Armstrong saying he fell in love with guitar solos again after doubling down on his love of Eddie Van Halen.

He’s also one of a select few musicians to have played Steve Jones’ Les Paul on stage in recent months, after its owner, who bought the guitar for $390,000 at auction, loaned it out to certified punk heavyweights.

From million-dollar auction sales to unbelievable yard sale finds, legendary gear has been bought, sold, acquired, and lost through many bizarre means.

Engineer Nick Brine, however, remarkably got Oasis’ iconic Wonderwall guitar straight from the source, after his own cherished acoustic guitar had been mistakenly destroyed during a Gallagher brother bust-up.

Brine had first worked with the band on (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? and returned to the studio for its 1997 Abbey Road-recorded follow-up, Be Here Now.

As the millennium beckoned and Britpop hit fever pitch, the swaggering Mancunians were at the height of their powers – but so too was the Gallagher brotherly rivalry that underpinned it. Brine’s guitar would get caught in the crossfire.

“It was the morning after a heavy night and Liam was worse for wear,” Brine tells the BBC ahead of the band’s hotly-anticipated return to the stage.

“Noel had said something about him in the papers and Liam kicked off. I’m in Abbey Road’s famous Studio Two setting up equipment and hungover myself, then looking up I saw a guitar come flying over from the control room.

“It was Noel’s Fender Jag and it smashed to bits,” he continues. “I ran to the control room and Liam also made a big dent in Abbey Road’s mixing desk.”

No stranger to the chaotic and often violent turns that the Gallagher brothers’ relationship repeatedly amounted to, Brine kept his distance. But the guitars kept coming.

“Then I see another acoustic guitar flying over the top and in a thousand pieces on the floor,” he says, “and realize that’s my guitar.”

Despite seeing his cheap ’70s Fender disintegrate before his eyes, Brine stuck to the tried and tested plan.

“I thought it best if I didn’t say anything. Noel came in and said, ‘What the hell is going on?’ It kicked off.

“Noel saw his guitar smashed up, then pointed to my smashed guitar and said, ‘Whose is that?’ Liam replies, ‘That’s your guitar too,’ to which Noel replies, ‘It ain’t mine!’”

“I sheepishly put my hand up and said, ‘Actually Liam, it’s mine.’ Then there was a big argument about who was going to buy me a new one. I told them it’s not valuable but it has quite sentimental value as my mum gave it to me.”

Liam felt a trip to London’s music store-lined Denmark Street, where Brine could buy “whatever guitar I wanted”, would prove sufficient compensation. Noel had other ideas.

“Noel replied to Liam, ‘What the hell do you know about guitars?’” Brine remembers. “There was another kick-off about who was going to buy me a new one.”

In the end, Noel convinced Liam to call Brine’s mother and apologize profusely for the guitar’s destruction. Then they handed him a piece of history: the Takamine Acoustic that had famously stared during their blockbuster Knebworth show and on MTV Unplugged. It was also used to track Wonderwall.

Auction houses have guessed it could be with up to £100,000 (approx. $140,000) if Brine were to sell it, and he’s had to take out insurance on it, just in case. But that estimation may be a little meager, considering Noel Gallagher’s Definitely Maybe Les Paul sold for nearly double its $100k estimate last year.

“I was gobsmacked,” Brine says. “I said, ‘It's OK, it’s fine,’ but Noel insisted I take it. It more than made up for the smashed guitar, I couldn’t believe it.”

A score of Oasis alumni are rumored to be participating in the band’s hotly anticipated reunion – one former bass player has already confirmed – while Sex Pistols’ Glen Matlock says he turned down the chance to fill that bass role once after being disappointed by their live show.

Former Oasis bassist Andy Bell has seemingly confirmed that he'll be returning to the stage with Noel and Liam Gallagher on this summer's reunion tour. Bell, who's currently part of shoegaze stalwarts Ride and played with Oasis between 1999 and 2009, recently commented on the reunion in an interview with Austrian newspaper Oe24, and stated, “I’m in, and I’m really looking forward to it.”

He continued, “We'll see each other on tour. Or rather, you'll see me – I'll hardly be able to see you in the audience.”

The Gallagher brothers have not yet confirmed Bell's participation – however, his long-rumored involvement has been confirmed by sources close to the band speaking to NME.

Alongside Bell, other musicians involved with the Gallagher brothers at different points in their careers are expected to join – including Oasis and Beady Eye alumnus (and Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds six-stringer) Gem Archer, Oasis co-founder, rhythm guitarist (and occasional bassist/keyboardist) Paul ‘Bonehead’ Arthurs, and drummer Joey Waronker – who has time with R.E.M. and Roger Waters on his CV.

Bell joined Oasis back in 1999, replacing Paul McGuigan, who had quit during the recording sessions of Standing on the Shoulder of Giants, the band's fourth album. At the last minute, Bell, originally a guitarist, had to learn bass and learn the breadth of Oasis' catalog before his first show with them.

“I hadn’t played bass to any great degree before I tried out for Oasis,” he told Guitar World in a 2023 interview. “So when I was invited to come out, when I got on the plane, I didn’t have a bass. So I couldn’t even try to learn anything before I got there. But I knew the chords to the songs, and I did my best to play the root notes; but I have to say, I probably wasn’t that good on the first run-through.

“The other thing was that I was playing bass with my fingers, and Noel said, ‘Guigsy played with a pick. Try it that way.’ And when I did, I found I could attack the bass in a way that sounded a lot more like Oasis.”

As for whether being in a band with Noel and Liam Gallagher was as tumultuous as the media made it out to be, Bell replied, “I would have to say yes. I’ve been in many bands over the years, but that was my first brush with true greatness on a worldwide scale.

“But in terms of global superstars of music, being in Oasis was just so huge. To be in a band with those guys was a huge learning experience. And their charisma – it’s a real thing. It was another level. And later, one of my proudest moments was that Oasis would start its set with a song I wrote called Turn Up the Sun. That was just unbelievably cool.”

Putting their rivalry aside, the Gallagher brothers will reunite this summer for 41 dates, kicking off in stadiums in the UK and Ireland before moving on to Canada and the States in August and September.

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation has revealed this year's inductees in an announcement delivered by Ryan Seacrest on the latest episode of American Idol – with a list that included some overdue names and omitted others who had an almost surefire shot at this year's class of inductees.

The guitar world is represented by The White Stripes, Soundgarden, and Bad Company in the Performer category. They are joined by Girls Just Wanna Have Fun icon Cyndi Lauper, gravel-voiced English singer Joe Cocker, Atlanta hip-hop duo Outkast, and Chubby Checker, who gets the nod nearly 40 years after he was first eligible for Hall of Fame recognition.

Bass legend Carol Kaye – who has played on more than 10,000 recordings over her six decade-plus career – is honored in the Musical Excellence Award category, alongside prolific R&B record producer, arranger, and songwriter Thom Bell, and English pianist and organist Nicky Hopkins.

Salt-N-Pepa, the first female rap act to achieve gold and platinum status from the Recording Industry Association of America, will also receive the Musical Influence Award, alongside Werewolves of London singer-songwriter Warren Zevon.

Meanwhile, record producer, former president of Warner Bros. Records, and co-founder and co-chair of DreamWorks Records, Lenny Waronker, is the recipient of this year's Ahmet Ertegun Award – reserved for non-performing industry professionals who have had a major influence on music and culture.

“Each of these inductees created their own sound and attitude that had a profound impact on culture and helped to change the course of Rock & Roll forever,” said John Sykes, Chairman of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. “Their music gave a voice to generations and influenced countless artists that followed in their footsteps.”

As is the case every year, there are a few high-profile snubs. Mariah Carey's omission, in particular, is a notable oversight, considering this is the second time she has been overlooked by the Rock Hall's voters. Britpop leaders Oasis were also given the cold shoulder, while jam band Phish – who topped the fan vote – didn't make the final cut.

This isn't the first time the winner of the fan ballot lost out on that year's induction. Dave Matthews Band, who won the 2020 fan vote, was ultimately not included in that year's final list – and had to wait four years before finally receiving their flowers.

The Class of 2025 will be inducted live on November 8 at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, California, with the ceremony streaming live on Disney+, a special airing on ABC at a later date, and available on Hulu the next day.

2024 Year in Review: Given their extensive warring and all-too-public exchanges, it’d be fair to say the Gallagher brothers are in a class of their own when it comes to sibling rivalry.

Which is why news of their long-awaited return dominated headlines around the world. It’s the reunion many of us were hoping for but few ever expected to materialize, and ultimately a big moment for guitar music in general.

Those overdriven cowboy chords and stadium-conquering chorus hooks will be omnipresent throughout 2025, and who knows, they might even result in more guitars being picked up.

Though no official confirmation of the resurrected lineup has been made at the time of writing, it looks as if Noel Gallagher will be joined by latter Oasis member and High Flying Bird Gem Archer on guitar, and original member Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs will also be likely to make an appearance.

In other Gallagher-related news, the Cherry Sunburst Epiphone Les Paul Standard used on Definitely Maybe (and in the Supersonic music video) sold at auction for just over $175,000, which works out as roughly 250 times more than what a new model would retail for today.

Glen Matlock, who rose to fame and notoriety as the bass player in the Sex Pistols has revealed he turned down the chance to play with Oasis because he finds them “boring”.

The Manchester indie rock giants broke the internet – and several ticket sites – when they announced their reunion earlier this year, but Matlock wasn’t found in the queue for tickets.

Speaking to British music publication the NME, he said he gave weight to the offer, but had several reasons for rejecting their approach.

“I’ve always seen Oasis as a bit Status Quo,” he says. “To hear one song once was enough. I just find them kind of samey.”

The famously outspoken low-end purveyor did then curtail his answer, making sure he remained diplomatic.

“I know the guys,” he goes on. “Nice blokes. I’ve gotta be careful what I say because I bump into Noel [Gallagher] quite a lot. He lives around the corner from me.

“I think Liam is fantastic. He sings great – he’s like Johnny Rotten but can carry a tune. He’s got a magnetic stage personality: he can just stand there and it’s riveting. The rest of the guys? No. I think they’re boring live.”

He says the approach was made in the “‘95 or ‘96” but was put off the gig after seeing them perform in London.

“I got invited to see ‘em at Earl’s Court. I left. It was boring,” he says. “I went again to see ‘em in upstate New York with [Blondie’s] Clem Burke. Nah – I couldn’t wait to go.

“[Band manager] Alan McGee asked me. So I went to see ‘em and I thought, ‘The last thing they need is someone else standing still.’”

Matlock isn't the only high-profile player to have considered joining the UK rock icons. The Smiths' Johnny Marr nearly joined Oasis – and famously gifted Noel Gallagher with his '78 Les Paul Custom.

The guitar would featured on mega hits by both bands, including The Queen Is Dead and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? Its legacy was celebrated with a special reissue last year.

Earlier this year, Noel Gallagher revealed he once bought one of Peter Green’s Les Pauls, but erased Green’s signature to get back at the store owner who sold it to him.

In the final issue of Total Guitar, the esteemed British guitar magazine is celebrating 30 years of history with an epic search through its sprawling archives. One of the highlights that has been unearthed is a classic interview with Noel Gallagher – where he discusses the time Oasis nearly had Johnny Marr as a second guitarist.

The interview dates back to a moment in time when the Britpop band were finishing work on their fourth album, Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants.

During that interview at Wheeler End Studios, just outside London, Gallagher reflected on handling nearly all of the guitar and bass parts on the album due to the departure of two founding members: guitarist Paul ‘Bonehead’ Arthurs and bassist Paul 'Guigsy' McGuigan. He also revealed how Smiths legend Johnny Marr had been ready to step in if needed.

“I never really wanted to play lead,” Gallagher admitted. “I’m more of a rhythm guitar player. That’s how I write.”

“Johnny Marr offered his services to the band. He said, ‘If you can’t find anyone I’ll step in for a while’. And we said, ‘Fine’. But then we recruited Gem [Archer]. Johnny was just gonna save us if we didn’t have anyone.”

Marr and the Gallagher brothers go way back. In addition to sharing the common thread of being from Manchester-Irish families, the veteran guitarist met Oasis when they were still relatively unknown.

As the story goes, Marr noticed they were taking a long time tuning between songs, so he loaned Noel a couple of his guitars, including a Les Paul previously owned by The Who's John Entwistle.

For Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants, Gallagher continued the tradition of using Marr's guitars.

“I got this Les Paul from Johnny,” he said. “There were really modern pickups in it and I didn’t like it. So I tossed the pickups out, took some from another guitar, and put them in this.” He quipped, “It’s a better guitar now, so he’s not getting it back!”

Following the band’s much-hyped reunion announcement, a handful of Oasis guitars – including Noel’s Definitely Maybe Epiphone Les Paul – exceeded initial estimates at a recent Sotheby’s auction.

A handful of Oasis electric guitars have smashed their upper estimates after going up for auction mere weeks after the influential Brit rock band announced their long-awaited return.

Following some brief but intense speculation, the Gallagher brothers officially confirmed that they’d be reuniting for a comeback tour later this year, with dates currently penciled in at London, Cardiff, Manchester, Edinburgh and Dublin.

The shows will mark the first time the brothers have played together ever since their infamous bust-up behind the scenes at the 2009 Rock en Seine festival in Paris, which involved the destruction of an ES-355 – which sold at auction.

But bubbling underneath the buzz surrounding Oasis’ long-awaited return was a Sotheby’s auction, which has seen the sale of some notable Oasis electrics – including Noel’s Definitely Maybe Epiphone Les Paul.

And, despite having an upper estimate of just over $100,000, the Epi LP ended up selling for closer to $200k – approximately $173,500, to be precise.

While it’s not quite enough to make it on to the list of the most expensive guitars ever sold at auction, it does weigh in as quite possibly the priciest Epiphone to be sold under the hammer.

To put it into perspective, it’s likely that Gallagher didn’t pay more than a few hundred pounds for the beginner electric guitar when he first acquired it. As such, to see its value rise to almost $200,000 is rather surreal.

But as mentioned, the guitar’s newest custodian – who may or may not have been swept up by Oasis fever at the time of the auction – will no doubt justify the hefty price tag by pointing to its cultural significance.

This is, after all, the guitar that paved the way for Oasis, and that helped them navigate their earliest sessions as they began their journey towards Brit rock domination.

“In December 1993 when Oasis recorded their first single, Supersonic, at the Pink Museum recording studio in Liverpool, all he had was an Epiphone Les Paul Standard, a used WEM/Watkins Dominator MKIII combo and a Roland RE-201 Space Echo,” Guitar World’s Chris Gill wrote of the Epi’s significance.

That Epi Les Paul wasn’t the only Oasis guitar to fetch a handsome fee at auction. Noel’s Epiphone EA-250, which also featured on the cover of Supersonic, went for approximately $63,077, while a Flying V – which was also once owned by Johnny Marr – sold for around $47,291.

Visit Sotheby’s to find out more.

Oasis has officially confirmed a long-awaited reunion tour, with the Brit rock icons announcing a string of live dates that will take place across summer 2025.

Over the weekend, the internet was abuzz with speculation that a reunion was imminent, after posts teasing an Oasis-related announcement – published to both Noel and Liam Gallagher’s social media channels – made their way online.

During his set at Reading Festival on Sunday (August 25), Liam also dedicated a song to his former Oasis bandmate. This came after Noel heaped praise on his brother, with whom he hasn’t played live since 2009, during a recent interview.

It turns out such friendly exchanges were just a precursor to ‘Oasis Live ’25’ – a 14-date tour of the United Kingdom with shows in Cardiff, Manchester, London, Edinburgh and Dublin.

“The guns have fallen silent. The stars have aligned,” a statement from the band says. “The great wait is over. Come see. It will not be televised.”

According to a press release, plans are in motion to take Oasis Live ’25 to other continents next year.

Oasis has famously not played together since they broke up in 2009, after a fiery bust-up between the Gallagher brothers backstage at the Rock en Seine festival in Paris led to the group’s split. The guitar that was apparently behind the altercation was sold at auction in 2022.

In the years that have followed, fans have clamored for one of the most influential British rock bands to reunite, with their long-awaited return now finally becoming a reality.

The only question that remains is, who will be joining the Gallagher brothers in the reformed Oasis lineup and, specifically, who will be playing guitar alongside Noel?

The band’s founding member and original rhythm guitarist, Paul ‘Bonehead’ Arthurs, will certainly be in contention for the role, and will no doubt be a fan favorite casting, having been present at the height of Oasis’ fame.

Not only that, in the past Liam has also reportedly made Bonehead’s recruitment in any potential Oasis reunion a key condition to his own involvement. Whether that has been the case this time round, though, remains to be seen.

Gem Archer, who replaced Bonehead and subsequently played in both Gallagher brother’s solo projects, is another name that will be closely linked in the lead up to the live dates. However, speaking to Guitar World in January, Archer implied a reunion was completely off the cards.

“If anyone thinks we'd be getting back together or getting on some sort of track, it’s just not one of those things that’s happening,” he said of a potential Oasis reformation. “So when those conversations come up, or my daughter asks, I say, ‘Look, no. Shall we have a fucking cup of tea?’”

Archer, however, does have the benefit of being a member of Noel's High Flying Birds band, and was also part of Liam's Beady Eye project. Bonehead, meanwhile, has sporadically played with Liam over the years, most recently during his Definitely Maybe tour.

As for the bass role, Andy Bell – who replaced founding bassist Paul Francis McGuigan – has already expressed his interest in joining an Oasis reunion, despite the fact it could clash with his ongoing Ride commitments.

When asked whether he'd be keen to hit the road with Oasis again during a conversation with Guitar World last year, Bell said, “Oh, absolutely. If that happens, I’m there for it, mate.”

But then there are current reports suggesting no-one else from previous iterations of the band will be invited back for the reunion. Whatever the case, we imagine all will be revealed in the coming months.

Tickets for Oasis Live ’25 will go on sale Saturday. A full list of dates can be found below.

• July 4th - Cardiff, Principality Stadium
• July 5th - Cardiff, Principality Stadium
• July 11th - Manchester, Heaton Park
• July 12th - Manchester, Heaton Park
• July 19th - Manchester, Heaton Park
• July 20th - Manchester, Heaton Park
• July 25th - London, Wembley Stadium
• July 26th - London, Wembley Stadium
• August 2nd - London, Wembley Stadium
• August 3rd - London, Wembley Stadium
• August 8th - Edinburgh, Scottish Gas Murrayfield Stadium
• August 9th - Edinburgh, Scottish Gas Murrayfield Stadium
• August 16th - Dublin, Croke Park
• August 17th - Dublin, Croke Park

The Epiphone Les Paul that Noel Gallagher used during the recording of landmark Oasis album Definitely Maybe is set to go up for auction.

The Epi LP will be sold by Sotheby’s, which – owing to the musical and cultural significance of the entry-level electric guitar – has set an upper estimate of more than $100,000, making it possibly one of the most expensive Epiphones of recent years.

Definitely Maybe is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential British rock albums ever committed to tape. Released in 1994, Oasis’ debut studio album introduced the world to hits such as Rock ‘n’ Roll Star, Live Forever, Shakermaker and more.

Many of those tracks were born with the help of this particular Epiphone Les Paul, which can also be seen in the music video and on the cover artwork for the record’s lead single, Supersonic.

According to Chiefs Guitars, the LP in question is Cherry Sunburst example that was specifically used during both the band’s first and second attempts to record the album.

In early ’94, after some creative differences and personnel changes that followed the initial attempt, Oasis set about re-recording Definitely Maybe. This time, Gallagher used this Les Paul – alongside a Gibson Les Paul and Flying V that had both been gifted to him by Johnny Marr – to complete the record.

As per a Sotheby’s press release, that Flying V – which was used to record Cigarettes and Alcohol – will also be going under the hammer.

During Oasis’ early days, Gallagher developed an affinity for Epiphones for two reasons: their affordability, and the fact they had been championed by the Beatles.

Speaking in 2023 during the British Music Experience museum’s 150 Years of Epiphone celebration, Gallagher noted, "I wanted to start playing Epiphones because of the Beatles. I didn't know anything about guitars then.

“They looked good; they felt good, I could make them sound good. I'm a songwriter, not a guitar player. You know, that's my thing. I'm not one of those people who can sit in a guitar shop and play lots of things.

“I will literally play an E chord, and if it had sounded great and felt good, I would have just said, 'Yeah, I'll take it."

Sotheby’s Popular Culture auction will take place on August 29.

Visit Sotheby’s to find out more.

Gibson has rekindled its partnership with Noel Gallagher to produce an ultra-limited, special-edition reissue of the Oasis legend’s 1978 Les Paul Custom, which will be released to celebrate the grand opening of the Gibson Garage UK.

Notably, the incredibly classy electric guitar is based on the same ‘78 LP that was given to Gallagher by Johnny Marr. The guitar quickly became a studio and stage stalwart for Noel, who used it extensively for both live performances and recording sessions.

For example, the Les Paul – which Gallagher identifies as one of his favorite instruments – can be heard on (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, and also starred in the music video for Whatever.

As mentioned, this particular six-string has been created to mark the opening of the Gibson Garage UK, which will officially open its doors to the London public on Saturday, 24 February. As such, only 20 of these instruments will be made, and they will be available exclusively from the store.

Further still, all profits from the sale of the personally hand-signed ‘78 Les Paul Customs will be donated to the Teenage Cancer Trust.

“The Les Paul Custom that Johnny gave me in 1994 was always one of my favourite guitars and it carries a lot of history,” Gallagher said in a statement. “The reissues are great, they feel almost identical. I am delighted they are being sold to support the Teenage Cancer Trust.”

It’s a statement release from the two parties, so it comes as no surprise that Gibson has made every effort to make the ‘78 LP as close to the source material as possible. 

To do so, the brand’s Custom Shop Murphy Lab was involved in the project, with the guitar featuring a lightly aged Ebony finish, uncovered humbuckers and classic Custom flourishes, including the block inlays and sleek binding.

As Gallagher himself says, the guitar has a pretty intriguing history. It’s well documented that Marr gifted instruments to a young Gallagher while Oasis were still finding their feet – in fact, the 1978 Les Custom wasn’t even the first one that the Smiths legend bestowed to his compatriot.

Before that, Marr lent a struggling Gallagher a 1960 Les Paul, which ended up smashed after Noel attempted to deal with a stage invader at a gig.

As the story goes, Marr then received a call asking for another guitar to take its place. In response, he supplied a replacement 1978 Les Paul Custom. The same Les Paul, it turned out, that featured on The Queen Is Dead.

“Me giving Noel those guitars has become such a big story over the years, but people don’t realise that at the time he wasn’t who he is now,” Marr told The Guardian. “He was just a kid from Burnage.

“I had no idea Oasis were going to go on to such big things. I did it because he was in need, because I was lucky and had lots of guitars, and because I wished someone had done it for me.”

Over the years, Gallagher treated the ‘78 LP to a few tonal and cosmetic adjustments, including swapping out the original humbuckers for a pair of P-90s that he had cribbed from a Gibson Firebird, and covering the body with some gnarly stickers. The control knobs and pickguard were also changed during Gallagher’s custodianship. 

“Somewhere down the line, the pickups had got damaged, and I had taken them out,” Gallagher said of the Les Paul (which looks like a totally different beast now) in an interview with That Pedal Show. “That guitar is the heaviest piece of equipment I’ve ever picked up.”

For this release, the Les Paul has been revived in its original-looking format, complete with the humbuckers, cream pickguard, amber control knobs, and the coil-tap switch that Marr had originally had implemented into the instrument – the same coil-tap, it should be noted, that helped create the opening lead line of (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?

That it’s been revived for such a good cause makes this release all the more significant. 

“These guitars are steeped in their own musical history celebrating the iconic moment one British music legend gifted a priceless guitar to another, like the handing of a baton,” said Teenage Cancer Trust Head of Music and Entertainment, Jane Ashton.

“Our sincere thanks to Gibson guitars, long-term supporters of Teenage Cancer Trust, and our Ambassador Noel Gallagher. The money raised will make an enormous difference in the lives of young people with cancer and could fund two Outreach nurses for an entire year, helping us to reach more young people in the UK no matter where they live.”

Only 20 of Gallagher's hand-signed '78 Les Paul Custom will be made, and they will be exclusively available at the opening of the Gibson Garage UK this Saturday. A price is yet to be revealed.

This isn't the first time Gibson has partnered with Noel Gallagher to produce a guitar. In August 2922, the brand recreated two of Gallagher's prized guitars – the 1960 ES-335 and Epiphone Riviera.

John Squire is renowned for three things: the incredible Hendrix- and funk-laced guitar chops that propelled the Stone Roses’ finest moments; his artwork – and his habit of disappearing from the public eye for long stretches of time.

Now he’s back in the spotlight, alongside Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher for a new collaborative album Gallagher / Squire (due March 1) – and sat down for a rare interview for the new issue Guitarist. 

The record – sparked by Squire’s onstage cameo at Gallagher’s gigantic Knebworth, UK show  in June 2022 – is full of killer electric and acoustic guitar work, but in his  Guitarist conversation, the ’Roses man recalls that a few years ago he thought his playing days might be over.

“I think you can always improve. Until arthritis gets in the way,” comments Squire, when asked if guitarists get better with age.

“A big part of what I consider a plateau that I built on was breaking a bone in my hand a few years ago. I was playing basketball with my younger son, used my right hand to break my fall and broke the bone at the base of my thumb.” 

Fortunately, it was Squire’s strumming hand, rather than his fretting side, so he could still hold the chords, yet for a while, he reveals, it didn’t look great for his guitar career.

“The specialist didn’t know if I’d get full function back,” explains Squire. “So I had the cast on, my fingers were set about a centimeter apart and I got a plectrum and glued some thick rubber either side so I could hold it. I tried to play – and it was terrible. And I went spinning into thinking I might not ever play again.”

As you might expect, the situation left Squire facing something of an existential crisis, but his thoughts went beyond just playing. “I also like to paint and spread margarine on toast,” he quips. “But it was sobering...”

Fortunately, Squire has been able to work back from the injury and, as is so often the case with enforced limitations, use it as a springboard for developing his technique. Not that he rests on his laurels. 

“I’m driven by failure,” observes Squire. “When I listen to my stuff, I tend to focus on the imperfections. Even with an album like this, where it’s generally very satisfying, I’ll focus in on the things that aren’t quite right. But I do that with painting as well. I do it if someone comes in and puts up new light switches…”

Nonetheless, Squire – whose playing on tracks like I Am The Resurrection is still regarded as the high point of ’90s UK indie guitar – maintains his style has matured and changed, and mostly for the better. Though, he admits, he’s not entirely beyond “that choppy thing”.

“I still do that,” says Squire. “I was in LA and this guy came running up and said, ‘I can’t believe you’re here! I modeled my whole guitar style after you! I bought a Gretsch Country Gentleman and I do that funky thing.’ [So, yeah] I’m still using that trick and probably a lot of others...”

In our book, that's no bad thing...

For Squire’s full interview in which he discusses the Fender Stratocaster that was the key to unlocking the Gallagher / Squire recordings, his chat with Jimmy Page over Les Paul signatures and getting on with Liam Gallagher, pick up issue 508 of Guitarist over at Magazines Direct.

As a mainstay of the British guitar scene, Gem Archer has influenced countless young players to pick up the instrument. With workmanlike technique and a catchall mentality, he made noise with his bands The Edge, The Contenders and Whirlpool. In the mid-'90s he broke ground with Heavy Stereo, a glam-meets-hard rock act that recorded a monster yet overlooked record, Déjà Voodoo, in 1996.

Archer fronted and had high hopes for Heavy Stereo. “In Whirlpool we got away from guitar music, and I had to go back to the drawing board because I wanted to get back to basic guitar,” he tells Guitar World. “That's what led to Heavy Stereo – and soon we signed to Creation Records. That's when I first met Noel Gallagher, Liam Gallagher, and Andy Bell, who was with Ride.”

While Heavy Stereo didn’t stick, Archer’s reputation as a capable player with a good attitude and knack for penning quality tunes did. That led to Noel Gallagher calling on him in 1999 when Oasis’s original rhythm guitarist, Paul ‘Bonehead’ Arthurs, split at the height of their Britpop fame.

The new arrival was far from a hired hand – Gallagher didn’t just draft him in to play rhythm guitar, but to help reshape the dynamic of Oasis. “Bonehead was part of getting that wall-of-sound thing,” Archer says. “He was there even before Noel joined. Once Noel got there, it was, ‘Right, Bonehead, it’s barre chords for you, and I’ll handle everything else.’ It was fucking brilliant and we all loved it.

“When I joined, on the first day, we were doing Cigarettes and Alcohol and he said, ‘Can you do this part?’ I said, ‘Oh, wow, that's lead!’ I told him, ‘Sure I can. Let’s go!' And it was the same thing with Morning Glory – he asked me to do some leads.”

For 10 years, Archer was an anchor for the Oasis sound, lending his talents to the live record Familiar to Millions (2001) and three studio records: Heathen Chemistry (2002), Don’t Believe the Truth (2005) and the band’s final record, Dig Out Your Soul (2008). Soon afterwards, a guitar-bashing bust-up between Liam and Noel in Paris in 2009 led to the end of Oasis.

Archer then hooked up with Liam for his post-Oasis band, Beady Eye, leading to two more albums – Different Gear, Still Speeding (2011) and BE (2013) – before eventually rejoining Noel as a member of his High Flying Birds, where he remains.

Asked to explain the chemistry between him and Noel, Archer says: “When we do Don’t Look Back in Anger or The Masterplan, it’s different live than on record. God knows, after 24 years of playing music together, we know each other well. We have an understanding; a certain wavelength.

“But Noel still writes songs that have me saying, ‘Wow. That’s the best you’ve ever written,’ and we’re off again!”

What inspired you to pick up the guitar?

“It was a combination of being too young to know why I was drawn to it, and seeing Elvis movies, Beatles cartoons and bits and pieces of things here and there. You start being drawn to something.

“I remember seeing guys who played football with guitars on stands in the dressing rooms and thought, ‘Oh, those look great!’ I didn’t know if they were fucking basses or guitars, but I thought, ‘That looks fucking alright.’”

Do you remember your first guitar?

“I don’t remember what type it was, but apparently I had my first guitar when I was four. I asked for it and broke it, running to show it to my auntie! I’ve still got a little dent in my head where the guitar hit me!”

That dent might be the catalyst for your creative muse…

“I can still feel it now… The funniest thing is when I was young, I thought the more knobs a guitar had, the better! I’d say, ‘Oh, look at that,’ not knowing what a Telecaster even was. And then I saw a Les Paul, which had more knobs, and I thought, ‘That must be better!’”

When did your mindset begin to change?

“I got my first proper guitar when I was around 10. I’d been playing violin and cello at school, and I liked violin because my teacher played guitar too. My violin teacher wore jeans and looked cool, but my piano teacher, man, was a pain in the fucking ass. He wouldn’t let me pack it in, but eventually my dad did.  

“Then one day I went around to this guy’s house with my uncle, and that’s when I first heard two guitars together. I was shown a D chord, and the whole experience was a lightbulb fucking moment for me. I’d never heard two guitars together before.

“I took lessons with that guy for two years, which was fucking brilliant. The things he showed me cracked the code for me and I went from there.”

How did your first proper band, The Edge, form?

“After I got done with that teacher, I went to a different school, and that was where The Edge got together. It was just a couple of guitars, which came from hearing a lot of the music coming out of Liverpool, Glasgow and Manchester – our local scene was nonexistent.

“We took it as far as we could go in the north east of England, doing lots of Jam, Blondie, Undertones, Buzzcocks and Vaselines covers. When I was around 20, I moved the band to London.”

“The Contenders was basically The Edge part two – it was like The Edge, but the London version. I thought, ‘Right, let’s have a little reinvention.’ The new version of the band was essentially built around this 12-string Rickenbacker I had.

“I got that guitar because I had been unemployed and got a housing benefit, but they overpaid me – so I took that money, bought the Rickenbacker, and moved to London very quickly!”

Is that the only guitar you had when you formed Whirlpool and then Heavy Stereo?

“For a long time, the Rickenbacker was the only guitar. But it was good enough because I loved the sound; and in the three-piece setting, it was great plugged into a Marshall. It gave me this big sound, and I often used a WEM Guild Copycat tape delay, which I didn’t fully understand then – but it gave me a mega sound.

“When we formed Whirlpool we got more into samplers and loops. We got a record deal with Food Records and made an album, but it got hung up in hell and had us going in circles, which lead to Heavy Stereo.”

Digging into the basis of Heavy Stereo’s distorted guitar sound, what gear were you using when you recorded Déjà Voodoo?

“I had sold the 12-string Rickenbacker by then because I needed to pay rent! I lined up all my guitars and said, ‘Right, sadly, that one has to go.’ So for Heavy Stereo, all I used was an Epiphone Casino, and I believe I had a Gibson Les Paul Studio Deluxe with mini humbuckers.

“I also had an Epiphone J-200 acoustic, and I used to weirdly feed that into a DOD FX55-B distortion pedal. I liked the lack of sustain it gave.”

Where were you and Heavy Stereo guitarist Pete Downing pulling influence from at the time?

“I was going for that T. Rex thing. I only had a Vox AC30 then, and Pete had a master volume Marshall. We didn’t have many pedals, so we were always using our amps to push for that ballsy, distorted thing. Pete was maybe a bit cleaner-sounding, so I guess I was the one who really was going for the more broken-up sounds.”

From there, you joined Oasis. What led to Noel giving you more lead opportunities than he’d done with Bonehead?

“In the early days, I think Noel and Bonehead would just put it all on 10 and say, ‘We’re gonna flatline the crowd,’ you know? But then (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? comes, and suddenly they had Whitey [Alan White] on drums, and there’s a whole different dynamic. They were using acoustics and things got more complex.

“Things changed when Andy Bell and I joined. I remember Andy learning Wonderwall exactly as it was on the record, and Noel said, ‘Can you give it another try?’ I went to him and said, ‘Give it a little Sid Vicious,’ and Andy said, ‘Right. Got it.’

“With Andy and me in the band, Noel could do other things. I can tell you that there was never a directive to play barre chords.”

You had some beautiful amps onstage with Oasis. What did your typical touring rig look like?

“It evolved from when I joined in ’99 to the end of ’09. I often had at least two amps on stage; sometimes, Noel would have even more. My main amp was a Vox AC50, which was very bulky, but it’s different than a Marshall or Fender – it has a lot of meat on its bone. I often had a Marshall head with that.

“As for Noel, believe it or not, his all-time favorite amp is a Fender Blues Junior. We always had amps that would give us clarity, even if the gig was massive. A mainstay of the Oasis sound was an Ibanez Tube Screamer TS9. 

“When I first joined I had no pedals, so I’d turn the guitar down to clean things up and turn it up for more grit. But Noel said, ‘Don’t turn down, man – we hit the fucking boost, and we go up.’ So, we always had the Tube Screamer, and we also always had the white Boss Delay DD-3, and another massive part of the sound was the SIB Echodrive – this big metal box with a valve in it.”

And how about guitars?

“I mainly went with Gibson Firebirds, which fit alongside Noel well. I wanted something with a different tonality, which I especially got with my red one; it has fantastic insulation. That guitar was so amazing while doing Champagne Supernova!

“And I’d often borrow Noel’s Epiphone Sheraton, which was and is the fucking best. When he asked me to play with him with High Flying Birds in 2017, he said I could use any of his gear that I wanted. I immediately asked if he still had the red Epiphone Sheraton, and he said, ‘Yeah, I do,’ and I said, ‘Okay, yeah, I’ll join.’ I use it on all sorts of songs.

“But I also use a Gibson ES-355 and a Paisley Telecaster, which I got back in 2001. It’s funny – Noel and I got Paisley Teles on the same day, without knowing it, and then turned up at the gig with them! They're brilliant guitars and Mexican-made, so they only cost us 500 quid.”

Noel seems more focused on rhythm guitar, making you important. I assume he has a lot of trust in you after all these years. 

“Yeah, I think he does. We’ve got a long history and evolved to where I understand what Noel will do guitar-wise, which is good because the High Flying Birds are different.

“I’m asked to cover a lot of different approaches and sounds, which can be tough because some of the stuff on the records has me saying, ‘This isn’t humanly possible!’ But Noel has always said, ‘That’s the studio version, but this is live – the nuances change.’ I really like that, and we both get that.”

You've navigated the choppy waters of being in a band with Liam and Noel over the years, and you’re still here today. What’s your secret? 

“Ah, I’d be a fool to think I knew the secret to that! There must be something in our mutual Northern souls that allowed the same influences and mindset to seep in. And as far as Liam and Noel go, none of us will ever know the depth of where some of those emotions come from. It’s better left between the two.”

That's a good lesson for anybody who speculates on their musical future.

“Oh, yeah, that’s for sure. That whole conversation is one I don’t really like to get too deep into, you know? It could go on forever and get nowhere. But the funny thing is there’s no escaping it.

”A few months ago my daughter, who is 24 – smart as a whip and a good kid – said to me, ‘Dad, can I ask you a question?’ I said, ‘Go on,’ and she said, ‘Are you lot getting back together?’ I had to laugh; I said, ‘Oh, not you too!’ And she goes, ‘Well, you’ve been up to Manchester.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, to shoot a video!’

“If anyone thinks we'd be getting back together or getting on some sort of track, it’s just not one of those things that’s happening. So when those conversations come up, or my daughter asks, I say, ‘Look, no. Shall we have a fucking cup of tea?’”

Elusive Stone Roses guitarist, John Squire, has teamed up with Oasis frontman, Liam Gallagher, providing psychedelic Britpop licks on the vocalist’s new single, Just Another Rainbow. The single marks the first recorded collaboration between the two giants of British rock, with more music together expected later this year.

Liam Gallagher called seeing The Stone Roses live as a 16-year-old “life-changing”, and later co-wrote the lyrics for Love Me and Leave Me, a single by Squire’s post-Roses band The Seahorses in 1997. The bands would later tour together, before their disbandment in 1999.

Since The Seahorses’ split, Squire, seen by many as Britpop’s premier guitarist, has been something of a recluse, primarily focusing on his painting. He released two solo albums in 2002 and 2004, with The Stone Roses’ short-lived reunion producing two singles in 2016.   

He’s arguably one of the biggest guitar players to have fallen off the grid after making their name. A rare appearance alongside Gallagher in 2022 at Knebworth Park playing Champagne Supernova, however, set up the possibility of the pair working on new music together.

A supergroup had been rumoured, and now it’s clear their collaboration will be in the guise of Gallagher’s solo work. For the Manc-twanged vocalist, the single follows on from 2022 album, C’mon You Know.  

“Everyone always bangs on about him as a guitarist, but he’s a top songwriter too, man,” the enigmatic Gallagher says of Squire.

“There's not enough of his music out there, whether it's with the Roses or himself. It's good to see him back writing songs and fucking good ones. The melodies are mega and then the guitars are a given. But I think even when you take all the fucking guitars off, you can play the songs all on acoustic and they’ll all still blow your mind.”

From its first notes, Just Another Rainbow exudes classic Stone Roses, Squire’s reverb-soaked guitar wringing out an intro that only he could. But he offers some tasty lead playing too, with the '60s-inspired track meandering through wavering passages before an elongated solo journey through bluesy double stops and fuzzy psych-rock motifs.

“To me, the most obvious take on Just Another Rainbow is that it's about disappointment, and the sentiment is that you never get what you really want,” Squire adds. “To me, it's also one of the most uplifting tracks we’ve made together, which is weird.”

The pair spent three weeks recording with Greg Kurstin (Foo Fighters, Beck, Sia) in LA, who also plays bass on the songs. Drums come courtesy of Joey Waronker, whose CV includes Beck, R.E.M. and Atoms for Peace.

In an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1, Gallagher indicated 10 songs would be on the album, and eight have been completed, with live dates also on the cards.

“We've got a bass player, we've got a drummer, we've got a keyboard player and that if we need it,” he explains. “We're going to try and tackle it without a keyboard player then piano player and give it a bit of bollocks, mate. A bit of rawness to it, but if it needs it, it needs it.

“But yeah, we're going out on tour. We're going to go and do some gigs, see what happens, and try to inspire people. And make people happy. That's it really. And then do another one.”

It will be interesting to see what comes next from a pairing that will no doubt leave Britpop fans salivating.

Just Another Rainbow is available now as a limited-edition 7" vinyl.

For the 90,000 screaming fans on their feet at London’s Wembley Stadium this past July, it must have seemed like it was the spring of 1994 all over again.

Back then, Blur had just blown up on the back of the disco-ish, new wavey hit Girls & Boys, the first single from their third album, Parklife, and it looked like they were going to lead their countrymates through an exciting international scene that steered around the boilerplate alt-rock sounds of the day and paid tribute to some of the greatest bands in the history of British rock.

Deemed the pioneers of Britpop, Blur spoke for a generation of British youth – at least for a while. Their guitarist, Graham Coxon, was one of the most skilled and innovative players on the scene, and frontman Damon Albarn was one of the most charismatic and quintessentially English vocalists, singing every line in an accent stronger than a keg of Fuller’s Golden Pride.

Gloriously incestuous, the scene flourished on connections. Albarn’s muse and romantic partner was Justine Frischmann, the co-founder of (the London) Suede and the future frontwoman of Elastica. For her, Suede, Oasis, Pulp and other emerging U.K. bands, the coming years would be as wild as the crowd at the World Cup finals and as regal and majestic as the Union Jack flapping in the breeze.

Blur’s two Wembley shows marked the largest audience the band had ever played for. Those immersed in the euphoria enjoyed a stunning flashback of Britpop history, back when Blur were on the top of the U.K. charts and making inroads in the rest of the world. Back before a bunch of arrogant, rude Mancunians who called themselves Oasis would release albums full of songs that upended Blur as the champions of working-class Britpop.

Today, Oasis are no longer a threat, and England, at least for the time being, has taken Blur back under its wing. During the Wembley shows, the band played hit after hit from their nine-album career while the Oasis brothers, Noel and Liam Gallagher remained distanced from their former rivals, carrying on with their respective solo projects and enjoying their celeb lifestyles. 

Judging strictly from the audience’s ecstatic reaction to Girls & Boys, Parklife, The Universal and Song 2, it’s hard to imagine that Oasis could recapture this much adoration from the British public… Of course, stranger things have happened – like back in April 1994 when Oasis left the nation slack-jawed, popping out of nowhere with their first chart single, the chemically euphoric and Stones-ish Supersonic. 

Or when Oasis released the fourth single from their second album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, Wonderwall, a sparse, infectious number that became a worldwide smash and turned Oasis into kingpins of Britpop, making Blur seem somewhat disingenuous by comparison. 

Structured after, and primarily influenced by the British Invasion, the ’90s Britpop movement wasn’t nearly as monumental as the ’60s revolution that spawned it. But for about a decade, it was a high point in English music and spawned a generation of enthusiastic players and songwriters turned off by the dominance of American music in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

“If punk was about getting rid of hippies, then I’m getting rid of grunge!” Albarn told the NME. “It’s the same sort of feeling: people should smarten up, be a bit more energetic. They’re walking around like hippies again – they’re stooped, they’ve got greasy hair, there’s no difference.”

Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher also lashed out at the aggression and negativity of alt-rock, crafting highly melodic songs, many rooted in open chords. By the time they released their first album, Definitely Maybe, in 1993, Oasis were press darlings and poster children for cockney lads who blew off steam by forming bands with their friends, hanging out in the pub, getting in skirmishes with rival gangs and popping ecstasy by the handful.

“We were the first people to come out and say, “The world’s a great place, life is for living!” Gallagher told Billboard. “Forget grunge music. Get a pint of Guinness down your neck and pick that guitar up.”

Led by Blur and Oasis, the Britpop scene exploded in the U.K. in the early ’90s and soon included a sonically diverse collection of acts, including the aforementioned groups as well as Supergrass, Ocean Colour Scene, Gene, Cast, Sleeper, the Bluetones and Echobelly.

Each of the Britpop bands had their own sound, but they all turned to classic British groups in an effort to stray from the downcast, testosterone-fueled vibe of grunge and alt-rock.

“From punk onwards, every generation of artists spent their entire time trashing the monuments of the ’60s,” Gallagher said in Daniel Rachel’s Don’t Look Back in Anger. “They didn’t want anything to do with it. What my generation did was rebuild the monuments of the ’60s because the ’80s didn’t mean a great deal to us. We reinvented the Beatles.”

As with almost every band inspired by British rock, the cornerstones of Britpop were the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. But there were other mainstays. Blur were influenced by the Kinks and art-pop bands like XTC; the La’s resembled the Hollies; the London Suede aped David Bowie; Ocean Colour Scene loved the Small Faces; the Bluetones mirrored Squeeze; Elastica sounded a lot like the Stranglers; Gene and Echobelly resembled the Smiths; and Cast and Supergrass were reminiscent, in their own ways, of the Who.

“It occurred to us that Nirvana were out there, and people were very interested in American music, and there should be some sort of manifesto for the return of Britishness,” Elastica frontwoman Justine Frischmann said in The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock by John Harris.

“It was a time when it literally felt cool to be British,” Echobelly guitarist Glenn Johansson added in Don’t Look Back in Anger. “Especially in relation to the creativity that seemed to be pouring out of the country at that time.”

Not every burgeoning English band went along for the carnivalesque Britpop ride or eagerly toured with other groups from the scene. When Radiohead released their second album, The Bends, in 1995, some lazy journalists lumped them in with Britpop, ignoring the skewed offbeat artistry of songs like My Iron Lung and Planet Telex. Radiohead loathed being pigeonholed, and they weren’t too fond of Britpop. 

“To us, Britpop was just a 1960s revival,” guitarist Jonny Greenwood told Rolling Stone. “It just leads to pastiche. It’s you wishing it was another era. But as soon as you go down that route, you might as well be a Dixieland jazz band, really.”

For Blur’s Coxon, the experimentation and noise of American indie bands like Pavement and Dinosaur Jr. was as exciting as music by his English heroes. Also, it was less homogenous and predictable than the song structures of other Britpop bands.

“Talking as a guitar player, Britpop for me was fucking really dull,” Coxon told The Guardian. “No one was doing anything interesting with a guitar. They’re all jolly nice and totally good on their instruments, but it became a thing…

“For me, people like Sonic Youth, Bikini Kill, Pavement and other small-label punk groups from America – these kids were teenagers. They were playing like they didn’t give a shit and like their life depended on it. That’s why I got so upset [about being typecast in a Britpop band]. …the Melvins and the Wipers, and these bands are brilliant unsung heroes, really.”

But while he loved the ramshackle quality of indie rock, Coxon also admired unconventional and creative guitarists from the British Invasion, including Dave Davies and Pete Townshend. Also hugely influential to Britpop songwriters: Deep Purple, the Smiths, the Jam, the Clash, the Cure, New Order and, in a big way, the ’90s rave scene in Manchester.

Nicknamed Madchester due to the abundance of drugs and alcohol consumed and the insanity that prevailed, bands including the Happy Mondays, the Charlatans UK, Inspiral Carpets and the Stone Roses provided an inspiring soundtrack to the all-night revelry. Blur even appropriated the Roses’ ’60s psychedelic vibe and loose backbeat groove on two commercial hits from 1991’s Leisure, She’s So High and There’s No Other Way.

“When Blur first started and we were playing Manchester, the Haçienda [a club co-owned by members of New Order] was the place to go,” Coxon told Designer magazine. “That was where a lot of exciting stuff was happening, and London was pretty dead.”

Gallagher reached for the stars in the same venues. Before he joined Oasis, he was a guitar tech for the Inspiral Carpets. “I was at the Haçienda from its early days and at all the big raves,” Gallagher said in Don’t Look Back in Anger. It gives me shivers when I think about it. That’s all wrapped up in being young and not being famous and just being carefree and high on ecstasy and dancing in a field at fucking 2 in the afternoon.” 

Britpop took off in England almost as fast as a souped-up Triumph Stag down an empty motorway. Blur went gold with Leisure, Suede (which became the London Suede in the U.S. since an East Coast singer-songwriter trademarked the name years earlier) hit Number 1 in the U.K. in 1993 with their eponymous album, and Oasis’ Definitely Maybe sold 100,000 copies in its first four days of sale in the U.K., easily topping that week’s chart. 

In the U.S., Britpop was a slower burn. Indie magazines like Alternative Press and Ray Gun, as well as MTV’s alt-rock show 120 Minutes covered the movement since the dawn of Blur and contributed to the early ’90s recognition of Pulp, the London Suede and the Verve. 

But the scene didn’t become mainstream until Oasis stormed the castle with a batch of simple, melodic pop songs that swaggered like Jagger and glistened with ’tude. 

Before that, two factors prevented Britpop bands from breaking America as the Fab Four had done decades before. Having never played outside of Europe, Britpop bands mistakenly thought they could become rock stars in the U.S. after one or two tours of major cities. 

More significantly, the way many bands flaunted British culture and acted (singing in heavy English accents, badmouthing American rock and raising the Union Jack at every photo op) was a major turn-off to grunge-loving Americans. 

“That whole anti-American, ‘Yanks go home’ thing – a lot of those bands weren’t really successful in America,” Lush guitarist and vocalist Miki Berenyi told Vice (Lush started out as part of the ethereal shoegaze scene before gravitating toward Britpop). “It felt a bit sour grapes,” she continued. “Like, ‘We don’t want to be big in America because it’s shit, we’re big in Britain.’ Then suddenly they get a bit big in America and it’s like, ‘We’ve conquered it.’ Fuck off.”

Not surprisingly, U.K. bands trumpeting their British-ness was a major selling point for English audiences. Suddenly, Blur, Oasis, the London Suede, Pulp and others were celebrating working-class England. 

Nothing epitomized this tell-it-like-it-is scenario like Pulp’s Common People, in which an upper-crust college student romanticizes the English squatting lifestyle and hooks up with an impoverished bloke to see how glamorous it is to be poor. 

In the song the student says, “I wanna live like common people/I wanna do whatever common people do/Wanna sleep with common people,” to which he replies, “Pretend you’ve got no money/… Smoke some fags and play some pool/ Pretend you never went to school.”

Britpop was empowering for common people who lived paycheck to paycheck. And with so many English musicians lacking a college degree, it wasn’t a huge stretch for them to write about their ordinary lives and their aching desire to escape their hometown and make something of themselves. 

“When I learnt to play the guitar and started to write songs and joined Oasis, I remember thinking, I’ve got one chance,” guitarist and songwriter Noel Gallagher told Don’t Look Back in Anger. “It wasn’t about Britpop. I thought, ‘I have one chance to make some fucking money’; just not to be fucking poor, and to see the world. That was it. I come from a family of grafters. And you don’t get anything by not working, [so] I did it all the time, every day.”

Blur’s evolution into storytellers for the working class was more reactionary. Albarn came from a solid middle class family. When the band returned from their 1991 44-date U.S. tour to support Leisure, they were so dispirited by how awkward and misunderstood they felt that they nearly broke up.

Albarn was especially distraught and sought solace in English culture. He developed an especially strong appreciation for the Kinks’ approach to storytelling. “[Ray Davies] was very near my idea of perfection in songwriting, who carried it off with an immense amount of dignity,” Albarn told the NME.

After a bit of soul-searching, Albarn wrote a batch of songs about the British working class and the little victories they found in their daily lives. He based his lyrics on the white Anglo-Saxon families he encountered after his family moved from progressive, ethnically diverse, Leytonstone, East London, to the small town of Colchester 50 miles away. 

“Those characters were my bedrock – the good yeomen of the fair county of Essex – people I watched and observed and lived among, and who then populated my songs for many years,” he told Don’t Look Back in Anger.

As with other music scenes, once enough bands became popular enough in the U.K. for the masses to notice, a rivalry developed between two top dogs. In this case, it was Blur and Oasis, and record companies and magazines exploited the friction between the two as an opportunity to make lots of money. 

The press baited both bands and, while neither had especially kind things to say about the other, Oasis were particularly vicious. Blur may have claimed Oasis were simplistic and derivative, but the Gallagher brothers smack-talked Blur with plenty of F-bombs and ultimately accused them of being elitist, inauthentic art-school hypocrites who, nonetheless, claimed to represent the British working class. 

Coxon insists he never hated Oasis (despite his distaste for Britpop) and found the battle of the bands to be unnerving and unnecessary. However, he claims he understood how, in a high-stakes game of ’90s pop superstardom, the rivalry was inevitable. 

“If you throw a bunch of competitive young men into the ring and all they have is music… the single door that might lead to them becoming rich and famous, then of course they’re going to stand their ground, get ratty and act territorially,” Coxon wrote in his autobiography, Verse, Chorus, Monster!

The friction between Blur and Oasis hit critical mass in 1995. Blur’s fourth album, The Great Escape, came out on September 11, 1995, and Oasis released the follow-up to Definitely Maybe – (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? – on October 2 that same year. 

To create pre-release hype, Oasis’ first single for the album, Roll with It was scheduled for April 24, one week before Blur’s Country House. So, to encourage discord, Blur’s record company moved the release date back a week, which became national news.

The Blur vs. Oasis battle wasn’t so much about the songs as what the groups represented. Blur came from the South of England, an affluent, educated area, and all of the members were articulate and comfortably middle class.

By contrast, Oasis were from the North, where families crowded into council homes, worked in factories and sometimes never ventured beyond the borders of their hometown. Neither of the Gallagher brothers went to college and their accents were so strong, they made Blur’s accents seem like BBC broadcasters by comparison. 

Country House sold 274,000 copies and Roll with It sold 216,000, earning Blur the victory and the invitation to perform on that week’s Top of the Pops TV program. But while Blur won the battle, they lost the war. It didn’t matter that none of the members grew up wealthy; in the fight between the classes, they were widely perceived as artsy, privileged college boys and Oasis were embraced as true working-class heroes. 

“The weird thing was the casting of myself, and us as a band, as these public schoolboys,” Albarn told Don’t Look Back in Anger. “Noel identified a very unprotected part in the armor and very effectively stuck his sword in there. I went, ‘Ow, that really hurt.’ ”

While Blur hardly fell into obscurity with The Great Escape, which entered the U.K. charts at Number 1 despite the controversy, it was Oasis that rocketed to multi-platinum stardom. 

Of course, the fact that (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? was filled with slightly melancholy, easily accessible guitar-pop hits like Wonderwall, Champagne Supernova, Some Might Say and Don’t Look Back in Anger legitimized Oasis’ success. By comparison, Blur, like their influences, wrote more complex, eclectic songs; they were never a hit factory.

“I couldn’t write something like Wonderwall, ” Albarn told the NME. “I just can’t bring myself to write simple stuff like that. Why on earth would I want to?”

“ Don’t Look Back in Anger was when I realized Oasis were the ones who had made that journey from being alternative to being a part of everyday life,” Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker said in Don’t Look Back in Anger.

“Every single bar seemed to be playing it. They’d done that thing that everybody had been trying to do of making that connection with the mass public. Wonderwall had been a massive hit, but Don’t Look Back in Anger was like a done deal. It has a tune that instantly sets it apart. A great song is indestructible. It can survive anything you throw at it – even the terrible video didn’t kill it.”

Ironically, Oasis set the bar so high with (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? that they couldn’t top themselves, let alone match their greatest achievement. Not that they didn’t try. For their follow-up, 1997’s Be Here Now, they pulled out all the stops, recording in numerous studios, including Abbey Road, and layering songs with horns, strings and multiple guitar overdubs.

They seemed to have forgotten that it was simple, catchy songs that won over audiences, not grandiose arrangements and overinflated production. Even so, the album entered the U.K. charts at Number 1 and sold almost 1.5 million copies in England alone. Today it is seven times platinum in the U.K. and platinum in the U.S. Even so, it was the band’s last platinum release, and looking back at Oasis’ career, Noel considers it to be the band’s low point.  

“I know where we lost it,” he told Q magazine. “Down the drug dealer’s fuckin’ front room is where we lost it. If you’re given a blank check to record an album and as much studio time as you want, you’re hardly gonna be focused.”

As much of a blow as Be Here Now was to Noel, he and Liam kept the band going with a revised lineup (including Ride’s Andy Bell) and in 2000 released the electronic-embellished psychedelic record Standing on the Shoulder of Giants with a slightly different lineup. The record went double platinum in England, where it topped the charts, but was the band’s first album not to go gold in the U.S. Oasis followed with three more albums, including their swansong, 2008’s Dig Out Your Soul.

Meanwhile, after The Great Escape and the Britpop war that followed, Blur shifted directions, integrating more elements of American indie rock into their sound, which yielded them their most popular song in the U.S., Song 2, the distortion-drenched main riff of which sounds like a satire of American aggression. 

Ultimately, it wasn’t the missteps by Oasis or the musical about-face from Blur that killed Britpop. That had more to do with the way everyone from runway models to politicians exploited it to gain favor with the masses. 

Tony Blair, the youngest English prime minister since 1812, hobnobbed with Oasis and trumpeted Britpop as a symbol of a newer, hipper Britain. The term Britpop was replaced by the more nationalistic slogan Cool Britannia. It was a loaded term, one that some argue was the first step toward Brexit.

The media’s adulation for all things British led to a climate of intolerance and “lad culture” that yielded an increase in misogyny, racism and homophobia. When many British people looked back at the aftermath of Cool Britannia they didn’t like what they saw, and many Britpop bands recoiled in horror at what they had inadvertently helped cultivate.

“I think like all movements it started off with good intentions,” Cocker said in While We Were Getting High. “When we were writing those songs in 1991 it felt thrilling and against the grain, but what began as a frank documentation of life as a poor, white, marginal man living in rented rooms in London – and which was in broader terms an exciting rejection of American cultural imperialism – soon became a jingoistic, beery cartoon when the money moved in.”

The death knell for Britpop came with music that took some of the English pride of Blur, Oasis, Pulp and others, and codified it into a more commercial, palatable form of entertainment: Enter the Spice Girls. 

When singers and dancers Geri Haliwell, Victoria Adams (now Beckham), Melanie Brown, Emma Bunton and Melanie Chisholm burst onto the English scene in 1996, screaming “Girl Power!” a new generation of happy, kid-friendly cartoon revelry took over, and the mass media dismissed Britpop as callously as it previously wrote off hair metal. 

The next obvious step was the resurrection of teen pop. As the Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and others took over the mainstream, a few English rock groups influenced by classic songwriting continued to draw large audiences, including Coldplay, Muse and Keane, but Britpop was effectively over. 

On August 28, 2009, Noel Gallagher disbanded Oasis due to irreconcilable differences. “It is with some sadness and great relief that I quit Oasis tonight,” read his statement. “People will write and say what they like, but I simply could not go on working with Liam a day longer.”

Liam started the new band Beady Eye, with whom he recorded two albums, then he went solo and has released three albums to date, the most recent of which, C’Mon You Know, came out in May 2022 and hit Number 16 on the U.K. charts. Meanwhile, Noel launched Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, who have released three studio albums, including Council Skies, which came out June and peaked at Number 20 in the U.K. 

Blur fell apart before recording 2003’s underwhelming Think Tank, which didn’t include Coxon, and broke up shortly after. They reunited with Coxon in 2015 and recorded The Magic Whip, which debuted at Number 1 in the U.K. (Blur’s sixth album to do so) and Number 24 in the U.S. In late July, Blur released The Ballad of Darren, a blend of American and British rock styles that span the band’s career. 

None of the above put Britpop back on the map, and despite Blur’s triumphant Wembley shows, there’s not likely to be a full-scale resurgence of the genre. Still, several bands have come back for a second go-round. Pulp re-formed this summer for U.K. shows but have no plans to enter the studio.

Cocker’s last release was his 2021 solo album, Chansons d’Ennui Tip-Top, a collection of 12 French cover songs. Suede remain active and recently played a 12-date tour in the U.S. to support their ninth album, 2022’s Autofiction, which debuted at Number 2 in the U.K. (their highest slot since 1999) but failed to chart in the U.S.

A big Britpop package tour – or a bunch of small reunion tours – would be exciting and nostalgic. It wouldn’t lead to headline slots at Coachella, of course, but as Radiohead and even Noel Gallagher said, the Britpop movement started as a celebration of the ’60s. So maybe it was always meant to be a wild romping nostalgia trip. 

Before Andy Bell strode across grand stages with the U.K.’s most cocksure band, Oasis, he handled six-string duties for Ride, one of the shoegaze genre’s preeminent acts. Bands like Lush and Slowdive linchpinned shoegaze on the other side of the pond, but Ride’s first two records, Nowhere (1990) and Going Blank Again (1992), proved to be high points of the period.

Looking back on those records, Bell tells Guitar World, “I think there’s one moment that I remember that came after we finished Going Blank Again. When we finished that album, and it was mastered, [Ride guitarist] Mark [Gardener] and I drove back to Oxford, and he put it on his stereo at home. When we sat there and listened to Going Blank Again, we didn’t speak; we just listened. 

“At the end, we were just like, ‘That is so good.’ But I don’t have a similar memory with Nowhere because, at the end, it was so stressful because we were hammering up against a deadline. The last days of Nowhere’s recording were chaotic; we worked night and day to mix it. 

“But the guy who was supposed to mix it had a breakdown, which led us to call [producer] Alan [Moulder] to save the day. I don’t really remember having that same pleasurable playback moment with Nowhere where I said, ‘Ah, that’s a great record.’ I remember it being stressful.”

Stressful as it was, Ride’s greatness was painfully obvious, making it even more shocking that they didn’t last long. The group’s third record, Carnival of Light (1994), was a departure. And their fourth album, Tarantula (1996) – the final nail in the coffin before Ride’s breakup – while reminiscent of their earlier efforts, wasn’t enough to save the band in the face of dodgy relations and the looming shadow of Britpop.

Thinking back on Tarantula, Bell says, “I don’t think the songs on that album have the same feeling as the first two. But I’ll say this: Tarantula was an attempt to bring back the vibe of the earlier records. We started the Tarantula sessions soon after the Carnival of Light sessions because we were searching to get our vibe back. We could feel it slipping away; it was a last-ditch attempt to try and cook something up.

“A lot of those songs were not quite as ready as they should have been, but we wanted to try and capture a moment of spontaneity. But unfortunately, we didn’t. And I suppose those sorts of ideas can work, but they didn’t this time. And it wasn’t enough to save the band because it had already gotten away from us.”

Not long after Ride’s demise, Bell formed Hurricane #1, which he recalls as “The first time I was in a band that had very defined roles,” before revealing that “it was like a rebound,” where the objective was “to do the opposite”. And while Hurricane #1’s two albums – Hurricane #1 (1997) and Only the Strongest Will Survive (1998) – were memorable, when the call came to join his old friends Noel and Liam Gallagher in Oasis, Bell didn’t hesitate.

“It was interesting,” he says. “Because when Guigsy [bassist Paul McGuigan] and Bonehead [guitarist Paul Arthurs] left Oasis, it’s not like it was something I was privy to. There were no prior discussions leading up to that point. I had been reading about it in the music press like everybody else. So when the offer came about, it came completely out of the blue.”

After a quick audition and reorientation from guitar to bass, Bell was off and running with Oasis. Thankfully, though, his first shows as part of the band’s new lineup – now with Gem Archer on guitar – were smaller, allowing Bell to break in gently.

“I seem to recall [my first gig with Oasis] was in the States, although I don’t know exactly where,” he says. “We did a short tour at the end of ’99, where there were maybe four or five shows. It was a sort of radio-promoted tour or something to that effect. It was Oasis, Blink-182 and a few other bands. I can’t remember much more than that. But I know it was quick, and we only played maybe five songs in the set.”

For the next 10 years, Bell, along with the rest of the members of Oasis outside of Noel and Liam Gallagher, weathered critical, commercial and interpersonal storms. And while it wasn’t always easy, unlike most before him, Bell managed to earn the respect of his bandmates and became a steady contributor across Oasis’ final three studio records.

Of course, Oasis have been gone for nearly 15 years, while Ride are back together and stronger than ever. Beyond that, Bell has his solo work and his latest project, Mantra of the Cosmos.

“I don’t feel pressure to amalgamate my history into what I’m doing now,” Bell says. “We make tracks and look to find freedom in the music. And we also think people should be able to dance to it. Being creative and moving forward is essential to me. The alternative, I guess, is making music that’s not meaningful, which is not an option.”

He concludes, “But I don’t have anything against nostalgia, to be honest. When the time is right, I love the opportunity to celebrate an old album. Ride recently played Nowhere in full, and we did Going Blank Again, too. But I guess I’ve always had a forward-moving approach in life that always has me embracing the chance to play. Life is too short, and outside of family, the greatest satisfaction I get is doing different things, finding different lineups and getting out there with my friends again.”

Considering the success of Ride’s reunion – and Bell’s willingness to bridge gaps via song – one can’t help but wonder if he’d be up for hitting the stage with Oasis should their long-awaited reunion come to pass.

“Oh, absolutely,” Bell enthuses. “If that happens, I’m there for it, mate.”

After the release of 1990’s Nowhere, the media labeled Ride “the brightest hope for 1991”. Did that sort of pressure register at all?

“My reaction was, ‘Yeah, you’re fucking damn right we are.’ [Laughs] But we were full of confidence by the end of 1990. We’d only been going for around a year by that point and had really put the right foot forward with the three EPs we did, and then Nowhere. 

“The songs we were writing were great, and we’d just been on an American tour, so we were cooking with gas. So we finished 1990 on a high note, and I remember seeing a lot of positive press about us, which fueled us going into the second album, Going Black Again.”

People often attribute Ride’s songs to Mark Gardener, but you wrote a ton, one being Vapour Trail, which, for my money, might be the best song on Nowhere. How did you put that together?

“Vapour Trail was one of those songs that came together very fast. The guitar line stands out; I remember exactly how it was written. We were on tour in the U.K., playing in small venues and staying in bed-and-breakfast hotels with a series of beds in the same room.

“All four of us were sleeping in dormitory-style rooms, and after the gigs, we’d sit around with a couple of guitars, having a smoke or drink. I remember sitting there with a guitar while hunched over the bedside, and that’s when I came up with the four chords that make up Vapour Trail.”

Did you immediately know you were onto something?

“As soon as I started playing it, I said, ‘Guys, listen to this. This is really good.’ And my next thought was, ‘How the fuck am I gonna remember it?’ Because we didn’t have any way of recording it while sitting in this room as we were. I just went to bed thinking, ‘I’ve got to remember this riff, and if I can remember it in the morning, then it’ll be cemented in my head.’ And luckily, in the morning, I grabbed my guitar and picked up where I left off the night before. I was like, ‘Right, cool, that’s locked in now; it’s recorded in my brain.’”

Did the lyrics come just as quickly?

“The phrase Vapour Trail and the lyrics that follow came from a friend of mine who ended up moving into my house in Oxford. He was dating this girl and had written a card to her and was trying to think what to write in it, and he wrote this message to his girlfriend, ‘Your vapour trail in a blue sky…’ and I thought, ‘That’s cool. I’m having that. I’m gonna put that into a song.’”

Going Blank Again features heavy doses of distortion, wah and feedback. How did that progression take place? Was it natural, or did you seek to apply that approach?

“Personally, the progression from Nowhere to Going Blank Again was pronounced because I had bought a 12-string Rickenbacker in between the two albums. And I had become friends with Graham Coxon of Blur, who I’d see often as they’d just become popular. 

“I loved Graham’s fluid, bendy guitar style. That sort of elastic guitar playing appealed to me, and I remember saying to him, ‘How are you getting that sound?’ And Graham said, ‘It’s really simple; it’s just a Les Paul,’ and then he said, ‘See, you’re playing a 12-string Rickenbacker; the strings are not going to bend. You’ll kill your fingers trying to bend on that guitar.’”

So the Les Paul was the key to your sound on Going Blank Again?

“Yes! Graham telling me that was what made me get my first Les Paul. And when I did, I took it to the studio and started talking to Alan Moulder about the string-bending thing I wanted to do. That’s when Alan showed me the classic, cliché Jimi Hendrix string bend where you bend the third string up, which matches the second string’s note [commonly referred to as a unison bend – Ed]. You know what I mean? He showed me that, and then, if you listened to Leave Them All Behind, you can hear that I immediately adopted it and played my own version of what Graham was doing in Blur.”

By the time Carnival of Light came out, Britpop was in full swing. How did the success of bands like Oasis and Blur affect what Ride were doing?

“I can only talk about my own experiences at the time, but I think it did. We started on Carnival of Light not too long after Going Blank Again, and it definitely was more of a retro-sounding record. 

“A lot of people were listening to ’60s music around that time, and you can hear that with us; bands like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and other late-’60s and early-’70s prog rock bands were being embraced. Whereas with Oasis and Blur, they went down a route that was more like the Kinks. 

“I know a lot of people linked them to the Beatles, but when I first heard Oasis, I didn’t think of the Beatles. I heard the Kinks and the Sex Pistols way more than I heard the Beatles in the earlier stuff.”

You became friendly with Noel and Liam Gallagher somewhere between Carnival of Light and Tarantula, right?

“Yeah, well, it was just before Carnival of Light. I remember going to see Oasis at a Creation Records showcase that Alan [McGee] took us to, and that’s when I was introduced to Liam. I told him, ‘You guys are amazing; we’ll have to get you out on tour with us,’ which was me naively thinking that Oasis would be supporting Ride on the Carnival of Light tour. Little did I know that Oasis’ first single would come out a few months later, and they’d be bigger than Ride overnight. They just exploded.”

The overnight success of Oasis, Blur and other Britpop bands undoubtedly changed the state of music in the U.K. How did that affect Ride’s fortunes?

“We had our own stuff going on as well. We had made two great albums, but we were starting to flounder because of the direction we were going in with Carnival of Light. Looking back, that direction didn’t particularly suit Ride very well. We were cleaning up our sound when other bands were getting dirtier. 

“There’s a real dirtiness to Oasis’ first album, Definitely Maybe, which was punky and aggressive. That sound was a lot like the early Ride sound, but we’d moved away from that and became cleaner and more polished. 

“It felt like by the time Carnival of Light came out, what we had moved toward was sort of irrelevant. But there was also stuff happening where things weren’t working well anymore. It wasn’t long before we broke up, maybe a year or so later.”

When you joined Oasis in 1999, what was the directive?

“I hadn’t played bass to any great degree before I tried out for Oasis. So when I was invited to come out, when I got on the plane, I didn’t have a bass. So I couldn’t even try to learn anything before I got there. But I knew the chords to the songs, and I did my best to play the root notes; but I have to say, I probably wasn’t that good on the first run-through. 

“The other thing was that I was playing bass with my fingers, and Noel said, ‘Guigsy played with a pick. Try it that way.’ And when I did, I found I could attack the bass in a way that sounded a lot more like Oasis.”

How steep was the learning curve from there?

“I did enough in the audition to get me into the band, and then I went away and learned the catalog. I literally spent hours every day over the Christmas holiday learning all the tracks inside out so that I could nail it. 

“And that was a massive education for me; being in that band, in general, was such a learning experience. To get inside a new instrument and feel the way drummers and bass players work together through that dynamic within a band was brilliant.”

Was being in a band with Noel and Liam Gallagher as tumultuous as it’s been made out to be?

“I would have to say yes. [Laughs] I’ve been in many bands over the years, but that was my first brush with true greatness on a worldwide scale. And that’s not meant to put Ride down because I love Ride. That’s what I identify with most because they’re my school friends.

“But in terms of global superstars of music, being in Oasis was just so huge. To be in a band with those guys was a huge learning experience. And their charisma – it’s a real thing. It was another level. And later, one of my proudest moments was that Oasis would start its set with a song I wrote called Turn Up the Sun. That was just unbelievably cool.”

There are few better-value interviewees than Noel Gallagher, and now the former Oasis/High Flying Birds man is the latest subject of Gibson’s in-depth Icons series. 

The conversation is packed with brilliant tidbits and amusing tales from Gallagher’s playing career: from his time as a roadie for Inspiral Carpets, into Oasis and beyond, but his story about Oasis’ first show will prove highly relatable to any player that’s stressed themselves out prepping for their first gig.

“I'm sat on a flight case or the top of an amp, jamming with Oasis and we've got a gig on Tuesday,” says Gallagher [around 16.50]. “And it suddenly dawns on me that I've never played guitar standing up. Not only that, I don't own a fucking strap!” 

While, in retrospect, this might not seem an insurmountable challenge, to the young (and penniless) Gallagher, it was a major concern. 

“This is Sunday night and I'm skint and I’ve never played guitar standing up,” summarizes the guitarist. “That seems like a preposterous fucking notion now, but I can only tell you that the Monday was probably the most stressful fucking day of my entire life.”

The first hurdle was overcome when he tracked down an unnamed member of Inspiral Carpets – then an international touring act – who leant him a strap, but sadly this did not fully alleviate his stress.

“I had to borrow a guitar strap. Borrow!” emphasizes Gallagher. “And then [it was] going home and putting the guitar on for the first time and spending, I'd say, a good hour looking in the mirror going, ‘Where am I gonna [hold it]? Is it there? Is it there?”

The decision meant a lot to the young guitarist – indeed it still does. “I think where you hold your guitar for the first time is crucial,” imparts Gallagher. “It signifies how much of a cunt you're going to be.”

According to the guitarist and songwriter, too high makes you unattractive (“you're not getting no fit birds mate, I'll tell you that for nowt”) but go too low and you’re a goth. The optimum position, in his opinion, is in the middle – something he dubs “The Gunslinger”.

“Anyway, I nailed it – clearly…” says Gallagher, dryly. “And it benefited me, because remember going to the gig and I was more stressed about standing up [than performing]...

“Thank fucking God it was before phones and cameras, because there would be some pretty fucking awkward footage of it now, but you know, an exhilarating experience all the same.”

Check out the full conversation above for more on Gallagher’s playing, guitars and to hear his explanation of the happy accident that was the Oasis sound. Indeed, for more on the latter, check out our guide to nailing Noel Gallagher's guitar tone on tracks like Supersonic.

It will be no surprise to guitarists to learn that there are certain perennial favorites that seem to last through successive generations of players. However, despite our suspicions, it’s always been difficult to determine the most popular choices for learners. 

Now new research claims to have done just that. The data, put together by UkuleleWorld.com (in no way affiliated with Guitar World), gathered average monthly searches for lessons on 1,000 popular tracks across piano, ukulele, guitar and violin to identify the top choices for American players. 

Narrowing the supplied data down to just the guitar category shows that the most popular choice for guitarists alone is Oasis’ ballad Wonderwall, which receives a reported 15,620 average monthly searches.

This is closely followed by Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama, on an average of 14,705 searches per month. Neither of these two tracks is a particularly surprising inclusion. 

A big caveat comes in that the data has some sizeable gaps once you narrow it down to a per instrument basis. The final list is drawn from the cumulative totals across all the surveyed instruments, which creates a very different top 25 than you would expect from a list based on a single instrument.

For instance, Vance Joy’s Riptide is the third most popular guitar track featured on the final 25, with 11,519 searches – a pretty surprising ranking. However, the reason it is in the 25 initially is likely due to the heavy weighting of ukulele searches it receives – a monthly average of 32,085. 

Given that in 2021 there were about twice as many guitars sold as ukuleles (3.4 million, compared to 1.7 million, according to Statista) it seems odd that the top guitar tutorial searches should perform comparatively poorly in this list. All of which is to say, we’d recommend you take any guitar-specific information here with a heavy pinch of salt.

Regardless, Wonderwall continues to be an enduring success when it comes to the repertoires of both guitarists and ukulele players. You can check out Total Guitar’s 2013 Wonderwall video lesson in the clips below. 

If you’re looking for some more challenging playing inspiration, however – why not tackle the best guitar solo of the 21st century?

The '90s is a time often associated with grunge, family sitcoms, and guilty pleasure pop music.

Dialing back, though, you'll find a time when groups from across the UK made their respective marks on an evolving scene. And though not always apparent on the surface, one of the most magical aspects of the indie/Britpop era was the guitar work.

Some focused on the cascading rhythms of '80s college rock, while others harkened back to '70s-inspired blues rock. And some brave souls amalgamated their style and influences so deeply that entirely new soundscapes were formed, reshaping our notions of what we thought we knew musically.

The '90s UK scene had many contenders – below, we're dialing back to 15 indie/Britpop guitar heroes who shook up the UK in the '90s.

15. Adam Devlin (The Bluetones)

As one of the lesser heralded six-stringers of his era, Adam Devlin formed a symbiotic partnership with The Bluetones frontman and vocalist Mark Morriss. The Bluetones' first two records, Expecting to Fly (1996) and Return to the Last Chance Saloon (1998), are sweet slices of Britpop heaven, yielding the Hounslow-based group major chart success.

Devlin pulled no punches in lionizing his heroes through his chiming chord progressions and sing-song approach to the guitar. After closing shop in 2011, The Bluetones reformed in 2015 and have performed on and off since.

14. Mark Day (Happy Mondays)

Madchester scene legends Happy Mondays aren't exactly known as a ”guitar group” per se, but peel back the onion, and it's plain to see that guitarist Mark Day's contributions are constitutive, nonetheless. In the case of Day, the best way to describe his importance to Mondays' psychedelic blend would be “structural”.

The group fancied themselves as a musical tornado, with an aim to get people up and dancing. To that end, Day laid the bedrock for a cataclysm of samples, vocalizations, and keyboards that would define the iconic group's music. Anyone who has heard 1990's Pills' n' Thrills and Bellyaches understands the magic of Happy Mondays. And Mark Day is at the epicenter of the madness.

13. Donna Matthews (Elastica)

Sadly, the wonder that was Elastica lasted for only two records, Elastica (1995) and The Menace (2000), but their impact is everlasting. A sublime blend of Britpop, punk rock, and post-punk, Elastica personified “cool” by every measurable output. At the heart of the chaos was red-haired firecracker, Donna Matthews.

Never one to take an excessive solo, it was Matthews' punk chords and whip-smart songwriting that would catapult the group to early success. However, luck wouldn't smile on Elastica for long, with drugs taking a toll on Matthews, leading to her departure in 1998. Matthews has kept a low profile since, with her recent output being restricted to improvisational music uploaded via YouTube.

12. Graham Lambert (Inspiral Carpets)

As a critical cog in the late-'80s alternative dance scene, the Inspiral Carpets were early purveyors of what was to come. By 1990, the Carpets had made waves with Life, and it was with that head of steam that they careened into the decade with The Beast Inside (1991) and their magnum opus, Revenge of the Goldfish (1992).

Lambert's atmospheric chord stylings and heavy riffing showcased an alternative approach to that of scene mates Happy Mondays, which would prove authoritative over a bustling musical movement. After two more records, the Carpets folded their tent in 2016, and Lambert has been mostly quiet since.

11. Debbie Smith (Echobelly)

After lending her talents to shoegaze outfit Curve, guitarist Debbie Smith joined vocalist Sonya Madan at Echobelly's onset in 1994. Smith's soaring vocals were accented to perfection by Smith's heavy, sidewinding approach to the guitar.

Known for sporting a Fender Jaguar, Smith provided textural layering, intertwining her string strokes with Madan's vocals to spellbinding results. At the height of their fame, Everyone's Got One (1994), and On (1995) were big hits in the UK. In the years since, Echobelly continues, but sadly, Smith no longer drives its engine.

10. Steve Cradock (Ocean Colour Scene)

Best known for their 1996 record Moseley Shoals, Solihull veterans Ocean Colour Scene are one of the few survivors of the Britpop era. But none of that would have been possible without the diverse talents of guitarist Steve Cradock.

A rare breed who could ably shift from sparse indie chord progressions to beefy, blues-rock riffing, Cradock gave Ocean Colour Scene free hand to cover multiple genres throughout each album. Since the group's inception, Ocean Colour Scene has never wavered – even when not releasing new music – and Steve Cradock has been a massive part of the band's longterm stability.

9. Miki Berenyi (Lush)

If you're going to feast your ears on one record leaning more toward the dream pop and shoegaze side of the era, Lush's sprawling 1992 affair Spooky is a great place to start. As a vocalist, Miki Berenyi is an ace in the hole whose angelic musings will send you into the ultimate dream state. But her luxuriant fretwork ultimately set Lush apart in their heyday.

Known to brandish anything from a Gibson Flying V to an ES-335 12-string, Berenyi is the complete package. As a linchpin of the “alt-girl” movement, Berenyi influenced droves of young women to vocalize their emotions through bursts of six-string fury. While Lush is no more, Berenyi has just released her memoir, Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me from Success. If you've got the time, it's must-read stuff.

8. Russell Senior (Pulp)

The musical kinship between Jarvis Cocker and guitarist/violinist Russell Senior was undoubtedly apparent, culminating in what's generally regarded as one of the decade's finest records, Different Class (1995). And so, it was no surprise that after Senior took his angular, Fender-driven approach with him in 1997, Pulp was never the same.

Another example of a guitarist who was never much for a solo, Senior excelled at building complex, post-punk-inspired song structures accented by thoughtful riffs. While Senior did participate in Pulp's 2011-2012 tour, as it stands today, he will not be joining Cocker for Pulp's recently announced reformation.

7. PJ Harvey

As a prodigious songwriter and a talented multi-instrumentalist, PJ Harvey has always seemed most comfortable with a guitar in her hands. Since the release of 1992's Dry, Harvey has been a supernova, colliding with adoring fans' eardrums in an implosion of alt-rock glory via cool Britannica.

As a defiant female presence among a vast sea of male guitar machismo, Harvey carved out a path for those who wanted something different and maybe slightly weird. Unafraid to combine genres, Harvey has laid her contralto-ranged vocals on the top of some of the decade's finest tracks and continues to grace stages in the same manner to this day.

6. Nick McCabe (The Verve)

Easily one of the '90s' most gifted guitar personalities, Nick McCabe played sideman to Richard Ashcroft for most of The Verve's iconic moments. Aloof by nature, McCabe made his talents known via The Verve's music, starring across stellar efforts A Storm in Heaven (1993), A Northern Soul (1995), and Urban Hymns (1997).

Deploying a combination of Les Pauls, Stratocasters, and Jaguars, McCabe straddled multiple genres – sometimes within the confines of one song – seamlessly merging shoegaze, alt-rock, and modern psych to fabulous results. 

While McCabe often stands motionless, the sounds he elicits are nothing short of memorable. Ashcroft and McCabe would bury the hatchet in 2007 following professional differences, leading to 2008's Forth. But old tensions halted things once more in 2009.

5. Bernard Butler (Suede)

Though only a member of Suede during the band's formative years, Butler lent a hand to their first two records. Generally regarded as one of the UK's finest players, Butler's unique tone, iconic vibrato, willingness to experiment, and silky-smooth fretwork not only defined but created the sound of Suede.

While he left the band before its most significant commercial success, it's plain to see that Suede (1993) and Dog Man Star (1994) are Suede's finest hours. More so, it's not a stretch to say that Suede doesn't exist as it stands today without Butler's Gibson ES-355-inspired influence. Butler continues to lend his talents to various projects but has never returned to Suede since his 1994 departure.

4. John Squire (The Stone Roses)

John Squire proved a throwback in an era not always associated with old-school guitar heroes. With a Gibson Les Paul effortlessly slung over his shoulder, the amiable six-stringer was a perfect foil to The Stone Roses' enigmatic lead vocalist, Ian Brown.

As early combers to a rising scene, Squire showed his meddle, covering everything from baggy, alt dance, and Big Star-inspired indie rock on the Roses' 1989 self-titled debut and 1994's Second Coming. 

With the Roses folding in 1996, Squire next lent his licks to The Seahorses, recording Do it Yourself in 1997. These days, Squire focuses on his artwork, but he occasionally pops up for air on the musical side of things as he sees fit.

3. Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead)

Never afraid to adapt his style as the musical situation sees fit, Johnny Greenwood has long been heralded as one of the finest players of his generation. As the de facto lead guitarist of Radiohead – a mantle he sometimes shares with Ed O'Brien – Greenwood is responsible for some of the group's fiercest guitar-driven moments, as well as many of its most off-the-beaten-path compositions.

While records such as The Bends (1995) and OK Computer (1997) paint a picture of an iconic guitar god, Greenwood's work on Kid A (2000) and In Rainbows (2007) reflect a restless virtuoso entirely unwilling to stagnate. 

Radiohead have been quiet of late, but lately, Greenwood's focus has been on crafting new material with Thom Yorke in The Smile, as well as composing movie scores. For the curious, the soundtrack to 2007 flick There Will Be Blood is just one of many standout moments in Greenwood's ever-evolving career.

2. Noel Gallagher (Oasis)

By no means a virtuoso, the era's most prolific songwriter is an able guitarist in his own right. Gallagher made up for it, though, with brazen swagger, a cocksure attitude, and a massive catalog of legendary songs left in his wake. 

Harboring an intuitive ability to untether lyrical solos seemingly on a dime, Gallagher's Union Jack Epiphone Supernova was never louder than on Definitely Maybe (1994), (What's the Story) Morning Glory (1995), and 1997's cocaine-fueled oeuvre Be Here Now.

Though Oasis ended in an explosive ball of fury in 2009, leaving fans forever “mad fer it”, The Chief is still at it with his High Flying Birds. From both a musical and aesthetic perspective, Gallagher was a tour de force that quite literally defined '90s era Britpop. While he will never be mistaken for the era's most gifted axe-slinger, when it comes to songwriting, Noel Gallagher has no equal.

1. Graham Coxon (Blur)

A profoundly dexterous multi-instrumentalist, Coxon was initially thrust into the role of Blur's guitarist purely out of need. Coxon's lo-fi approach fashioned a musical mosaic laden with chimes of shimmering six-string bells, noisy flourishes, and downright weird bursts of angular art-rock. 

While unafraid to take a solo, don't expect conventional tropes: no, Coxon uses his time in the limelight to induce over-amplified colorways of disruptive pandemonium.

Partially responsible for some of the most exotic records of the Britpop era in Modern Life is Rubbish (1993), Parklife (1994), and The Great Escape (1995), Coxon is dissimilar to his contemporaries in aptitude and temperament. Blur reformed in 2009, and in addition to his art and solo work, Coxon continues to imprint his brand of Telecaster-bred whimsy on the group to this day.

After multiple teases, Gibson has finally unveiled two all-new Noel Gallagher signature guitars: a replica of his late ‘80s Epiphone Riviera and a recreation of his number one 1960 ES-355.

Spearheading the lineup is the meticulously crafted, limited-edition ES-355 – restricted to only 200 units – which takes inspiration from the original 1960 semi-hollow model that has been Gallagher’s go-to guitar since the late ‘90s.

Appearing on stages and studios throughout the decades, the guitar was originally purchased by Gallagher in 1997, though was deemed too nice to play and thus initially kept as a collector’s item.

That was until the early ‘00s, when Gallagher took the guitar out of its slumber and began to use it as his main touring instrument.

In terms of specs, the signature Sixties Cherry six-string looks to be a like-for-like aesthetic and functional recreation of the original guitar, complete with a Murphy Lab aged finish to replicate the years of wear and tear Gallagher’s own axe has picked up over the years.

At its core, the semi-hollow stunner sports plain maple laminate top, back and sides, which are paired with red spruce bracing and a maple centerblock. Atop the body sits five-ply top binding, while three-ply binding graces the back.

Elsewhere, a SlimTaper-profile mahogany neck is partnered with a 22-fret ebony fingerboard, which flashes the standard mother of pearl block inlays and single-ply binding.

The highlight of the guitar, though, is its luxurious gold hardware, which also sports an aged finish. An ABR-1 bridge lines up alongside a Bigsby B7 tailpiece, as well as True Historic Black Top Hats with gold inserts, a True Historic amber switch tip and a gold Varitone switch.

Other notable appointments include unpotted Custombucker neck and bridge pickups, a classic ES control layout, gold Grover Kidney tuning machines, five-ply bound headstock and a “Stereo”-embossed truss rod cover.

Of his new ES-355 replica, Gallagher commented, “Fuck me, what a guitar! I’ve actually sent my main one back to storage, something I haven’t done since the day I bought it… that’s how good it is.”

Lee Bartram, EU Head of Marketing & Cultural Influence EMEA at Gibson Brands added, “This is the guitar associated with Noel Gallagher since the late 1990s, we have taken our time over the details, we have worked closely with the artist and we have produced not only a truly remarkable recreation of the original but also a beautiful instrument which can be appreciated by all. 

“This project has been a labor of love for over 10 years and I’m extremely proud of what has been produced by amazing artisans in Nashville.”

Joining the Gibson ES-355 is a signature Epiphone Riviera, which takes inspiration from another Gallagher staple: an early ‘80s Riviera that featured in the music videos for Don’t Look Back In Anger and Champagne Supernova.

The guitar was also used during Oasis’s 1995 David Letterman appearance, and was taken out of Gallagher’s personal collection to inspect during the design phase of the project.

Available in both right-hand and left-hand iterations, the Dark Wine Red Riviera – which was teased by Cesar Gueikian last week – features five-ply layered maple top, back and sides, and houses a five-ply layered maple center block.

A SlimTaper-profile neck is topped with a 22-fret Indian laurel fingerboard, which in turn is adorned with period accurate pearloid trapezoid inlays and a more contemporary Graph Tech nut.

Just like Gallagher’s original, the signature Riviera features a pair of humbuckers and a Stop Bar tailpiece, as opposed to the mini-humbuckers and Frequensator or Tremotone tailpieces of the original. Specifically, a pair of Alnico Classic Pros are wired to a standard Riviera control layout.

Other nods to the model it’s based on include an “E” print on the white pickguard and truss rod cover, a brown sound hole label and Black Witch Hat with Silver Insert control knobs.

“That guitar played a part on so many songs in the '90s it’s ridiculous” Noel Gallagher said of the Epiphone Riviera. “The Epiphone is excellent, really very good. [It] sounds exactly like my original one, it’s a belter.”

Noel Gallagher’s Gibson ES-355 and Epiphone Riviera signatures are both available now for $9,999 and $899, respectively.

To find out more about each model, head over to Gibson or Epiphone.

Noel Gallagher’s once-prized Gibson ES-355 – the electric guitar reportedly behind the break-up of Oasis – has sold for €385,500 (approximately $403,254) after it was put up for auction last month.

The Bigsby-equipped beauty sold for less than what the auction host, Artpèges Gallery, had anticipated, and pulled in just under its $550,000 estimation.

Nevertheless, It’s still a significant sum of money – not quite enough to get it on the list of most expensive guitars ever sold at auction, mind – and one that was commanded by the ES-355’s association with both the Gallagher brother and Oasis’ volatile split in 2009.

As the story goes, the ES-355 in question was present when Oasis were gearing up to hit the stage for their headline slot at 2009’s Rock en Seine festival in Paris.

Minutes before the group were set to make their appearance, however, Noel and his brother Liam were reportedly engaged in a bust-up that resulted in the ultimate destruction of the guitar, with Noel alleging his brother had smashed his prized six-string.

The damage was extensive, leaving the ES-355 in need of a neck refit after it had been detached from the body.

A few years after it had been battered and bruised, the guitar was restored by Philippe Dubreuille – a luthier who has worked on instruments for Jeff Beck, Iggy Pop and Mark Ronson. From then on, it joined the rest of Gallagher’s High Flying Birds six-string lineup.

It’s notable that, although Gallagher was synonymous with a cherry red, gold hardware-equipped Gibson, the model that has been sold wasn’t his number one ES-355. Instead, the axe in question – identifiable from its longer pickguard – usually filled the second chair to Gallagher’s main example. 

Per The Guardian, Artpèges co-founder Arthur Perault said he was “pretty happy” with the outcome of the auction, which took place at the Hôtel Drouot yesterday (May 17).

To find out more about the guitar and its story, head over to Artpèges.

In other Gallagher news, the songwriting powerhouse's near-mythical relationship with the ES-355 model is set to continue with renewed life, after he teased he'll be teaming up with Gibson later this year for a signature version of his beloved Cherry Red six-string.

A Gibson ES-355 once owned and used by Noel Gallagher, which was smashed on the night iconic British rock band Oasis broke up more than a decade ago, is set to go up for auction.

As the story goes, Gallagher’s Gibson ES-355 – an electric guitar model the Oasis man has played almost religiously throughout his career – was present prior to the band’s set at the 2009 Rock en Seine festival in Paris.

Minutes before they were set to take the stage, however, a bust-up between Noel and his brother Liam ultimately resulted in the destruction of the guitar, with Noel alleging that Liam had smashed his prized six-string during the altercation.

The damage was extensive: as per photos supplied by auction host Artpèges, the neck of the guitar had been completely removed from the body.

Following the fight that night, Oasis canceled their headlining performance and called it quits for good, with Noel announcing in a statement that he “simply could not go on working with Liam a day longer”.

Liam Gallagher has since denied smashing the ES-355, claiming that Noel had in fact destroyed one of his guitars during the argument instead.

“No, it was the other way round, he smashed one of mine,“ he said in 2009. “I’ve still got it in pieces. It’s a shame, it was a nice guitar.“

Gallagher had become almost synonymous with the ES-355 model at this point. Purchased alongside another, almost-identical model – save for a shorter pickguard – between 1996 and 1997, the Gibson in question was used heavily in the studio and throughout 2008’s Dig Out Your Soul tour.

As for its significance in Gallagher’s playing career, the axe usually played second fiddle, at least as a live guitar, to Noel's other ES-355, which he can be seen playing in the picture at the top of the page.

Two years after the guitar was smashed, Gallagher’s ES-355 was restored by Philippe Dubreuille, who has worked on instruments for Jeff Beck, Iggy Pop and Mark Ronson. After it was salvaged, the Gibson returned to active duty as part of Gallagher’s High Flying Birds six-string lineup.

In Artpèges' own words, “This ES-355 symbolizes on its own the soul and the history of the group: smashed in the last storm of August 28, 2009 at the Rock en Seine festival, it embodies the intense and tumultuous career of one of the most iconic ‘90s group.

“It was one of Noel Gallagher’s most important guitars,” it continued. “This ES-355 has become the symbol of Oasis’ breakup.”

Accompanying the guitar, which will be sold in its original hardcase, will be a letter of authenticity signed by Noel Gallagher himself. 

The auction is slated to take place on May 17, with the Gibson ES-355 carrying a starting price of €150,000. The auctioneers estimate the guitar will eventually sell for more than €500,000 (approximately $550,000).

If such a prediction comes to pass, Gallagher’s Gibson will find itself well outside the bracket of most expensive guitars sold at auction, which is currently headed up by Kurt Cobain’s $6,010,000 Martin D-18E.

For more information, head over to Artpèges.

It's not the only high-profile guitar auction to be announced in recent weeks, after Kurt Cobain's Smells Like Teen Spirit Fender Mustang was slated to hit the auction block for the very first time later this year.

Noel Gallagher might be one of the most commercially successful guitarists on the planet, but he's not afraid to admit he has some gaps in his guitar knowledge. For instance, until recently, the former Oasis, current High Flying Birds man didn't know how to play the stratospheric main riff from AC/DC's Back in Black.

That was until his 10-year-old son Sonny – who is relatively fresh to the guitar himself – taught him how to play it. 

In a new conversation on Radio X (via MusicRadar), Gallagher admits that he “genuinely did not know how to play” the riff, and explains how his son finally helped him crack it.

“He's doing good on the guitar,” Gallagher says. “He showed me [how to play] Back in Black, which is a famous riff. He's a rocker, he likes AC/DC and Queen, it's fucking great.”

“I hope he hasn't started too early so that when he gets to 18 he's bored of it,” he continues. “He's my little protégé. My plan was always not to say, ‘Right, Dad's a musician, you're going to be a musician, because I know loads of kids who have done that and by the time they get to 21 they've given it up. So my plan was just to leave musical instruments around the house.

This isn't the only time since Sonny started playing guitar that Gallagher has felt the heat regarding his riff knowledge.

“He was practicing a few things, [including] Smoke on the Water. And then he came home from school one night and said, ‘Can you play Thunderstruck by AC/DC?’ I sheepishly went, ‘No’.

“He was like, ‘Guy, in our school, can play it and he's grade 2. What grade are you?’ I was like, ‘I'm grade £76 million, son. That's what I am, how about that?’ But big up Sonny. He made me a very, very proud dad.

Gallagher also recalls watching Sonny play in a band as part of a recent school concert, saying he had a “little knot” in his stomach because “he's only 10”.

“He's not been playing that long, he's not even been interest in it that long. There was a projected thing that came up of what they were going to play. And it came up: 20th Century Boy by T. Rex. I was like, 'Get in there, son!'

“He had it down, he had the riff and he played a blinder. He even did a little [raises arm up] at the end. I've never been so proud of anything or anyone in my life. It was amazing.”

Earlier this year, Gibson announced a luxuriously appointed new acoustic guitar for the High Flying Birds leader, the Noel Gallagher J-150.

Noel Gallagher is known for having a pretty damn sweet guitar collection that includes vintage Gibson Les Pauls and ES-355s, Epiphone Sheratons and Rivieras, Telecasters, Rickenbackers and much more. 

However, long before Oasis became a multi-Platinum-selling sensation, his rig was about as modest as it gets. In December 1993 when Oasis recorded their first single, Supersonic, at the Pink Museum recording studio in Liverpool, all he had was an Epiphone Les Paul Standard, a used WEM/Watkins Dominator MKIII combo and a Roland RE-201 Space Echo (back when one could be bought for a few hundred bucks instead of a few thousand like today). 

The Dominator combo is the secret weapon here, as the amp was unfairly maligned by tone snobs for decades and has only recently caught the attention of collectors. Marshall’s legendary 18-watt amps famously appropriated the circuit of original early '60s Watkins Dominator, with its distinctive V-shaped cabinet and two-tone blue-and-white cosmetics.

But even though the appearance of the Dominator changed drastically over the years, its basic circuit underwent only minor updates, such as swapping a solid-state rectifier for the tube version, ditching the tremolo circuit and changing the EQ from a single tone knob to separate treble and bass controls. As a result, even Dominator models from the '70s still deliver similar mojo to an 18-watt Marshall for a lot less bucks.

Gallagher initially overdubbed several rhythm tracks in an attempt to build a wall of sound, although engineer Dave Scott later stripped down his rhythm part to only a pair of tracks during mixing.

Gallagher’s Epiphone Les Paul through the Dominator is the first guitar track heard, joined around the 30-second mark by a heavier, fuzzier rhythm guitar played by Bonehead using a Gibson SG through a Marshall JCM900 half stack. 

Gallagher employed the same Epiphone/WEM rig for the lead overdubs, but Scott employed a handful of tricks to make the parts stand out, including placing the Dominator in a stone room with close and distance mics and recording a second unison overdub with the tape varispeed slightly sped up to thicken the guitar tone via natural detuned chorus. 

It appears that Gallagher didn’t use his Roland RE-201 Space Echo during the session, but he did use the tape delay unit in live performance to replicate the thick, slapback-like lead guitar sound crafted for the recording.

Get the sound, cheap!

Epiphone Les Paul Standard '50s

 Marshall Origin 20C

Boss RE-20 Space Echo

TONE TIP: Crank up the Master control all the way and slowly bring up the Gain just past the brink of overdrive. To generate Manchester grunge you need dynamics, brightness and sparkle instead of compressed crunch.

• Definitely Maybe (Remastered) is available now via Big Brother Recordings Limited.

Six months after it was announced back at NAMM 2020, and after a slew of teasing details from the Oasis legend himself, Gibson has officially launched the limited-edition Noel Gallagher J-150 signature acoustic guitar.

The luxurious six-string is a recreation of Gallagher’s original instrument that made its first appearance during a promo video for the Oasis track Little By Little, and will be restricted to an ultra-limited, 200-unit run.

In terms of specs, Gallagher’s guitar remains true to its J-150 roots. Build-wise, it boasts AA flamed maple back and sides with a premium Sitka spruce top, as well as a two-piece maple/walnut stringer neck with slim-J-150 profile.

20 Standard Small Crown frets are featured on an Indian rosewood fingerboard, with the elegant offering also sporting Mother of Pearl Graduated Crown inlays, gold hardware and a hand-rubbed Historic Thin Vintage Sunburst finish.

Under the hood, the guitar sports a traditional hand-scalloped X-bracing system, with an additional LR Baggs Anthem under-saddle pickup paired with soundhole-mounted controls for Volume, Mix, Phase Inversion, Battery Check and Mic Trim.

Other appointments include a rosewood two bar SJ-200 Moustache bridge, bone saddle, TUSQ bridge pins and an SJ-200 pickguard.

When quizzed about how close the recreation got to the original instrument, Gallagher commented, “I was shocked. This looks like it looked the day that I bought it.

“It was hanging up in the shop and I picked it up, and I just did this,” recalled Gallagher, before strumming an E major. “I said, ‘I’ll take it.’ The guy started laughing and said, ‘Do you want a plectrum?’ I said, ‘No, it feels fucking great.’

“I instantly fell in love with that guitar,” he continued. “But this one… I mean, when I think back now at the songs that I’ve written and the amount of time I’ve spent holding this guitar, it just becomes a part of you.

“There’s just something about it. I find it very, very easy to write songs on.”

The Gibson Noel Gallagher J-150 signature is available now for $4,299, and comes complete with a custom case, signed label and a reproduced hand-written lyric sheet.

Head over to Gibson for more information.