Not that he's conservative or anything

Well, Showbiz Zoe's strong Oasis story turns out to have a flaw: Noel Gallagher reckons Oasis won't play the Millennium Dome:

"We'll never play the O2. We went there to see Led Zeppelin and to be honest the gig was fantastic, but it was the most soul destroying venue I've ever been to.

"And much to our manager and agent's disappointment we came back and said we would never play there.

"So it means we are going to have to do 640 nights at Earl's Court, I would have thought.

"It's too Americanised for me, and it's too far away. Any gig you can get to by boat that hasn't got a beach is wrong."

Thank god his clunking band never played the Bristol Thekla. His head might have imploded.

It's good that Oasis care enough about their fans to avoid making the venues they play soul-destroying, though - if you've stuck with Oasis this long, you can't have much of a soul left and what remains must surely be protected at all costs.

Noel has also brought his experience to the question of why Glasto didn't sell out this year. Noel should be something of an expert on what's stinking the place up, having made the entire place reek in 2004 with a set so poor it made him scrap an entire album. Noel's diagnosis?

"If it ain't broke don't fix it.

"If you start to break it then people aren't going to go. I'm sorry, but Jay-Z? No chance.

"Glastonbury has a tradition of guitar music and even when they throw the odd curve ball in on a Sunday night you go 'Kylie Minogue?'

"I don't know about it. But I'm not having hip hop at Glastonbury. It's wrong."

It might perhaps be unfair to wonder if Noel is using "hip-hop" and "guitar music" as, ooh, euphemisms for something else entirely, but why does this remind us so of that woman off last week's Apprentice having a strop because the team wasn't making "English food"?

And while there might not have been a hip-hop headliner before, Glastonbury has always had a tradition of doing more than the bands who hang out in the perpetual Beatles tribute stage of Noel's mind; and even if there had never been a black artist in Somerset before, surely that's a problem for what bills itself as a "performing arts festival" rather than simply the Camden Crawl relocated to farmyards. It's like Noel... has some sort of... well... some sort of mental road block... blocking off new...
... possibilities... for... going...