Oasis/Photo: Simon Emmett
It was the best of times. Or so we thought.
In the early nineties the Cold War had ended, the Berlin Wall had fallen, and it was the dawn of a digital era that tech savants assured us was rich with possibility, not peril.
Tony Blair’s New Labour Party was on the rise in Britain, and on this side of the ocean, a market-friendly Democratic Party, led by a saxophone-wielding Bill Clinton, had taken the White House. Globalization was in, welfare was out, and the chattering class seemed united in its belief that no problem was too great for capitalism to solve.
If there was a musical standard-bearer for the era it was arguably—with apologies to Blur—Oasis, the ubiquitous Britpop band launched in 1991 by the ever-feuding brothers Gallagher, Liam (vocals) and Noel (lead guitar, vocals), along with founding members Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs (guitar), Paul “Guigsy” McGuigan (bass) and Tony McCarroll (drums), who would be replaced in 1995 by Alan White.
Already known for buzz-worthy live shows, Oasis, with the extraordinary 1994 debut “Definitely Maybe,” would usher out the extremely offline era and give new life to the term “British invasion.” Brash, bold and relentlessly future-focused, Oasis made music with a sound and sensibility well-suited to the stadium. They were a band that stood for dreaming, for ambition and arrogance, for the triumphant belief that if you wanted it badly enough, it was destined to happen.
They were also famous for their intra-band brawling. Through the years, the squabbling between the Gallaghers was often of the hold-me-back variety, but it now and then erupted into genuinely bloody brawls—Noel once smashing Liam’s head with a cricket bat when the latter’s drunken post-pub revelry disrupted a studio session.
Oasis’ early days, October 22, 1991, courtesy Uptown photo/Oasis
The band ended bitterly in 2009, to be followed by fifteen full years of brotherly animosity, sealed by the Gallaghers’ very public resolve not to speak to one another. But over the course of their recording career, Oasis—not unlike the Kinks, another legendary British band renowned for battling brothers and buoyant songs—recorded a body of music remarkable for the persevering belief that tomorrow we’re sure to find better things.
In truth, Oasis were always strange standard-bearers for the late-stage capitalist era. What’s maybe too easy to forget—what their lyrics only inconsistently gesture at—is the world from which the brothers and their bandmates sprang. Manchester born-and-bred and working-class poor, they were the sons of Irish immigrants, one and all, without a drop of English blood in the lot, Noel Gallagher once remarked. Peggy Gallagher’s boys grew up on the council estates, the British version of the projects, actually celebrating the day when they moved into a home with indoor toilets.
Known as the world’s first industrialized city, and built on the nineteenth-century boom in textile manufacturing, Manchester has always been defined by its haves and have-nots. In fact, it was a test-case city for Friedrich Engels in his 1845 classic “The Condition of the Working Class in England,” in which he famously argued that the industrial revolution had made things far worse for the working poor, and none more so than the droves of immigrant Irish, the most exploited among the lower classes. Through the decades there were waves of Irish immigration, the industrial city offering the prospect of work and financial promise, albeit under harsh conditions. It was an invocation accepted by tens of thousands, including the parents of the young men who would become Oasis. Loss of industry in the 1970s and 1980s made jobs even tougher to score; both Gallagher brothers spent time on the dole while trying to launch their band.
Peggy, Liam and Noel, courtesy Oasis
Oasis had always known where they came from, and the fate their majestic music helped them avoid. “I didn’t pick the scabs of my childhood at all,” as Noel Gallagher puts it in the uncut interviews from the 2016 documentary “Supersonic.” “We had a shitty upbringing, but it was normal to everybody else of our age, it wasn’t like we were locked in a cupboard for thirteen hours a day. It was hard work being working class then and we dug ourselves out of it because we had talent and we chased it and that was it.”
From 1991 to 1993 Oasis were road warriors, their shows reviewed with increasing frequency and fervor in the “Live” sections of NME and Melody Maker. Renowned for their arrogance, their drug intake, their rock ’n’ roll-clichéd destruction of hotel property and, of course, all that brotherly brawling, Oasis were also prolific and hard-working, as they spun song after song that felt both timeless and very much of the moment.
You knew you’d heard that melody somewhere before—that guitar part, that rhythm section—and sometimes it really was Oasis brazenly lifting a T. Rex blues riff, a Beatles harmony, a New Seekers melody, a Burt Bacharach chord sequence. Put off by what he saw as the band’s personality-free cool, one NME music critic deemed them retro indie fops “too well versed in old records to do anything new.” He wasn’t all wrong.
Oasis “Definitely Maybe”
But all these years later, one can’t listen to their 1994 debut, “Definitely Maybe,” and not be struck again by how fresh, vital and, yes, truly original the Oasis sound was. The record went to number one its first week on the UK charts, the fastest-selling debut in British history.
It’s all there—the dream, the bravado, the band already bigger than imagination—in the album’s perfect, prophetic opening track, “Rock ’n’ Roll Star.” All charisma, Liam leans into a sneering vocal, like some punk John Lennon, backed by those wall-of-sound guitars. I live my life in the city / There’s no easy way out, the council estate kid sings, sounding off for all his mates, believing with all his heart that there’s no limit to where tonight’s show might take them. In his mind, his dreams are real. We’re all invited to join in, to believe also, in the band, in ourselves. And for those still not onboard—If you’re not down with who I am—well, Liam’s got you in his sights: Look at you now, you’re all in my hands.
The guitar work on “Definitely Maybe” is noisy, thick with guitar overdubs, spiked with industrial edges. The band required three separate studio sessions, and one spectacular remix by producer Owen Morris, to achieve a sound that approximated the energy of their live shows. The dirty, feedback-heavy beginning of “Bring It On Down” owes a debt to the brilliant Scotsmen of The Jesus and Mary Chain. It’s a song steeped in working-class anger, backed by relentless punk-rock rhythm: You’re the outcast, you’re the underclass / But you don’t care because you’re living fast.
Oasis also weren’t afraid to dip into the love-hate dynamic between musicians and audience made notorious by punk shows, as Liam jeers at the very people he’s serenading: I’ll be scraping your life from the sole of my shoe tonight. “We were rocking, steaming,” Liam would recall about the sound on that first album, “it was like the Pistols with melodies.”
On a debut record with many heights, and not a single weak track, “Supersonic” is the unmistakable standout, one of the best radio singles of the 1990s. Edged by creaking guitars, and a filthy psychedelic groove, the song launches on the standard Oasis credo of self-expression and attitude: I need to be myself / I can’t be no one else. It’s a track about overcoming, about getting high on having it all, complete with rock-star rides in BMWs and yellow submarines and bad-tripping: I know a girl called Elsa, she’s into alka-seltzer / She sniffs it through a cane on a supersonic train.
In any other band’s hands, lyrics so openly ridiculous might rob the song of its sexy, sneering edge. To their eternal credit, Oasis makes it work. And when the song’s aggressively nonsensical imagery strands a friend inside a waterfall where nobody can hear him call, there’s genuine existential terror in the idea: the streetwise kids of Manchester knowing what it is to be left out, unrecognized, trapped inside the echoes of our own loneliness.
The other musical masterpiece of the album is, of course, “Live Forever,” the first Oasis song to land in the Top Ten in the UK, while also splashing into the Top Forty on the Billboard charts in the U.S. In Noel Gallagher’s memory, “Live Forever” stands as the first great song he ever wrote. Not known for strident working-class politics, or for digging at the scabs of his own pain, he’s nevertheless carrying enough of that history to be able to craft one of rock ’n’ roll’s most-enduring songs about wanting out and up.
“Live Forever” is one part escapist fantasy, one part youth anthem, filled with stadium-worthy guitar tracks and a clarion cry to flying and breathing and believing, filled with the vitality of life, the feeling that you and the person singing next to you really might live forever, if only in this one, perfect song.
Oasis “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?”
In the rock ’n’ roll annals British bands have to take America if they’re going to take the world. Despite the U.K. success of “Definitely Maybe,” it was 1995’s “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory” that moved Oasis into the musical and cultural stratosphere. The sound of their second record is spacious, sonic and powerful: it’s no surprise to learn the band once set the goal of sounding as loud on vinyl as The Who did on “Live at Leeds.”
The band led with the single “Roll With it,” and soon found themselves embroiled in a media-hyped Battle for Britpop with their musical rivals, Blur. NME styled it as a boxing match, in a front page dominated by the headline “British Heavyweight Fight” and side-by-side mugs of Liam and Blur frontman Damon Albarn. It was Blur’s single “Country House” that took the initial battle, landing at number one that week, but Oasis fans didn’t lick their wounds for long. “Morning Glory” went on to become the second-fastest selling album in UK history, while also reaching Number Four on the U.S. Billboard charts.
Noel called the band’s first U.K. chart-topper, “Some Might Say,” the quintessential Oasis track. A T. Rex groove and wall of sleazy glam guitars back an edgy, tempo-shifting Liam vocal, as he sings of the slog of ordinary life that makes the sunshine hard to see. The song takes sides, backing those who say we’ll see a brighter day, against the naysayers who don’t much believe in better places: Some might say they don’t believe in heaven / Go and tell it to the man who lives in hell.
“Don’t Look Back in Anger” was the first Oasis tune to feature Noel on lead vocals. With its piano intro lifted from John Lennon’s “Imagine,” it’s an anthem to pointed goodbyes. Insults have been hurled: You said the brains I had went to my head. Decisions have been made: Take that look from off your face / You ain’t ever gonna burn my heart out. It’s song as score-settling and self-justification, the determination not to be bound by other people’s regrets.
If “Don’t Look Back in Anger” seemed to speak to break-ups past and future, it was “Wonderwall” that gave voice to Noel’s sentimental side. The song was soon ubiquitous the world over, number one on U.S. alternative airplay charts, as well as a nineties wedding-song staple: I don’t believe that anybody / Feels the way I do about you now. Characterized by its rush of intimacy and its gesture at saying things never said before, the song is at its core about openness: to love, to salvation, to transformation. Maybe, the song says—and Oasis is nothing if not a band of hopeful “maybes”—you’re going to be the one that saves me.
Oasis “Wonderwall” with Liam and Noel Gallagher/Photo: Jill Furmanovsky, courtesy Oasis
Critics have too often panned, sometimes outright ignored, the five studio albums that followed, every one of them topping the U.K. charts. It’s inarguable that Oasis’ much-hyped and also immensely successful third studio effort, “Be Here Now,” was a bloated, ambitious miss, notorious for tracks carrying as many as thirty guitar overdubs—the wall of sound crumbling under the weight of too many bricks.
But Oasis has never made a studio record without a slew of good, often great songs. 1998’s “The Masterplan” should hold place on anyone’s list of must-have B-sides, with songs such as “Acquiesce” and “The Masterplan” testifying to Noel’s can’t-miss songwriting prowess at his peak. And no Oasis playlist should be without later-era singles like “Stop Crying Your Heart Out” and “The Importance of Being Idle,” two of the band’s very best tracks.
In the end, what’s made Oasis’ body of work endure is a quality not often associated with the brooding, feuding Gallagher brothers: their earnestness. Long before word-heavy aspirational posters became de rigueur in the mud rooms of middle-class homes, Noel Gallagher—the band’s sole songwriter and lyricist through its first three albums—was creating music as mantra: Don’t look back in anger. You need to be yourself, you can’t be no one else. All the roads we have to walk are winding. All we know is that we don’t know.
Oasis, MTV London, August 18, 1994/courtesy Oasis
It’s striking that during a nineties-era often associated with irony, Oasis made music that was anything but. There is nothing at-a-remove about this band; all their angst is laced with sincerity. The essential us-ness of the human endeavor—that search for love and meaning which is at once timeless and universal—is their consistent subject matter.
That us-ness is also what characterizes the band’s best live shows. To listen to an Oasis record in solitude is to be overcome with the desire to clench a fist and throw it skyward—to want to find a crowd, a partner, someone, anyone to sway in time with—and to become part of the rock ’n’ roll collective. And to roll tape on the band’s raucous two-day set at Knebworth, England, or their legendary appearance at River Plate in Buenos Aires, where 70,000 Spanish-speaking fans sing “Don’t Look Back In Anger” alongside a clearly emotional Noel Gallagher, is to see the OG crowdsourced band in action.
With hindsight, the Oasis of the early nineties, like so many of their Gen X fans, knew everything and nothing. We believed in love without quite grasping its demands; felt lonely but had not yet known the loneliness a longer life might bring; bought into the promise of a globalized utopia without properly calculating its human costs. We were twentysomethings congratulating ourselves, without a hint of self-awareness, for not looking back in anger.
Perhaps what Oasis fans most share with the band now is the sense that the journeys we embarked on in the nineties, both personal and political, didn’t bring forth all they promised. But the Gallagher brothers are still making music. They’ve taken life’s slings and arrows, thrown a punch or two, most often at each other, and somehow managed to put aside the past and come together for Oasis Live 25, their much-anticipated global comeback tour.
And yet again, they leave us looking forward. Because if Noel and Liam can make peace, maybe there’s hope for the rest of us.
Anne K. Ream (Writer, “Touched by the Spirit”) is a writer and the co-founder of Center for Story & Witness, a global testimonial writing program for survivors of gender-based violence and other human rights violations. A frequent writer for Newcity, she is a contributor to “The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan” and the co-creator of Hear to Be Heard, a blues and rock benefit concert series.
R. Clifton Spargo (Writer, “Touched by the Spirit”), author of the novel “Beautiful Fools,” is a novelist, short-story writer and cultural and music critic. His writings on music have appeared in Huffington Post, The Yale Review, “The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan,” and regularly in Newcity. He is co-founder of Center for Story & Witness, and teaches creative writing at Yale University.
