And Finally Artist News Beef Of The Week

Beef Of The Week #378: You v Oasis puns

By Andy Malt | Published on Friday 27 October 2017

I think one of the top ten worst things about social media – possibly even higher up than birthdays on Facebook and the existence of Twitter – is the trend for law enforcers to attempt to engage humorously with the public online.

The only time I ever want to engage with the police on social media is when I need to know why a helicopter is hovering over my house in the middle of the night and how long it might take to go the fuck away. But every local police HQ in the country now has to have its own Twitter and Facebook accounts where they attempt to make the public feel safer through the medium of jokes and chit chat.

This is how, last Sunday, Swindon North Police came to post on Facebook: “You know it’s going to be one of those shifts when you get a report of ‘a Noel Gallagher lookalike swigging from a bottle of White Lightning and licking windows!'”

Does the public at large really need to know this? Why are our tax quids not being spent on ensuring that the windows of Swindon are cheap cider-soaked spit free, rather than on maintaining a social media presence? The Swindon cops didn’t even follow their post up to say whether or not the man had been apprehended. This is no public service, it’s just fear mongering about Noel Gallagher lookalikes.

How, though, do we know that it was a lookalike and not the actual Noel Gallagher? Might he have been drunkenly stalking the streets of Swindon? He’s got a new album to promote, after all. No, I know that it wasn’t the real Noel Gallagher, of course, because he said so on social fucking media.

After word got to him about the all-important Swindon police Facebook update via a local media report, Gallagher posted on Instagram: “Nowt to do with me mate. I’m still away on holiday”.

By “holiday”, he means he’s on tour in South America. That’s not a holiday, it’s work. He’ll get nowhere with that lax attitude.

Still, in treating the jaunt like a holiday, it does mean we get some holiday snaps from Noel, proving that he’s definitely not in Swindon. Here he is in Colombia doing… look, I don’t know what’s happening in this picture, but it’s in Colombia and that’s what’s important. And here he is flying a plane over Sao Paolo.

“But Andrew”, I here you say. “This column is supposed to focus on music-based disputes. What exactly is the beef here? Is it Noel versus the lookalike? Or the police versus Noel? Or is there, in fact, no real beef to report on, which is why you contrived one between yourself and the police right at the beginning?”

Well, first of all, don’t call me Andrew. You’re not my mum. Unless you happen to be the one avid reader of this column who is my mum. In which case, Mother, please stop interrupting me when I’m trying to work.

Second of all, yes, I did open this article with an argumentative tone in order to distract you from the fact that I just saw a thing that made me laugh that I wanted to write about, even though it doesn’t really fit with the remit of Beef Of The Week. Whatever, you try writing nearly 400 of these things and see how stringently you end up holding to the rules.

Anyway, I haven’t even got to the end yet. You haven’t had the big reveal. I’m about to throw in a major plot twist. There is a beef after all, you see. And that beef is: All Of You versus Wiltshire Police.

That’s right, Swindon North Police apparently now too busy attempting to track down the window licker – possibly following a lead that the offender was actually an Aphex Twin fan – it fell to someone at the main Wiltshire Police office to come up with a statement when Metro came knocking.

“We received reports of a man resembling Noel Gallagher in Swindon at around 5.30pm yesterday who appeared to be under the influence of alcohol and was licking windows – not a Wonderwall and he may have been Half The World Away”, they sniggered.

“It’s believed he was with another person causing a general nuisance”, they went on. “The incident was nowhere near the Oasis, but in the town centre, near the Wyvern Theatre. If anyone heard or saw anything suspicious in the area, please Don’t Look Back In Anger but contact us on 101”.

I mean, the state of that. There’s an Oasis Leisure Centre in Swindon, by the way. Jokes are always better when they require local knowledge, don’t you think?

See, you’re enraged now, aren’t you? Not only do we get jokey chit chat on the socials, the police pile on the pop puns even when talking to proper old school media. That’s really got your goat. And I totally manipulated you into that situation.

This is like the end of ‘Seven’, isn’t it? Except, instead of a head in a box, I gave you a load of bad Oasis puns on a screen. I am Keyser Söze. No wait, wrong film. It doesn’t matter, the main thing is that I am now recognised as a master of mind control. Good, I’m glad we’re all agreed on that.

Speaking of Aphex Twin and ‘Windowlicker’ – which you were – that track soundtracks a new road safety advert that came out this week. That doesn’t really fit in with any of this either, but it’s nice to finish with a video: