If the government can’t be bothered with the law, Noel Gallagher and Ian Brown shouldn’t be expected to care either
On Monday, the Oasis pop star Noel Gallagher announced his suspicion of masks: “If I get the virus it’s on me, it’s not on anyone else… it’s a piss-take,” declared the People’s Virologist. “There’s no need for it… They’re pointless.” The previous week, in a punctuation-resistant statement Auto-Tuned into near coherence, former Stone Roses
Singer Ian Brown declared: “NO LOCKDOWN NO TESTS NO TRACKS NO MASKS NO VAX”, and appeared to imply that billionaire
Bill Gates had released the bat virus. Two members of 90s northern indie bands had announced their distrust of Covid realities. I found my Britpop-era Filofax to see if I could track and trace a failure to trust scientific and health data generally among the fading faces of the Madchester generation. Top one!
Tommy Scott, of Liverpool’s 1996 Female of the Species hitmakers Space, did not disappoint. “I do not believe in any germs,” he told me by text. “If they are real, and there’s loads, why don’t they have a smell?” Leon Meya, vocalist of Stockport’s From a Window chart-toppers Northern Uproar, revealed his suspicions of hand-sanitiser: “It could be anything. We don’t know. It might just be water with glue in it, or liquidised Pritt Sticks. It could be bats’ jizz. If I see anyone using it I slap them.” Finally, the Stone Roses’ dancer and vibesmaster, known only as Cressa, told me that he had recently prevented a teenage boy receiving the Human Papillomavirus vaccine (HPV) by snatching it from the nurse’s hands and downing it in one himself, like a tequila shot. “Papillomavirus isn’t even an English word,” he explained, “it was made up by French scientists. It means ‘the butterfly is unwell’. I saw it on the internet.”