That first Oasis summer, 30 years ago, was a rush, a high, a hit. Three singles landed in four months, with giddy titles: “Supersonic” in April, “Shakermaker” in June and “Live Forever” in early August, just after school was out for summer. The album Definitely Maybe followed, its title a little more tentative, just before school started back. I was 16, and I wore their T-shirt for my first day of tertiary college, their logo my armour.
Oasis were very different to other working-class bands in 1994. While the Manic Street Preachers delved into poetry and philosophy and Suede into darkness and danger, Oasis sang about self-actualisation (“I need to be myself/I can’t be no one else”), manifesting success (“Tonight I’m a rock ’n’ roll star”), and a desperate desire for reinvention (“The way I feel is oh so new to me”). They were on their uppers and looking up, all class-A cockiness.
A new British confidence was also bristling in the air. Tony Blair won the Labour leadership election in July, arriving just as quirky, British indie bands such as Blur and Pulp were landing high in the charts. Oasis arrived in the middle of them all, with a logo that showed a Union Jack as a psychedelic swirl. A few years after Manchester was the centre of the British rave scene, their look was similarly unromantic, uncompromising and thrilling. On their first NME cover in June 1994, frontman Liam stared at the lens, all heavy lids and long lashes, his mouth set in a sexy if gormless grimace. The look matched his voice, a mix of John Lydon, John Lennon and impudent toddler.
His fractious, funny relationship with big brother Noel, the band’s songwriter, made the band music-paper catnip, while the group’s other members hung behind them in shades and big shirts. Their early, scrappy music videos propelled their swaggering attitude. The first, performed on a warehouse roof by St Pancras, was a ruffian-like nod to the Beatles’ rooftop gig in Savile Row. Their second saw them setting up their gear in terraced alleys near where they grew up in the southern Manchester district of Burnage, Liam trailing through a scrubland of psychedelic buttercups, wearing a Beatles-esque Nehru jacket.
Revisiting these videos now in midlife, I notice Liam’s hands are like a little boy’s, lost in his sleeves. Watching a 21-year-old desperate for the pop culture signifiers around him to become him feels silly – although Liam had the last laugh, of course, because they did.
Definitely Maybe threw every element into the mix. Initial recordings of the songs at Monmouth’s Monnow Valley Studios in 1993, featured on their 30th anniversary reissue, are far thinner and lighter, and were scrapped. The Welsh producer Owen Morris took new recordings from early 1994, compressed drummer Tony McCarroll’s basic playing into tight, steely hits, and turned up the guitar sound beloved by shoegazing bands like Oasis’s Creation labelmates Slowdive and Ride to full fuzz, and added studio techniques learned from Tony Visconti’s work on David Bowie’s Low and Phil Spector on John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Instant Karma”.
The results still sound fantastic: the way the guitar sounds like it’s dripping down the strings at the start of “Supersonic”, the wall of noise in “Columbia”, even the gentle country of “Married with Children”, which sits at the end of the album like the Beatles’ “Her Majesty” on Abbey Road. But Oasis never really sounded like the Beatles. They did sound like a few other hits from 1971, like on the lumpen “Cigarettes and Alcohol”, which takes the opening riff from T-Rex’s “Get It On”, and on “Shakermaker”, a song referencing childhood toys and TV characters, which stole liberally from the New Seekers’ “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing”. Both were number-one singles in 1971 when Noel was four.
It’s striking how so many other intimations of childhood appear to me now. There’s tomfoolery in “Up in the Sky” (“Hey you, up in the tree/You wanna be me?”). “Digsy’s Dinner” has a narrative concocted around school hours (“What a life it would be/If you could come to mine for tea/I’ll pick you up at half past three/We’ll have lasagne”). Even in the album’s most beautiful song, “Slide Away”, there is a rejection of adulthood: “I dream of you and we talk of growing old,” Liam sings. “But you said please don’t.”
Noel was 26 when Oasis broke through, old enough to know the desperation and longing young adults can feel when their lives aren’t going right. In the excellent 2016 Oasis film Supersonic, it’s revealed he had a tough childhood, often being beaten brutally by his father, who never hit Liam. He doesn’t like thinking about it too deeply, he says, as “it would f***ing drive you mad”, adding it “benefited me in a way… it made me withdraw into my own world, and from that came my learning the guitar”. Then he proffers a classic Noel line, primed for a pull-quote: “I guess in some way my old fella beat the talent into me.”
Here lies the tension in Noel’s songwriting: a desire to convey a rebellious, emotionless need for attention, clashing with his knack for moments of wonder and tenderness. Nihilism often wins out. In “Cigarettes and Alcohol”: “Is it worth the aggravation/To find yourself a job when there’s nothing worth working for?” Liam’s sneer has never been as potent as when he sings: “You might as well do the white line.” Unemployment may have been falling after the early-Nineties recession, but the devastation of industry across the north in the previous decade, and the Thatcherite smack of the north-south divide, still hung heavy in people’s lives.
When phrases break through that brilliantly evoke intense depression and the desperation to escape it, Oasis’s power is visceral. In “Live Forever”, Liam sings, “Maybe I will never be all the things that I wanna be.” It’s a song about wishing to exist fully, or even to exist to all: “Maybe I just wanna fly/I wanna live, I don’t want to die/Maybe I just wanna breathe.”
The word “maybe” is a Noel regular, important enough to be in Oasis’s debut album title, and the chorus of their most successful single, 1995’s “Wonderwall” (“Maybe you’re going to be the one that saves me”). It implies both a lack of commitment and a shimmering glimpse of possibility – the idea that something could easily be in your world then slide away, a chance that Noel’s lyrics often shake off with bravado.
My love affair with Oasis finished at Glastonbury in 1995. Caught up in crowd surges of thuggish fans, I shrugged at the live extended outros, the indulgence, the arrogance. Still, I remember the rush of hearing “Supersonic” live, which made me cry 30 years later, as it still contains so much of how it felt to be young.
They didn’t play “Sad Song” at Glastonbury, a bonus track on Definitely Maybe’s vinyl edition that allows room for honesty and regret. Like many of Noel’s best early songs that were hidden away (such as B-sides “Acquiesce” and “Talk Tonight”), he sings it himself. It tells us of how “we cheat and we lie”, and how “nobody says it’s wrong so we don’t ask why”.
“Don’t throw it all away,” goes its penultimate chorus, like a warning. But by the next album, flushed with money and success, Noel told us, “Please don’t put your life in the hands/Of our rock ’n’ roll band/We’ll throw it all away” – and they did.
[See also: Watching Bruce Springsteen with my Dad]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 14 Aug 2024 issue of the New Statesman, England Undone