For more than three decades, Oasis‘ Noel Gallagher has been dunking on Phil Collins. He’s called the Genesis frontman the antichrist and humorously urged Britons to vote Labour as a means of keeping Collins out of England. Now that Gallagher, 59, and Collins, 75, stand to run into one another when they’re inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this fall, Collins is speaking out. “I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt here, and assuming he doesn’t really think I’m the antichrist,” Collins recently told Mojo.
The magazine reports that in 1994, Gallagher called Collins “the antichrist of music” in an interview. The Oasis guitarist/songwriter said he drew that conclusion after attending a Genesis show in the Eighties while “completely out of it.”
Collins told Mojo he’s given some thought to Gallagher’s story and reckons it was a performance of “Mama” — a menacing song off Genesis’ 1980 self-titled album, in which Collins commands a demoniacal laugh while holding a flashlight under his face — that must have spooked the Oasis guitarist. “I think ‘Mama’ is why Noel called me the antichrist,” Collins said.
Antichrist comments notwithstanding, Mojo dredged up other instances when Gallagher disparaged Collins, sometimes using gruesome and, dare we say, un-Christian language. “I want the severed head of Phil Collins in my fridge by the end of this decade. And if I haven’t, I’ll be a failure,” Gallagher reportedly once said.
And in 1997 Gallagher told The Guardian that people should effectively vote Collins out of the country. “If the Conservatives get in, Phil Collins is threatening to come back and live here,” he said. “And let’s face it, none of us want that.” (One artist who defended Collins against Gallagher was rapper and actor Ice-T, who told Rolling Stone in 2011, “Noel Gallagher should shut the fuck up and calm the fuck down.”)
Collins fired back in a 2005 Irish Examiner interview calling Oasis rude, horrible, and untalented. The Genesis frontman’s daughter, actress Lily, even involved herself in the “feud,” confronting Noel’s brother, Liam at Live Earth in 2007. This prompted Liam to say he doesn’t hate anybody.
But whatever sparks fly (or whatever reconciliation takes place) at the Hall of Fame ceremony in L.A. on Nov. 14, it likely won’t happen in public. “The inductees have all been invited to a lunch before the ceremony,” Collins said. “Which will be interesting, as I’m sure to bump into Oasis.”
