Moving on from the Mandrake era.
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It’s all love and peace now, obviously, but when when [formerly] warring siblings Liam and Noel Gallagher were gleefully trading witty insults in the media, they were united in their belief that the band which propelled them into global consciousness was special, their songs forever resonant.
And they were right.
Here are 12 songs which demonstrate why Oasis continue to capture the popular imagination, 30 years on from their huge, history-making Knebworth gigs.
1. Rock ‘n’ Roll Star
Famously, in May 1993, Creation Records boss Alan McGee, back in his hometown of Glasgow to see family, caught Oasis playing third on the bill to 18 Wheeler, and offered the band a record deal on the spot. Noel Gallagher, already wise to the weapons-grade bullshit spouted by cocaine-fuelled music industry types thanks to his apprenticeship as a roadie for Inspiral Carpets, made sure that McGee left the venue with a copy of Oasis’ eight-song Live Demonstration cassette, so he wouldn’t forget the band’s name when he sobered up. With all due respect, Strange Thing or Cloudburst on that tape would never have secured the Mancunian quintet worldwide record deals, but side B, song 4? That’s the good stuff.
Imagine fronting a gang of older lads who look like they’ve stepped off a building site in their work clothes and delivering the line, “Look at you now, you’re all in my hands tonight” with utter conviction to audiences you could comfortably fit into a Ford Escort while third on the bill at JBs in Dudley, The Duchess Of York in Leeds, or Hull Adelphi. Then try to imagine watching anyone but a 21-year-old Liam Gallagher, still living with his mum Peggy on a Burnage council estate, singing this and actually believing him/her/they.
Gallagher The Younger quite correctly identified Rock ‘n’ Roll Star as “the most arrogant song ever” and as track 1, side 1, on Definitely Maybe, it is the most perfectly cocky introduction to a debut album that would change literally millions of lives. The Instagram/TikTok generation call this “manifesting”, back in the ’90s it was known simply as “dreaming”, but no dream ever sounded more like destiny.
2. Live Forever
“I’ve pretty much summed up everything I wanted to say in Rock ‘n’ Roll Star, Live Forever, and Cigarettes & Alcohol,” admitted Noel Gallagher as Definitely Maybe was filed in record racks across the UK ahead of its August 29, 1994 release. “After that I’m repeating myself, but in a different way.”
Rock ‘n’ Roll we’ve already discussed, and Cigarettes & Alcohol is the most fabulously ‘zero fucks given’ song on the most fearlessly optimistic punk rock album in history, but it’s Live Forever which is the most Oasis song ever written, and Noel Gallagher’s definitive statement.
Written as a response to (incorrect) music magazine rumours that Kurt Cobain was intent upon naming Nirvana’s third album I Hate Myself And I Want To Die, Live Forever is all about widescreen dreams, unshakeable self-belief and BDE swagger, a transcendent anthem which encapsulates everything about early Oasis. If you don’t ‘get’ Oasis after listening to Live Forever you never will, but if you know, you know.
3. Half The World Away
Coming in the wake of four superb introductory singles – Supersonic, Shakermaker, Live Forever and Cigarettes & Alcohol – Oasis’ first non album single, released on December 18, 1994, was a bit… whatever. Until you listened to its B-sides.
Noel Gallagher’s prolific songwriting talents had already allowed Oasis to casually toss out songs – Fade Away, Listen Up, Alive – as bonus tracks on singles when other bands would have killed to showcase them as A-sides. But listening to the B-sides of Whatever is the moment where you imagine Gallagher is starting to take the piss. It’s Good To Be Free (check out the live White Room version) is a banger, but the beautiful, brilliant Half The World Away moves the dial from ‘grandstanding’ to ‘shithousing’… not least because Noel, not Liam, at the time the world’s most compelling vocalist, sings it.
That Half Away The World was subsequently used as the theme tune to much-loved BBC sitcom The Royle Family only served to copper-fasten its iconic status, and place it alongside Pulp‘s Common People as an alternative British national anthem, one that actually resonates with the majority of its citizens.
4. Talk Tonight
Without Melissa Lim, this list would end here. Rather ungraciously, interviewed for the Oasis documentary Supersonic, Noel Gallagher claimed to remember neither Lim’s name, nor what she looked like, admitting that the time was “a bit of a blur”, but the San Francisco native’s entry into Gallagher’s life stopped him walking away from Oasis during their very first American tour, following what he considered to be a disastrous crystal meth-fuelled gig at LA’s legendary Whisky A Go Go club.
Having been hit by a tambourine thrown by his little brother at said gig, a furious Gallagher collected his passport and $700 from tour manager Maggie Mouzakitis, pushed a note under her door to say that he was fucking off, then caught a flight to San Francisco to meet Lim, who he’d first met at Oasis’ show at the city’s Bottom of the Hill venue four nights earlier. “He was very upset,” Lim told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2016 . “I took him in, fed him and tried to calm him down. He wanted to break up the band… I wasn’t going to let it happen on my watch.”
The story is told, partially, in Talk Tonight, which Gallagher recorded solo in Austin, Texas just weeks later, after his return to the fold. The song’s chorus runs “I want to talk tonight/ Until the morning light/ ’Bout how you saved my life”, a more gracious ‘thank you’ which no-one can ever take away from Lim.
By the way: listen to that Whiskey A Go Go gig sometime, because it’s electrifying when the Gallagher boys aren’t trying to knock lumps out of one another. And that was Oasis at their worst.
5. Acquiesce
“Because we need each other. We believe in one another.”
In the sleevenotes to The Masterplan, Oasis’ outstanding B-sides compilation album, we’re informed that Acquiesce, contrary to all speculation, isn’t about the relationship between Liam and Noel Gallagher.
Riiiiiiiight.
That Acquiesce was ‘relegated’ to the B-side of the infinitely weaker Some Might Say is, frankly, unbelievable: you’d have to have ears fashioned from Bagpuss’ pelt not to hear the gulf in class between the two songs, not least when it comes to the soaring, sublime switches from Liam’s verses to Noel’s chorus.
When Oasis played two nights at Maine Road, then the home ground of their beloved Manchester City, in April ’96, they chose Acquiesce as their set opener. The nerve! The chutzpah! Liam sings flat – whatever – and it’s still unfeasibly thrilling.
6. Hello
Hello is by no means the best, most significant, or most important song on (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, but it’s on this list for a simple reason. If you were an Oasis fan in 1995, and had heard the Mancunians preview their second album with the decidedly mediocre one-two of Some Might Say and Roll With It, you would have been forgiven for having a crisis of faith over what lay ahead, particularly if you also found time within that to question The Chief’s wisdom in spunking so many killer songs on B-sides. But Hello, the album’s lairy opener, was the moment you knew that everything was going to be alright.
With retrospect, the Gary Glitter echo is deeply unfortunate. But the Paul Calf-echoing “I’ve got a feeling you still owe me, so wipe the shit from your shoes“?
Come on.
7. Wonderwall
Is anyone here unfamiliar with Wonderwall? Anyone at all? Okay, next!
8. D’You Know What I Mean?
Another album opener, another absolute beast of a song.
Famously, Be Here Now, is Oasis’ ‘cocaine album’: frankly, if you think any Oasis album wasn’t a cocaine album, you weren’t paying much attention. Whatever, the implication here is that Be Here Now was over-blown, long-winded, and full of its own self-importance, which is a totally accurate assessment. But in the case of opener D’You Know What I Mean?, the more relevant epithets are ‘epic’, ‘massive’ and ‘monstrous’, for it sounds the way you would hope one of the biggest rock bands in the world should sound, brash, bold and louder than bombs.
Explaining some of the thinking behind the song’s swagger, Noel Gallagher stated, “We were a bunch of scruffs from Manchester and we’re going out in a Rolls-Royce.” Old school rock ‘n’ roll indulgence may be a bit déclassé in 2024, but sometimes you just have to sit back and gawp in wonder at the excess, and this is one such instance.
9. Little James
Now, wait, we’re not suggesting that this is one of Oasis’ greatest songs: we’re not insane. But in terms of the Oasis story, Little James is a landmark moment, being the first Liam Gallagher-penned/non-Noel Gallagher penned song to feature on an Oasis album, specifically Standing on the Shoulder of Giants.
Rather sweetly, the song was written for Gallagher’s former stepson, James Kerr, the son of Liam’s ex-wife Patsy Kensit and Simple Minds vocalist Jim Kerr: a shame then, that’s it’s such a soppy, sappy, wet tissue of a tune, with lyrics – “Live for your toys / Even though they make noise / Have you ever played with plasticine / Even tried a trampoline” – that make Noel Gallagher’s rhyming couplets read like Jean-Paul Sartre.
Noel, to be fair, was encouraging of his brother’s efforts, saying, “It’s good, it’s very catchy… Now he knows he can do it, good luck to him.” But in opening up his band’s songwriting, Gallagher Senior opened up Oasis’ own Pandora’s Box…
10. Stop Crying Your Heart Out
Take a look at the songwriting credits on Heathen Chemistry: after Noel Gallagher opened the door to other writers, suddenly everyone in Oasis wanted in on the act (or in on the songwriting royalties, at least). To be fair, given that Andy Bell had written for Ride, and Gem Archer had a modicum of success with his previous band Heavy Stereo, you can easily imagine why they listened to Little James and thought, ‘Right, fucking hell, if that’s the standard now…’
Now go look at the the songwriting credits on Heathen Chemistry again. Notice anything? Here’s a clue: the only good songs are all Noel Gallagher’s songs. And Stop Crying Your Heart Out, the very obvious highpoint, is so far and above everything else on the record that you have to imagine that Noel Gallagher was trying really, really hard not to sound too smug when he presented it to the band. “Mind if I try one of mine lads?”
“Heathen Chemistry had a couple of good tunes, Little By Little and Stop Crying Your Heart Out,” Noel later told NME. “The rest of it is a bit ‘meh’.”
File under: sit down, shut up.
11. Lyla
So, following on from the previous entry, wherein it may have been implied that letting every fucker write songs for Oasis was The Beginning Of The End – which it kinda was – in the interests of fairness, we should state here that 2005’s Don’t Believe The Truth is [insert Larry David impression] pretty, pretty good. Andy Bell’s Keep The Dream Alive is excellent, Gem Archer’s A Bell Will Ring is decent, and the Archer/Liam Gallagher co-write Love Like A Bomb is catchy, sunny and fun, with some nice Beatles harmonies. Well done everyone.
Again, though, The Chief’s compositions shines brightest, with Mucky Fingers, The Importance Of Being Idle and Part Of The Queue hinting that Noel’s songwriting was heading in a more experimental direction. Lyla is more typical Oasis, but it’s also arguably the band’s last true banger, with a chorus tailor-made for summer stadium screamalongs 20 years on.
12. I’m Outta Time
Again, with hindsight, Dig Out Your Soul is probably most significant for foreshadowing What Noel Did Next, but let’s give props to Liam here, because the rather lovely I’m Outta Time is not only the best and most poignant song on Oasis’ seventh and final record, but also the album’s most-streamed song on Spotify.
After this, you can understand why Liam felt pretty bullish about the prospect of post-Noel, post-Oasis life, which has worked out just fine. But not quite as fine, admittedly, as things have been since the brothers buried the hatchet and Oasis swaggered back into view.