There is the inevitable Noel Gallagher, who as ever sounds like somebody fed the Bumper Book of Bad Clichés into a random text generator.

“Sitting upside a high chair/The devil’s refugee is gonna be blinded by the light that follows me”

But I have to defend the late, great Ronnie James Dio. They quote this line from “Holy Diver” and rather miss the point of what Dio was about.

Ride the tiger/You can see his stripes but you know he’s clean/Oh don’t you see what I mean?

I’ve always seen Dio as the Jon Anderson of metal; he plays with evocative imagery even when they don’t make any literal sense.

And this one from Krokus’ “Down the Drain” is a work of comic genius along with Queen’s classic “Told my girl I gotta forget her/Cost I gotta buy me a new carburettor”

“My mother was a B-girl/My old man was a tramp/Some say they conceived me/On a loading ramp”

Some of the others are hilarious, though the Great White lyric is too crass to post here. That appalling piece of macho drivel is actually credited to five authors, presumably so each of them could deny all responsibility and blame the others.

But this quote takes the biscuit (I’ve left the swears in)

I was being asked about a reunion five weeks after I left the band. It’s a modern phenomenon. It’s a modern disease. All the bands that get back together, all those ones you’ve mentioned [Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin] they didn’t have anybody in the line-up as fucking brilliant as me. What’s the guitarist out of Fleetwood Mac called? Lindsay Buckingham. I can’t remember him setting the world on fire. Jimmy Page? That’s debatable. He’s a good guitarist but I’m not sure how many solo albums he’s fucking made.

Oh dear, oh dear.

The software development industry, or rather the software development recruitment industry, often talks about “Rock star developers”. I have always found the concept utterly ridiculous, and the above quote goes a long way towards demonstratng why. In today’s world, the concept of “Rock Star” is far more about swaggering ego than it is about actual skill.

As a guitar player, Noel Gallagher is at best a mediocre talent who is not fit to tie the shoelaces of Jimmy Page or Lindsay Buckingham. If you read some listicle of supposedly great guitarists and see his name there, it’s as much proof that the list is a load of cobblers as the absence of Tony Iommi or Nile Rogers. And as a songwriter his work is so derivative and backward-looking that if he was a programmer he’s be writing in COBOL.

There was a day when “Rock Stars” represented the top talent of their profession. The larger-than-life personality was part of the package, but the talent had to be there. But the days of Freddy Mercury and Jimi Hendrix had long gone by the time Oasis arrived on the scene, and the worlds of creative artists and media celebrities have gone their seperate ways.

Anyone who talks about “Rock star programmers” is living in the 1970s.

A screencap from The Guardian showing Dom Lawson’s five-star review of Steven Wilson’s “Hand Cannot Erase” alongside Alexis Petridis’ detailed review of one-time media darling Noel Gallagher’s allegedly ‘seismic’ new album that could be summed up with the word ‘meh’.

It’s difficult to imagine this a couple of years ago, when it would have been very unlikely for The Guardian to acknowledge artists like Steven Wilson.

On the day it comes out, Virgin Trains won’t be able to cope with all the people trying to flee the chaos,’ says Mark Coyle, who co-produced Definitely Maybe.

The trouble with that analogy is that all it would take to stop people being able to get out of Manchester by Virgin Trains would be a points failure at Slade Lane Junction.

But “Noel Gallagher’s album: More devasating that a points failure at Slade Lane Junction” is hardly a killer slogan…