As I prepare to perform the music of Liam and Noel, I wonder why they still matter to people
Tomorrow night (May 22), I’ll be performing the songs of Noel and Liam Gallagher to what I hope is a crowd in double figures at the Caxton Arms down in Brighton. I have been assured that the landlord is a big Oasis fan, while the fact that fans of the football team use it as a base might attract some of them to kickstart their late May Bank Holiday weekend early.
This is the sixth show I’ve put together that combines factoids, quotations and, significantly, the one time in the year where I perform onstage. In 2018 it was country music, followed from 2021 onwards by Bob Dylan, Garth Brooks, George Michael and Robbie Williams. Having initially thought about doing Elton John for 2025, when Oasis reformed last August it made the decision easy, and I quickly wrote an essay which I made available online here.
Having chopped it down to seven sides of A4, I have spent the last month learning my cues and hoping that they stick in the mind. Fortunately I’ll have a setlist listing the montages and a keyword that follows them, prompting a critic’s words about their ‘unfettered everyday blokeishness’ or how Liam once compared the band to a Ferrari which will ‘spin out of control if it goes too fast’.
The story of the Gallaghers isn’t particularly deep or meaningful. Its soundtrack really only comprises two dozen copyrights written and recorded between 1993 and 1995, songs which dominated the band’s set even as they ended their first life in 2009, with only the brothers remaining from the original lineup. Noel called the debut album Definitely Maybe ‘the last great punk album’, and he ranks his band within a notional seven or eight bands who are spoken of as definitive British acts.
I am positive a music magazine or website has already plotted out just such a ‘where to put Oasis’ list. The band are heritage rock now, just as the music of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones was classic back in 1994. Live Forever and Champagne Supernova can fit alongside Satisfaction and Yesterday, Wonderwall next to Lola or My Generation. Oasis covered that song by The Who, aware of the lineage in which they were operating; Pete Townshend bucked the apathy shown towards (What’s The Story) Morning Glory by praising Liam’s voice as ‘our voice…everyone’s’.
Noel used Paul Weller as his musical model: even though both men are now making interesting albums that take their longtime fans with them, they know that people will show up to hear those classic hits, often done in different musical settings. Noel often plays the slower version of Wonderwall which he took from Ryan Adams, although if he really wanted to mess around with his work he would go for the loungecore cover that Mike Flowers Pop almost took to number one. This was the time when Oasis sold albums and two TV actors, Robson and Jerome, sold millions of singles.
Nobody listens to their schmaltzy cover of Unchained Melody today, because it was product that capitalised on their TV fame. Oasis were big on TV too, in a time before wireless internet access; in one week in 1994, they were on the covers of three magazines, only two of which were dedicated to music. The following year saw them make their US debut on The Tonight Show, at a time when American kids were being presented with dozens of acts that sounded like Nirvana. Noel wrote Live Forever, one of his greatest copyrights, in response to those alternative rock acts.
Otherwise his goal was to rid the world of ‘junk food music’ like Phil Collins and Sting. Dave Grohl, the Nirvana drummer whose band Foo Fighters have been playing stadiums for three decades, once said his band was trying to do similar, with Wilson Phillips the opposition. In perhaps the most interesting thing he has said about his songwriting, Noel argues that his songs should say more to the listener about themselves and their lives than they do about his own life; if he writes a lyric that is too personal, he is liable to take it out.
During the show, I will linger on certain lyrics that offer pearls of wisdom: ‘we should never ponder on our thoughts today ‘cos they hold sway over time’ or ‘cos in the end the past means nothing’. Mostly, though, I will sing songs which sound better than they mean: ‘she’s electric, she’s in a family full of eccentrics’ is an easy rhyme and is fun to shout, while the power of the anthems come in the vowel sounds. Look at ‘tonight I’m a rock’n’roll star’, or the repeated mentions of things shining, which Liam pronounces as ‘shee-yine’.
It was Liam’s band in the first place, and he wanted to draft in his brother as manager because he’d had experience within the music industry, but he became a band member to stop him getting jealous. The pair grew up in Burnage, within walking distance of two golf courses, and sold rock’n’roll spirit in the same way the Rolling Stones had done. Noel used to complain about the nostalgic emptiness of a Stones tour t-shirt; I would guess that this summer we will see plenty of Oasis tees and bucket hats, as nostalgia for the nineties rises up.
This matches trends in the music industry: festival lineups are full of old acts with bulging catalogues of hits which are known to thousands; new hits interpolate classic copyrights; even the boyband Five, who split in 2001, have reformed to play songs that were hits when I was ten years old and they weren’t that much older. It’s a safe bet for a promoter to sell the past back to someone, especially when the present is so precarious.
Oasis were already their own nostalgia act in 2009, when a conveniently thrown plum caused the dissolution of the band; four years previously, when all but two tracks of their set came from their first two albums, one reviewer thought they might not last beyond that summer, so disengaged Liam seemed. But people still showed up to bellow the hits; in fact, Noel was surprised to see teenagers in the crowd who were barely alive when Morning Glory dominated British music, realising that their big brothers or uncles had introduced them to the magic of Oasis.
‘Liam’s attitude, my songs and the solidity of the band’ was how Noel summarised the group’s power, to which I would add the participatory nature of them, welcoming the audience in and allowing them to yell along. When I first learned guitar, it was Oasis I turned to first: the riffs are simple, the chords rudimentary and the melodies very quick to grasp. Blur and Pulp might be more interesting, and the latter are actually putting out new music this summer to help promote a reunion show, but Oasis caught the mid-nineties zeitgeist.
Like Friends, the National Lottery and the Spice Girls, Oasis are easy shorthand for a period of time before cameraphones, which will broadcast the Wembley shows this summer. ‘You can’t download spirit’ is another pithy Noel aphorism, although those ticket revenues will certainly help alimony payments to his ex-wife Sara.
