Like most fans of rock ‘n’ roll, I gravitate to works from the vicinity of Greater Manchester intuitively, involuntarily. Even as someone who’s never once set foot in Great Britain, I’ve always felt I could viscerally relate to exactly where bands from the north of England were coming from. While I might not quite relate to football clubs or bangers and mash, I do hail from America’s Rust Belt, and more specifically, the inner outskirts of a battered old industrial city that was once bustling and systemically significant to national prosperity, but that eventually ended up more or less betrayed and forsaken. Manchester and its nearby municipalities in the United Kingdom have been as mistreated and abused by posh toffs in London as my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, has been pummeled in the United States by, as the viral hit puts it, rich men (and women) north of Richmond.
Consider the effect that small region of the world has had on our soundscape. There’s the Fab Four, of course, and legendary acts of more recent vintage such as Joy Division/New Order, Happy Mondays/Black Grape, The Stone Roses, and The Verve. And then there’s Oasis, currently on its triumphant global reunion tour.
Oasis isn’t my absolute favorite northern English band of its era, but they’re up there, and they have to be considered the scene’s greatest of modern times. Noel Gallagher was never as dazzlingly creative a songwriter as Shaun Ryder of Happy Mondays et al., and while he could be quite an emotive guitarist, peak Oasis played like an above-average bar band compared to the almost telepathic chemistry of The Stone Roses and The Verve. But those other bands didn’t record “Live Forever” or “Wonderwall” or “Champagne Supernova,” nor manage to conquer the elusive American market to anywhere near the same extent. However often Richard Ashcroft might declare “Bitter Sweet Symphony” the greatest anthem of all time, the last time I saw him play in New York, it was for 45 acoustic minutes opening for Liam Gallagher.
What was that palpable X-factor that so differentiated Oasis and made the Gallagher brothers so enduringly relatable to listeners all over the planet? Quite simply, it burningly desired to be the biggest band in the world every bit as much as anyone has ever burningly desired their own most grandiose fantasy.
Released in 1994, and among the greatest debut albums of all time, Definitely Maybe was an explosion of desperate ambition that could only have come from talented but frustrated working-class young men feeling trapped and going nowhere as the dreams they had as children seemed on the verge of fading away. Almost every song is a lumbering beast so thoroughly composed of bits and pieces from the very best of the entire British popular music tradition as to make each feel inevitable, and the intensity doesn’t let up much until the final track.
I’ve never felt it was quite fair to dwell on Oasis stealing from the Beatles. To my ear, Oasis nicked at least as much from bands such as Faces and The Kinks and many of its contemporaries. Extensive borrowing and repurposing is a venerable rock ‘n’ roll tradition so long as it results in great tunes, and Noel Gallagher delivered in spades: Not only are songs like “Supersonic” and “Cigarettes and Alcohol” exceedingly catchy, but they add up almost like a short story collection to searing and earnest reportage about how he and his circle were experiencing life as they scratched by in dead end jobs yet still dared to dream big even as society was telling them that it was past time to settle down and find a proper career. The album’s emotional palette fluidly shifts between defiant bravado and glum recognition that the big dream was more than likely to crash and burn.
But the Gallaghers were hellbent on not letting that happen. Every song on the album would be at least as good as the singles on most bands’ albums. Most bands’ B-sides were random live tracks, extraneous remixes, or goofing off in the studio — and Oasis did engage in a bit of that — but Oasis also famously burned off a number of instant classics as B-sides as if to prove this band was definitely no flash in the pan.
The band’s debut proved an immediate success upon release, but by no means were the Gallaghers about to rest on their laurels: A few months later, even amid an exhausting amount of touring and bombastic rock star antics, Oasis had a newly recorded single out in time for Christmas, “Whatever,” with a couple more top-notch B-sides. And less than a year later, the band released another album, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?, that proved to be its commercial peak.
There’s a music biz truism that you have your whole life to write the first album, but then just six months to write and record a second one. And in comparison to the sheer slab of gobsmacking genius that was Definitely Maybe and its B-sides, the new LP and its B-sides were somewhat thinner and patchier even as they could boast far higher production values and a clutch of the band’s most beloved songs, including “Wonderwall” and “Don’t Look Back in Anger.” That was more than enough to truly crack American radio and sell an avalanche of CDs, cassettes, and concert tickets far beyond Albion’s shores.
Amid even more exhausting touring and over-the-top rock star antics, the Gallaghers gave it nearly two years before releasing the lavishly produced third record in the band’s grand opening trilogy, Be Here Now. The revealed truth therein was that the band had been snorting truckloads of cocaine in between concerts, photo-ops, miscellaneous recording sessions with Johnny Depp, and ‘Cool Britannia’ press junkets, shaking hands with Tony Blair. It was a staggeringly ambitious LP, ultimately far more composed and coherent than its predecessor, but the epic grandiosity had swelled to the point of dragging out almost every song with at least two or three minutes of extraneous guitar solos and sound effects. The album ended up bloatedly self-indulgent enough to dethrone Oasis in the U.K.’s pop pantheon in favor of iconic 1997 albums from Blur, The Verve, Spiritualized, and even Radiohead.
OASIS REUNION TOUR TAPS INTO ’90S NOSTALGIA
As excellent as some of the later LPs turned out, they’re not really relevant as far as general audiences are concerned. How impressive a comeback Don’t Believe The Truth was in 2005 after the relative disappointment of 2002’s Heathen Chemistry has no bearing on why Oasis’s reunion tour is this year’s hottest ticket. As much as I love Oasis, I wasn’t about to bother spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars to see the band in person from nosebleed seats in a New Jersey stadium. I’ll just watch the inevitable Netflix concert film in a few months. Oasis was never especially a “live band,” judging from the bootlegs I’ve heard from the band’s prime. And at any rate, the Oasis I really want to see still resides back in the 1990s, when the Gallaghers were at their hungriest. The reunion tour is but a footnote to the saga. Instead, I’ve been blasting my old Oasis CDs in the car as I’ve been back visiting St. Louis. The B-sides compilation The Masterplan is as great as any of the band’s albums.
I’m scheduled to head to England next year to attend a wedding. No doubt I’ll spend a few days playing tourist in London, going to see Big Ben and Notting Hill and Trafalgar Square, but I’m infinitely more interested in heading up north to see where so many of my heroes cut their teeth. Forget the capital city, I want to visit the spot of the old Hacienda club, where so many great bands got their start. I want to go see Thor’s Cave in Staffordshire, where Verve (the “The” came later) shot the album cover of its classic debut, A Storm In Heaven. Some kind of rusted magic up there made so much rock ‘n’ roll genius possible, far and beyond even Oasis’s mighty megastardom.
Jesse Adams is the writer and consultant behind The Ivy Exile on Substack.
