NOEL GALLAGHER - NOEL GALLAGHER: I'M NOT HAVING HIP-HOP AT GLASTONBURY

Noel Gallagher has attacked Glastonbury Festival organisers for picking Jay-Z as a headline act for this year's event.

The New York rapper's planned appearance has received a lukewarm reception from festival fans, with many blaming the prominence of hip-hop in favour of indie as their reason for not attending the Somerset event.

And while festival organiser Michael Eavis has said the reason for comparatively slow ticket sales - previous events had sold out within hours while registration for tickets to this year's was reopened after more than 30,000 remained - was due to poor weather conditions, Oasis guitarist Gallagher has criticised Jay-Z's involvement.

"If it ain't broke don't fix it," he told BBC News.

"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."

Though Gallagher - who headlined Glastonbury with Oasis in 1995 and 2004 - said the band have completed their seventh album, he denied rumours that a residency at London's O2 Arena was imminent.

"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," he explained.

"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."

Gallagher added of the Greenwich venue: "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."