Hip-hop is 'wrong' for the festival...
Scott Colothan

09:10 14th April 2008

Noel Gallagher has slammed Glastonbury Festival organisers for booking Jay-Z as a headline act, saying that the rapper is the main reason why the festival failed to sell out.

The Oasis lynchpin said that it was “wrong” for a hip-hop act to be booked to headline the event in favour of traditional guitar acts who play.

The 40-year-old said: "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."

Of course, unlike almost every year this side of the millennium, Glastonbury failed to sell out on the first day of tickets going on sale. Embarrassingly organisers had to re-launch the registration for the festival in a bit to attract more revellers.

Elsewhere during Gallagher’s candid interview with the BBC, he also took time to have a swipe at the O2 Arena saying that recent stories that Oasis were booked in to play a Prince-esque residency at the venue were rubbish.

He continued: "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."


Photo: wenn