We believe in one another
The best of Oasis
Welcome to the latest edition of the Hell World Top 5 Songs series. This week we're going to discuss the music of our beloved dumb assholes Oasis. Normally I don't like these to be tied to any relevant news cycle but I've been thinking about doing them for a while and then the reunion news came out of nowhere so that is just how it is.
Please check out the previous pieces on David Berman, Jason Molina, The Cure, Elliott Smith, R.E.M., Chris Cornell and Weezer.
As always I'm very grateful for the talented group of writers and musicians who weighed in on this matter. I thank them and also you for reading.
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As usual some people ranked their choices in order and some didn't and that's fine because it doesn't matter.
Alex Suskind
1995, suburban Maryland, 10 years old. I go to this kid’s house down the street and he throws on What’s the Story (Morning Glory?). “Have you heard of Oasis?” I have not. I’m still listening to my parents’ stuff: Pink Floyd, the Beatles, Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl. Yet the Gallaghers turn a screw loose in my brain: They’re loud, brash, and — according to this kid — always call each other “c*nts.” They also sing catchy songs with lyrics I can’t make out because I have never heard someone from Northern England speak. They are my new favorite band.
If I hadn’t listened to Oasis until college, I’d probably say they were a cheap Beatles imitation — “Bro, these are just Northern Songs” — and throw on Parklife instead. But the innocence of youth was on my side. Also, to love Oasis is to know they’re ripping off John and Paul and loving them for it anyway. Like, does anyone really care that Noel pulled the Imagine chords for Don’t Look Back in Anger? Sure, there were plenty of more challenging and hard-rocking bands out there in the ‘90s, but something about screaming along with two Manchester blokes about whatever champagne supernoverrs were felt good, like watching your favorite football team score. As Noel once put it to Q magazine, “At the end of the day, you can go to a Radiohead show and stroke your fucking beard and watch the miserable c*nt” — c-word alert! — “complaining, or come see us, put your arm around your best mate and have it.” While I’d rather do both, in honor of this list — and the recently announced reunion — we’re going with the latter.
5. D’You Know What I Mean?
Look, I was as irritated as you were when I first heard Be Here Now. This is how we’re following up Morning Glory? Where are the anthems? Where are the riffs? Where is the fookin’ fun? But then it was also 1997, and once your parents bought you a CD for your birthday, you were stuck with it until the next one came in. That’s how this one became a familiar favorite — a nearly indecipherable eight-minute freakout that kicks off with a jumbo jet taking off and lyrics sung backward and… wait, is that a monkey screeching in the background? Did Liam buy goddamn a chimp? I really tried my best to get into the rest of this bloated, cocaine-fueled slop of an album, but the opener was the only one that ever truly stuck. It’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink music — extra for extra’s sake.
4. Hello
The first Oasis track I heard. (It’s also, unfortunately, one they have to pay Gary Glitter royalties on). Damn, that whammy bar sounds phenomenal, as does Liam doing his best Manchester snarl. Also, selfishly, the song made me feel smarter than I was, since Noel flips one of the few familiar tropes I knew as a 10 year old (talking about the weather!) on its head.
3. Hey Now
Formative summer afternoon music. That long, droopy riff must have soundtracked a million dog days at the sleepaway camp I went to. In the movie of my pre-teens, it’s what’s playing in the background after the girl I have a crush on never responds to my handwritten letter asking her out. I feel you, man, who is hitching a ride with your soul by the side of the road, just as the sky turned black.
2. Rock ‘n’ Roll Star
Oasis is the only band that can pull off a song where they call themselves literal rock stars and not have it suck.
1. Champagne Supernova
I didn’t start doing drugs until I was 17, but hearing this seven years prior for the first time made me feel like I was stoned (or whatever I thought being stoned was). By the second verse it had single handedly destroyed everything the D.A.R.E. program had taught me. Yes, it was the “where were you while we were getting high,” but also that lulling ocean tide and the maximum reverb and those shoegaze-y guitars. It’s still their most beautiful song.
Alex Suskind is the senior music editor at Vulture.
Ben Firke
5. D’You Know What I Mean?
Is this a good song? Not really. It’s way too long, lyrically insipid, repetitive as a day job, and begins with 40 seconds of context-free helicopter noises. But does it sound awesome when you’re really fucked up? A hundo percent.
I’ve been sober for over 8 years, but when I hear Noel launch into his customary languid stroll up and down the pentatonic scale during the bridge? My jaw goes numb and I can taste warm Carling Ice like I’m Dirtbag Proust.
Fun fact: the drumbeat is a sample of Straight Outta Compton slowed down, which means this is the closest Oasis ever got to making a “chopped and screwed” remix.
4. Half A World Away
This is a classic Sensitive Noel Ballad, yet it doesn’t get the maudlin overproduction of his other slow songs – just some organ, brushed drums, and jangly arpeggios. It has a sort of Burt Bacharach quality to it, proving that Noel doesn’t just steal from the Beatles, he can also steal from Burt Bacharach.
This shit sounds like the Carpenters and I mean that as a compliment.
3. Fade Away
Wow, Ben, another selection from the 1998 b-sides comp The Masterplan! How unique and contrarian of you.
Hey shut up! If I wanted to score easy cool points, I wouldn’t be writing an Oasis Top 5 Songs List, period.
But yes, I must be a pretentious dickhead and question the Maybe-Morning duopoly looming over the Oasis catalog. The Masterplan is arguably the most interesting Oasis record because it was written at the peak of the band’s pre-coke powers, but features a much more cynical, melancholy, world-weary outlook on life than the “you and I are gonna live forEVah” vibes that predominate the first 2 studio albums.
Fade Away is like if the Sex Pistols made a '90s pop punk song, an idea that seems revolting in the abstract as I type it out, but somehow ends up working out OK in practice. It’s like a good version of the angry songs on Green Day’s Nimrod, full of seething resentment at the end of youth, raging against the compromises and resignations that define the miserable, disappointing scam of adulthood.
Bummer, dude! Good luck with Be Here Now!
2. Slide Away
Slide Away is a rare Oasis song with…and you may want to sit down for this…an audible bassline. It’s nothing fancy (theory-wise, the bass just follows the chord progression like literally every other Oasis song) but somehow Slide Away is punchier and groovier than the rest of the band’s songs, sort of how Led Zeppelin were at their best when they snuck a little soul/funk into all the noisy riffage.
The original non-Gallagher members don’t get respect these days, but they absolutely go off here, playing their little rudimentary parts with so much feeling that you remember Oasis was a real band before the expendable guys were replaced by session and touring hacks.
1. Acquiesce
Acquiesce is the only Oasis song where Liam and Noel trade off vocals in the verse and chorus. Whether they intended to write a self-referential meta-dialogue or not, Acquiesce has an autobiographical poignancy that turns their whole endlessly-feuding-alcoholic-brothers act into something more significant than slapstick comedy.
Remember the gimmick the Libertines had, where Pete Doherty and the other one would sing from the perspective of two feuding lovers, with the unsubtle subtext that they were describing their own deteriorating bromance? Well, Oasis invented that with Acquiesce, and did it 10 million times better. Acquiesce takes the Fleetwood Mac dynamic of doomed intra-band romance and transposes it onto the sibling rivalry of two emotionally stunted brothers. Like every great Oasis song, it has no right to be as moving as it is.
“Because we need each other/we believe in one another/and I know we’re going to uncover/what’s sleeping in our souls” is the emblematic Gallagher Bros chorus. It is stupid and obvious and corny, but it fills your heart up with emotions, the ones that Blokes and Dudes struggle to articulate. It is an unabashed rock ‘n’ roll love song, played at 120 decibels, a tender duet between two brothers who hate each others’ fucking guts. If only for 4 and half minutes, Noel and Liam finally accept they are bound by fate, endowed with a connection no one else will ever understand, and that only they have. It’s De Niro and Pacino holding hands at the end of Heat, in Britpop form.
This is peak Dudes Rock. Dudes have never Rocked harder than on Acquiesce. I hope they play it at every show.
Ben Firke is a playwright in New York. His latest show, Rich Beyond Our Wildest Dreams, premieres this November.
Luke O’Neil
I know I saw them somewhere in DC on the Be Here Now tour. I think I know that. I hope I think I know as the song goes. Cornershop opened. Maybe sometime in Worcester around then too? I should know that. I should remember every time I saw what was at that time and for many years after that my favorite band. If you asked old friends of mine right now what do you think Luke’s favorite band of all time is they would probably still say Oasis but they are remembering me from a time that I don’t really remember.
I should not have done all those drugs over the years. Maybe you could say that same thing about Oasis depending on your opinion of Be Here Now (an engorged plodding goddamned masterpiece with so many huge dumb singalong anthems).
I should remember so many more things. I should not have let 25 years pass by like that. 30 years. Sometimes I get this sinking feeling that I might not actually live forever. Not even when the song comes on anymore.
It was 1996 at the Worcester Centrum. Screaming Trees and Manic Street Preachers opened. I only remember that because I just went back to read what I wrote when Mark Lanegan died.
“Liam Gallagher was an obvious poser, a playground bully. Like all bullies, he was also a total pussy,” Lanegan wrote in his book. Apparently the two were supposed to have a fist fight and Liam chickened out.
Liam was a poser in that sense of the word but it was like one of those deals where your mother would tell you to stop making a weird face or it might get stuck like that forever. He posed so hard it became who he was.
Maybe it was more like something you'd read on LinkedIn about Business Mind Mastery.
He was also someone who could strike a pose. Goddamn could he pose.
He can also post for that matter. Who would have seen that one coming out of the two of them all those years ago?
I do in fact remember the very first time I saw them though. I had always remembered the year wrong until recently. I thought it would have been 1994 but I guess it was also in 1996 at the old Strand in Providence. Someone threw a shoe at Liam and he stormed off never to find his way back as the song goes. Noel finished the set playing acoustic and did Whatever into Octopus’ Garden. I was so happy. I was going to live forever.
I interviewed Noel at least once I know that. Maybe twice. I just found one story I wrote deep in my email. It was for the Boston Phoenix which doesn’t exist anymore. 2011. The band had broken up not too long before. Here’s something he said that is relevant to our purposes today:
“The only mistakes I think I've ever made were when I was fucking high on drugs. Since I kind of gave up drugs I've kind of been alright. I know when things are good. The tricky thing is when you're not sure about something and you just put it out because other people might think it's great. That's the beauty, d'you know what I mean? Your favorite song won't be mine. People say ‘What's the best Oasis song?’ 99% of people will say it's Wonderwall. The 1% of connoisseurs will say it's like Supersonic. It's all subjective innit?”
I wasn’t even doing drugs yet during that Oasis period of my life. That wouldn’t start until the early 2000s when I was playing in a band of my own. We acted like we were in Oasis naturally. Coke addict shit heads. Forgot to do the part about writing some of the greatest rock songs of all time though. Should have spent more energy on that aspect of the bargain in retrospect. Now all I have left is this lack of memories and tinnitus.
I bought the oldest t-shirt I still own at that show in DC. It was at the Patriot Center in Fairfax, Virginia actually. I just looked it up. 1998. I was an intern at the White House at the time. My god how long is a person’s life?
It’s not my favorite t-shirt anymore but it was at one point. For many years. I could go put it on right now if I wanted to. It’s so worn-in and comfortable. It makes me want to remember things.
Here’s some shit I tweeted a few years ago:
When I was a child I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child, I thought Noel doing his nice little acoustic songs was as good as it gets. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me and embraced Liam belting one out to the fucking moon.
This too:
small brain: Liam is cool
medium brain: Noel has a better voice actually
large brain: They need each other they're both good
giant brain: Liam is cool
I think I stand by that today. Might change my mind later if I listen to Angel Child or Talk Tonight or Don’t Look Back In Anger or Little By Little or any Noel-sung versions of traditionally Liam songs like Slide Away or Cast No Shadow.
Obviously songs like Live Forever and a few others are technically “better” songs than these but these are the ones that are my personal favorites. The ones I remember loving then and still love now even though I’m older than I used to be as the song goes.
5. Acquiesce
4. Stay Young
3. Rockin’ Chair
2. Slide Away
1. Listen Up
Luke O’Neil runs this very newsletter you are reading. His most recent book A Creature Wanting Form is the best book of fiction written in the last five years.
John Cullen
5. D’You Know What I Mean?
I was tempted to put Lyla on here. Oasis were dead and buried in 2005 and no one would’ve thought they were still capable of a song as good as that then. Oasis had fallen so far that EA Sports could even afford the rights to it for FIFA 06. But instead I am choosing a song from another time where they were considered dead and buried, way back in 1997. People saw the big budget video with the helicopters, declared this song was no Wonderwall, and began moving on. 27 years later, this song goes. It has everything a good Oasis song does, right down to the nonsensical chorus: “All my people, right here, right now/d’you know what I mean?” I don’t, actually. But this song is a monster. Absolutely massive.
4. Champagne Supernova
Warning: this list is chalk. It’s ok if that’s a problem for you. Oasis have lots of great songs and you can pick any combination of five that make you sound and/or feel smarter than someone who likes the big ones. I’m pretty dumb, so my list is a little more “big song sound good!” And few rock songs in the ‘90s sounded bigger or better than this one. Only could this band, at the height of their powers, think that because Liam sings about waterfalls in the verses they should put a waterfall sound effect at the beginning of the song. And only they could have made it work.
3. Slide Away
I suppose there’s any number of songs on Definitely Maybe that portended things to come. Supersonic, Live Forever, even Cigarettes & Alcohol. But none are as good as this one, which has arguably Liam’s best vocal performance and justifies every second of its 6:32 running time. It was a trick perfected here that Oasis was so good at, which was cramming every verse full of stuff going on that you figured the chorus could never top it, and then the chorus slamming you over the head right after. When Liam belts “now that you’re mine/I’ll find a way/of chasing the sun/let me be the one that shines with you”, it’s impossible not to want to hug any person within your immediate vicinity and start belting out the words together.
2. Don’t Look Back in Anger
I think Liam is one of the best vocalists in rock ‘n’ roll history, the perfect blend of snarl and tunefulness that you can’t teach or bottle or train. So it is strange that one of Oasis’ best songs is entirely sung by Noel. Then again when you consider he wrote all the songs in the first place, maybe it isn’t. For all the countless bands who have tried to rip off the Beatles, this song is the singular best instance of someone actually doing it. It’s a perfect song, no notes.
1. Wonderwall
If you think this song cannot be on this list because it is overplayed, or you’ve heard too many bad karaoke or coffeehouse versions of it, you need to grow the fuck up. This is one of the greatest songs in history. Just because some of your university friends defaulted to it at karaoke doesn’t act as a strike against it, I’m sorry. For a guy whose default mode is singing like he just fell down the stairs into a dank pub in Manchester, Liam’s vocal performance here absolutely nails a vulnerable longing that many have tried to capture and very, very few have done so well. That said, the key to this song? The drums. Alan White is perfect. The drums are busy without being overpowering and lend it a weightlessness that plodding rock drums would not have done. You know that Noel’s ego was big enough that he was specifically trying with this song to write the best ballad of all time, and it’s the drums that save it from being too obvious, too cheesy, and ultimately ensure it hits the mark. You might not like it, but this is 100% Oasis’ best song and I genuinely think without it, despite all their other hits, we don’t talk about them in the same way, in the same pantheon of artists, as we do now.
John Cullen is the co-host of the podcasts Blocked Party, The P.O.D. Kast, and What Is...? A Jeopardy! Podcast. Read his top Weezer picks here.
Steven Sladkowski
A short preamble: Oasis were my first real favorite band. At one point, as a teenager in the early 00s, I knew how to play and sing every song in the catalog including covers. I saw them in ‘02 and ‘06 and still believe the band sounded their best with Gem Archer, Andy Bell and Zak Starkey. I count passing on a £100 original pressing of (What’s The Story Morning Glory) in a shop in Brighton in 2014 as my all-time record-collecting L; though I am evidently not motivated enough by nostalgia to get out of bed at 4 AM and queue for a general on-sale for this reunion tour. I prefer my nostalgia in the form of lists and/or a venue closer to my house.
Columbia
This is Noel Gallagher’s love letter to Madchester. Shoegaze for blokes who drank too much because they supported Man City while United took the world by storm. It’s not the catchiest song on Definitely Maybe but it is the song that places Oasis firmly in conversation with Manchester’s rich musical history. It also fuckin’ rules.
Champagne Supernova
This was the first Oasis song I ever heard and I can still play it from memory. It used to play on my Mom’s alarm clock in the morning because her alarm clock was set to a Toronto rock radio station. It’s the same station that considers itself alternative and still doesn’t play my band with any regularity. At least they still play this song on occasion, I guess.
Acquiesce (Live)
“The ultimate b-side single yadda yadda yadda.” Yes, of course. Seems like people forget that Oasis were a singles band in tandem with writing albums. You could buy CD singles from all but one of their albums which is probably how they could afford all the coke. Anyway, the coke they were doing in 2000 when they filmed/recorded this Wembley performance must’ve been awesome. Or maybe it’s the presence of Gem Archer, Andy Bell and Zak Starkey. Who can say for sure? Either way Familiar to Millions is a festering powder keg of a concert DVD/double CD.
Mucky Fingers
Don’t Believe The Truth is the third-best Oasis record solely based on the fact you can actually hear the drums. The songs are great too: a creeping paranoia spreads from the title and permeates all of the songs, including this droning pulsating Noel-sung examination of oblivious greed.
Songbird b/w Guess God Thinks I’m Abel
It’s hard to pick one of Liam’s incredible contributions to Heathen Chemistry and Don’t Believe The Truth. At the time, I don’t think I fully appreciated how quickly his songwriting chops developed as the century changed. Listening back now, these are some of the songs that sound the most focused on the later records. They’re the ones that feel the most immediate. Anyway, I was the first person to put a full tab of Guess God Thinks I’m Abel on the Online Guitar Archive. If you remember that website, you are old and not immune to nostalgia just like me.
Steven Sladkowski plays in the band PUP. Read his top Weezer picks here.
Paul Savage
I was almost exactly the right age for Britpop. I grew up in a nice part of a shit town called Wolverhampton. It was a deprived post-industrial area. At the time the largest town in Europe, it made a city for the millennium, then was voted number 5 in Lonely Planet’s top 10 worst cities on the planet. There were lots of bands writing about coming from shit parts of nice towns and nice parts of shit towns.
I was starting in my first year of secondary school, 11 years old, immediately after the summer holiday in which Blur had won the “Battle of Britpop,” beating Oasis to number 1, when they had released new singles in the same week. It should be noted, as both bands now have, that both singles (Roll With It for Oasis, Country House for Blur) are amongst their weaker single releases. Noel has said that he wishes it had been Cigarettes and Alcohol vs Girls and Boys. The whole thing was major news. Major. It was on the front page of papers and on the TV news in the days when there were still just four channels (unless you were posh and had Sky TV. None of my mates did).
We never called it Britpop. It was just “Indie.” The NME and Melody Maker were often making up names for musical sub-genres they invented whole cloth: NWONW, the new wave of new wave, described as “Britpop without the good bits” and Greebo, an incredibly niche scene based out of nearby Stourbridge, that all of the bands in it (Pop Will Eat Itself, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, The Wonder Stuff) deny was ever really a scene. Greebos were what we called kids into grunge or metal. Not to their faces, as they were invariably harder than me and my mates. Though for years, calling someone a dirty Greebo, pronounced “dutty graaayyboww,” (it’s a fucked up accent) was enough to start at least some slagging off, if not actual fighting.
Or you were into Take That or Boyzone and you could safely be ignored.
Britpop is now remembered as being two and a half bands: Blur vs. Oasis, and then there was also Pulp, the hipsters’ choice. But there was a strength and depth to it with bands like Manic Street Preachers, Sleeper, Ocean Colour Scene, Suede, Elastica and a bunch of others. It is really hard to overstate how big Blur and Oasis were though. Everyone could do an impression of Liam Gallagher. My mum, a woman divorced from pop culture, knew who they were.
I was firmly in camp Blur but I can’t remember anyone who didn’t like both if they liked one. You just picked your arguments well when it came down to who was better. Or, if you’re the Ivor Novella songwriting awards, you give a joint award like the cowards you are.
5. Half the World Away.
It’s a b-side. Noel forgot about it. But three years later a plucky young writer and actress called Caroline Aherne wrote a show called The Royle Family. It’s a TV show where not much happens. A working class family sit in front of the telly, smoke fags and bicker. You and your family are in front of the telly watching a family watch telly. There’s no laugh track (they fought not to have one) and some critics had to be told it wasn’t a drama.
Co-writer and co-star Craig Cash is Bonehead’s cousin and so asked the band if they could use it as a theme tune. It’s perfect for it. (Cash would repeat the trick by using Roddy Frame’s Small World for the excellent pub based sitcom Early Doors.)
Noel’s vocals start with “I would like to leave this city, this old town don’t smell too pretty” which doesn’t exactly scream “get on the fun bus to chuckle town!” but the whole thing is shot through with love, and the song strikes the perfect bittersweet note the sitcom carries through. Noel recognized his own working class scrappy background in the show and has said he doesn’t think of it as an Oasis song but belonging to the show. When he plays it live, he’ll often dedicate it to the memory of Caroline Aherne, who died in 2016. There was at one point a report in the press that Noel would play a busker in the shopping precinct but thankfully that never happened.
4. Fuckin’ in the Bushes
It starts with drums, then a sample. It’s taken from a 1970 film about the Isle of Wight festival where a bloke who’s been pushed too far gets on a mic and starts screaming at some dirty hippies. “You wanna destroy? Then you go to hell!” And then the guitar kicks in. And no one ruins it by singing. Oasis walked out to it at their own concerts. As someone who’s been in comedy for nearly two decades (and has done announcing in wrestling and boxing) it’s the perfect walk out music. A needle full of adrenaline. It’s the opening track on Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants and there should be a better album after it.
3. Cigarettes & Alcohol
In which the word “imagination” becomes a seven syllable word and Liam does his first big “sun-shiiiiiiine” that would keep happening with diminishing returns. It somehow takes the idea The Smiths explored of “I was looking for a job and then I found a job, and heaven knows I’m miserable now” and yet makes it a paean to, you know, doing drugs and being a laugh. It makes me feel like that and I’ve never smoked a cig or done cocaine in my life.
2: Round Are Way
The b-side to Wonderwall. Realizing now that this was was my first single I bought with my own money. On cassette. I’d previously not been able to narrow it down to three cd singles all bought within a week of each other: Kula Shaker’s Hush, Rocket from the Crypt’s On a Rope, or Manic Street Preachers’ Kevin Carter. All of which I stand by as excellent first single choices.
Round Are Way is a slice of life growing up in England. The kind of thing, weirdly, done very well by Blur. It’s 25 a side footy matches, and the “birds” singing for you might be him cheekily referring to women! It could have been a hit. It maybe should have been. It’s better than anything they did after about 1998.
1. Champagne Supernova
In the sweaty indie nights I used to frequent, there was a breed of “lad” that loved Oasis and no other bands. There was a bit of tension, a possibility of violence, a knowledge that they were on a hair trigger and a spilled pint or a stepped on Reebok Classic could have blood flowing. Oasis fans got a reputation for being these lads and their gigs had people chucking pint glasses full of piss about.
This is the song that lad wants to throw his arms out to. From deep within, a guttural wail “Some day you will find me, caught beneath the landslide.” It’s a song about wanting to get out of your life, as a lot of Oasis songs are. But unlike Springsteen, who sings of leaving your shit hole town and never coming back, Oasis were the band for leaving your shit hole town and never coming back, but also leaving your shit hole town and coming back with a couple of qualifications, finding your old mates have done the same, getting a job as a quantity surveyor and making sure the WhatsApp group for the 5 a side game is properly curated. Noel explores all of this in this song, but is smart enough to leave it unanswered and just to chuck on a big load of na, na, na, na's so we can throw our arms out, and all join in the singalong guttural howl together. Maybe you throw your arms out, but maybe you throw your arms round your man. He’s a good lad really.
Paul Savage is a comedian, a cartoonist and about nine other things to pay the bills. He’s got a collection of comics called “But Doctor, I am a collection of comics by Paul Savage” that you can get from Savagecomic.com. He keeps meaning to put videos up of his stand up online but he fundamentally can’t be arsed.
Alex Zaragoza
Rock ‘n’ Roll Star
Supersonic was the first single off the band’s debut album Definitely Maybe, and it announced the band’s hunger for a grimy rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, but on their working class Mancunian terms. “I need to be myself / I can’t be no one else” etc. But it’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Star that fully defines Liam Gallagher, every fiber of his swagged out being built for rock stardom. There’s a sliding doors world where Liam is the loudest, funniest guy at the worksite, but thank god that didn’t work out for him and instead we got new, culture-shifting pronunciations of commonplace words. It’s no longer “sunshine,” it’s “soon-sheeee-IIIINE.” When are you a rock ‘n’ roll star? “Tyuh-nyiiiight.” The song, and by extension Liam, gave us a new musical language we still use, albeit when we’re impersonating Liam Gallagher. But isn’t that the definition of a rock star? Oasis have always been pretty straightforward in their lyricism and their desires, and Rock ‘n’ Roll Star lays it out simply: “Tonight, I’m a rock ‘n’ roll star.”
Digsy’s Dinner
There are songs where Noel and Liam Gallagher actually really put their hearts out there, like Songbird and She is Love, both off 2002’s Heathen Chemistry, and both some of the most referential songs in their whole catalog. And that’s saying something. The brothers have always worn their inspirations loudly – The Beatles being the most megaphoned. Songbird is one of Liam’s more intense John Lennon drag moments and Noel’s She is Love sounds so much like Faces one could assume it was a cover. I love both songs, but there’s no denying it. Digsy’s Dinner, on the other hand, always felt like a true Oasis love song, down to the simplicity of how they plan to treat you like a queen. “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 lasagna.” Lasagna might be a euphemism for saucier activities, or it could just be lasagna. Either way, you’re winning. Ideally, there’s a bit of both. The song feels like a word-for-word transcript of Liam hitting on a bird at a pub, and here’s the thing: it would work. And my friends would all go green.
She’s Electric
Generally we like it when we can see ourselves in the shows we watch, music we hear, etc. Representation matters and what not. But She’s Electric always felt close to home because as someone coming from a “family full of eccentrics” who can make life very difficult, especially when you’re bringing a new person into the fold, this song hits something soft and direct in my heart. Someone loving you and all the assholes and loudmouths that raised you, not in spite of it all but because of it, that’s real. It’s another Oasis love song that’s squarely a version of love they understand deeply and have lived; not an emulation of more heartfelt songwriters' declarations of love. But this is nonetheless romantic, even if he says he needs more time.
Cigarettes & Alcohol
I quit smoking, and I hardly drink anymore, but this song makes me want to be in a bar at 3 am six drinks and a pack of smokes in, about to make a potentially huge mistake. Fuck jobs.
The Masterplan
The Masterplan has always felt like Oasis’s version of a Bond song. It has all the elements: the violins, an aura of intrigue, the searching lyrics, the swelling vocals. On that last point, Noel Gallagher really freaked it. Yes, Don’t Look Back in Anger is Noel’s crowning moment as a step-in frontman, but here he does something sweeping, something that fills the chest with a poignancy that builds and builds until it calms. I’m not sure what a Liam version of this would sound like, but I actually don’t care to know. The Masterplan was released as a b-side to Wonderwall, and got a bit buried as a result of that massive chune’s takeover of the culture that’s still going to this very day. But it deserves love, and gets plenty of it, from die hard fans. That’s taste.
Alex Zaragoza is a journalist and television writer based in LA. She's a contributing columnist at the LA Times and has written for Primo and Lopez vs. Lopez. Alex has been a Britpop obsessive since her best friend Monica lent her The Stone Roses' self-titled album in high school and later cultivated that obsession by spending a year bartending at an indie/Britpop nightclub in Birmingham, England, during the heyday of indie sleaze and still bears many scars from that experience.
Rasha Al Aqeedi
I was an adolescent living in mid-90s Iraq, and we did not have a CD player under the severe economic sanctions. I used to make mixtapes by recording music from international radio stations like Monte Carlo and BBC World. One of Iraq’s two national TV stations would air the UK’s Top 50 songs. That was how I first knew Oasis. My knowledge of rock included Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, and some '80s hair metal. Oasis sounded completely new to me. My first impression was “What is this? Why does this rock sound so slow? Why does the singer sound pissed off?” I was 11, enjoyed boy bands and Eurodance, and knew nothing. In my 40s now, I get it. There was, however, something catchy about the melodies. There was something else endearing to me, personally. English was not my first language though I knew it well enough to enjoy Western music. It would usually take me 4-5 listens to the low-quality radio recording to understand song lyrics correctly most of the time. That was not the case with Oasis, and that was the power of Liam and Noel. I understood exactly what they were saying from one listen. Like millions around the world, news of the reunion and tour made me nostalgic, though my memories might differ from those of the lads and gals. Here are my top 5 Oasis songs.
Disclaimer: This was a lot harder than I thought.
5. Cast No Shadow
The feeling of not leaving enough of an imprint, or a shadow, is a relatable one. Insignificance can be taunting, and Liam conveys the story through a beautiful melody. Years later I would learn the song was dedicated to Richard Ashcroft of The Verve who had not been happy and decided to quit music.
4. Whatever
The sweet violin, playful tune, and powerful message makes Whatever a timeless classic. Though I feel most Oasis songs are instant classics, this one stands out. The older I get the more grateful I am for the freedom to say and choose what I want, the more I am willing to fight to be free.
3. Live Forever
The perfect song if one ever existed. It’s simply brilliant and requires little explanation. Noel believes it’s the one that changed everything. Who are we to disagree with Noel?
2. D’You Know What I Mean?
A bit more advanced in production and with a brilliant music video, D’You Know What I Mean? is criminally underrated. What struck me 27 years ago and still strikes me today were how some expressions the Gallaghers used in this song translate near perfectly to local idioms in colloquial Iraqi Arabic. I have no clue how, but we have an equivalent of “I ain’t good looking but I’m someone’s child” and “I met my maker, I made him cry.” The message of the song, being in the here and now and knowing that only you can live your life is universal after all.
1. Some Might Say
Is it their best song? Maybe not. It’s my favorite because it was the first Oasis song I watched and heard on TV. I listen to it at least 100 times a year according to Spotify. If memory doesn’t fail me, Some Might Say knocked Take That’s global hit Back for Good off the top spot in the UK. 11 year old me protested but was secretly hooked, and still am almost 30 years later.
Rasha Al Aqeedi is an Iraqi American writer, and lecturer at the Foreign Service Institute in Washington D.C.
Annie Zaleski
1. Acquiesce
Oasis is an absolutely killer b-side band – just listen to The Masterplan and the lead-off track Acquiesce, the flipside to Some Might Say. Jagged guitars, a buoyant hook and the Gallagher brothers trading off yearning vocal lines.
2. Morning Glory
A cautionary tale about drugs, Morning Glory boasts towering guitar work with a blistering psychedelic edge that teeters toward danger.
3. Going Nowhere
Another incredible b-side that's almost better than many Oasis singles, Going Nowhere is a low-key baroque-pop gem with big daydreams.
4. Cigarettes & Alcohol
There's plenty of swagger on Definitely Maybe, highlighted by the glammy T. Rex swing of Cigarettes & Alcohol, a song that captures shrugging ennui to a tee.
5. Don't Go Away
Sure Wonderwall is the best known Oasis pop hit here in America – but the desolate pop-rock jam Don't Go Away deserves shine too, especially for the way it captures longing with such melancholy clarity.
Annie Zaleski is an author and editor based in Cleveland, Ohio. Read her Weezer picks here.
Tyler Littwin
5. Gas Panic!
It's fair to say Noel has an iffy track record when it comes to lyrics. There are some genius moments on the first two albums – from the breezy everyday psychedelia of Shakermaker to the straightforward lads-night-out of Cigarettes & Alcohol. And for my money, there's still no better couplet than Morning Glory's "another sunny afternoon / walking to the sound of my favorite tune." But yer man gets lazy. There’s a lot of rhyming dictionary nonsense, a lot of "fuck it, second verse same as the first." But Gas Panic! (a dark drifting tune about drug-fueled insomnia) showed that Noel could capture both the poetic and personal.
4. Fade Away
The Masterplan is a collection of wasted b-sides that easily could have been a killer album. There was a period where Noel was just tossing out brilliant songs like half-smoked Benson & Hedges butts. And why not – the guy was on an insane winning streak, no need to save any of these tunes, right? Fade Away is one of those hastily written gems. It's one of Oasis' punkiest songs and (like Shock Of Lightning) an argument for the band keeping things simple. It rips and the super-compressed demo quality only adds to the vibe. “While we're living / the dreams we have as children fade away” could sound trite if sung by anyone else but Liam's delivery bristles with sincerity.
3. Rock 'n' Roll Star
Only Oasis had the arrogance required to both write Rock 'n' Roll Star and slot it in as the opening track on their debut album. Sure, it's an unknown new band daydreaming of success but it's also so much more. It's a mission statement. It's a manifesto. There's real belief in what lies ahead. Might live in a council housing and punch the clock at a shit job but listen, we're meant for bigger things. Get in, man.
2. Live Forever
I remember seeing the video for Live Forever in the spring of '95 during one of the few years my family had cable tv. I loved the song but it confused my teenage brain. It wasn't the wet flannel misery of grunge. It was somehow sad but also defiantly optimistic. Everyone dies, but guess what, you and I are gonna live forever. Britpop had made its way to small town Western Massachusetts and with it some new trajectory – escape velocity from the black hole sun, destination champagne supernova.
1. Acquiesce
“Because we need each other / we believe in one another” could be another Noel throwaway line, but it means everything when you're seven pints in and singing along with your friends. The core driver of Oasis has always been the Noel-Liam dynamic, the push and pull of their respective forces. Often at odds, sometimes aligned, but at their best when complimentary. Acquiesce is the best of Gallagher brothers and by extension Oasis. Liam sneering over the plodding swagger of the verses, Noel singing on the soaring choruses. Inside you there are two wolves and they're both mad fer it.
Tyler Littwin is a former "band guy" and current "graphic design guy" dba Blake Ink. People like him and respect him. Read his top Weezer picks here.
Michael Christopher
Oasis connected at a time when that first teenage injection of testosterone began to subside and not everything in my musical orbit had to run concurrent to the rage toward every human who might or might not have done me wrong at some point. Nor did it need to be depressing enough to keep me in bed sobbing for days like Grace or Roman Candle. Their music was sometimes sensitive but usually had attitude too, and those Gallagher brothers were intent on showing the world the latter wasn’t some working class, drug-induced put on.
Take, for instance, this nugget. Noel was notorious for lifting melodies off popular hits from previous generations, like the rip in Shakermaker, eerily reminiscent of that soft drink jingle I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke. Not exactly unwarranted, Oasis were sued by Coca-Cola and would pay handsomely hundreds of thousands of dollars to offset the theft. During all that, at a 1994 Paris in-store performance of the track, Liam adds a verse from the soda song, tweaking it slightly to, “I’d like to buy you all the coke, to keep you company.”
These guys just didn’t give one fuck.
After a handful of masterpiece Brit-rock albums, Oasis turned consistently uneven in their output and frequently had only a few songs per LP worthy of the groundwork put in early on. Whereas it used to be Liam singing about cooking fucking lasagna was compelling, suddenly promising titles like Bag It Up were bleh. The band still managed to hold my interest, even if it became more about the extracurricular shenanigans than what was done in the studio.
The cool kids can have their Blur and the snobs can stan for Pulp, but I’ll take the basic bitch, rough and tumble working class Mancunians any day of the week.
Columbia
If you were a precocious lad in his early 20s who liked to get revved up while readying for a night of debauchery on the streets of Philadelphia, then this was the song integral to laying the foundation. The lazy and insistent guitar riff was like one big, long line of coke, and it was nothing to have knocked back two, three Yuengling or Budweiser (but usually the latter) by the time the “Yeah, yeah, yeah” kicked in around the final minute or so. To this day, hearing Columbia quickens the heartbeat and makes me want to reach for an aftershave gel with some variation of “cool” or “icy breeze” in its name before going to take over a jukebox at some extra-shitty dive bar.
Acquiesce
One of the reasons the narrative spread that the b-sides of Oasis were better than the a-sides of most artists. Acquiesce is a goddamn banger. It’s also unique in the fact that Liam and Noel split vocal duties with the former on verse and his brother on chorus. They should’ve done that more often because it works wonderfully.
Talk Tonight
Written in the immediate aftermath of a disastrous performance in Los Angeles that was so awful, Noel absconded to San Francisco for two weeks without telling anyone. Crestfallen and suffering a crank hangover, he questioned his future with the band, but had sense talked into him by a random girl he’d met backstage two shows earlier. Talk Tonight, a sparse acoustic number, details that encounter, and almost has, if not an innocence, then a sense of purity. It’s certainly purer than that crystal meth he and his mates did prior to the LA show thinking it was cocaine.
Supersonic
There’s no denying the greatness of Supersonic, which is like if Back in Black were composed in Manchester. And if you haven’t seen the 120 Minutes version from the band’s first appearance on MTV in late 1994, view it right now. Soon-to-be sacked drummer Tony McCarroll starts in like a lunatic, playing way too fast, leading Noel to glance back at him, clearly irked. Even with sunglasses on you can sense the murderous gaze. Much like the peak of their success, the performance burns fast, hard and is over before you know it.
Angel Child [Demo]
I really, really wanted to pull from a deeper well of Oasis songs beyond the first two records. But there’s simply way too much brilliant material to get past it just to be greeted with The Hindu Times on the other side. So a b-side from Be Here Now lead single D’You Know What I Mean will have to suffice. And I’m not picking the demo just to flex musical pretension; it’s literally all there is. No properly recorded version exists. Again, that’s what I’m saying: these guys didn’t give a fuck. Even in their most overproduced era, Noel Gallagher does a Fonzie comb hesitation on a goddamn demo and says, “Ayyy,” then puts it out as is. And I’m sure he still has that attitude, which is why I’ll be losing my mind seeing them at a half-full Gillette Stadium next September.
Michael Christopher is a journalist, author, and music historian. He links to all that and more at The Chronicles of MC.
Zach Schonfeld
1. Acquiesce
Imagine writing a song like this and chucking it aside as a b-side? It's either peak confidence or the height of stupidity. Among many virtues, Acquiesce is the rare Oasis song where Liam and Noel both trade off lead vocals, verse and chorus respectively highlighting each of their strengths as a singer.
2. Live Forever
A while back, I interviewed Liam Gallagher and we were talking about Taylor Swift and he excitedly remarked, “Shake It Off is a fookin' tune!" I feel the same way whenever I hear Live Forever. Now that's a fookin' tune, mate. Biblical!
3. Don't Look Back in Anger
The secret to ripping off the Beatles is you have to occasionally write a better song than the song you're ripping off. And Don't Look Back in Anger pops off at karaoke the way Imagine only wishes it could.
4. Champagne Supernova
I give (What's the Story) Morning Glory? a slight edge over Definitely Maybe because the ballads are better. What the fuck does "Slowly walking down the hall/Faster than a cannonball" mean? I don't know, man, but it sure sounds profound when you're 14 and listening to it on your iPod classic.
5. Fade Away
I love that busted, tinny-ass guitar tone. What distinguished early Oasis tracks from their Britpop rivals is that their studio recordings basically sounded like live bootlegs. They had no use for studio trickery. They knew their power lay in their songs and swagger.
Zach Schonfeld is a freelance writer and the author of How Coppola Became Cage. Read his The Cure picks here.
Evan Greer
Some Might Say
She’s Electric
Wonderwall
Champagne Supernova
Don’t Look Back in Anger
When I was in middle school I was basically an alien. I felt like every other kid had been given some kind of rulebook on “how to human” that I just hadn’t gotten. In retrospect this is very much because I was trans and neuro-divergent, but at the time it just felt like I was literally from some other planet.
One area where this came up a lot was with popular music. I just could not keep up. Or even really understand why other teens and tweens cared about bands and artists in the way that I mostly cared about legos and sci-fi books and building fairy houses in my parents’ backyard.
I liked music. I listened to my parents’ The Beatles and Aretha Franklin and Neil Young and was happy to tag along with them to a Celtic music concert or whatever, but it just never felt like... important? Or something that would be connected to my identity in any way? MTV was boring. There were no action sequences? No plot? I didn’t get it.
When I hit middle school I briefly thought I’d give this whole “fitting in” thing a try. I bought a New England Patriots jersey and tried to start paying attention to the songs on Kiss 108 and Mix 98.5. It was a miserable failure. I was always a few years behind. By the time I got into alt-rock kids had moved on to nu-metal. I refused to get into nu-metal so that was kind of the end of that experiment.
I’m not really sure exactly when it happened, but somewhere in there I encountered Oasis. I can conjure a specific memory of all the kids in the van on a school field trip singing along, unironically, to Wonderwall, during the simpler years when one could do such a thing.
But the thing was that I was into it too. There was this brief moment when we were sort of all on the same team. I may have been picked last, but I was in.
What’s the Story Morning Glory was the first CD I bought with my own money. I already had a cassette tape of Alanis Morisette’s Jagged Little Pill.
Getting into that album, I felt like I finally got it. I liked the references between songs. I liked the album art. I was enamored with the songs and what they might or might not mean. I was into the adultness of it. Having grown up on my parents classic rock and ‘60s folk, the straightforward alt-rock and Beatles-y vocals felt super accessible. The Britishness of it made it a little exotic.
The songs seemed to be about… something. I wasn’t that interested in sex or relationships or even politics yet. But it felt like there was a plot, something to grab onto, to decipher.
Evan Greer is an activist, writer, and musician based in Boston. She’s the director of the viral digital rights nonprofit Fight for the Future and a regular commentator on technology, human rights, and LGBTQ issues. Her most recent album is Spotify is Surveillance.
Paul Driscoll
It's 1994 and I'm living in my parent's basement watching 120 Minutes on MTV. I hear the opening guitar riff of Supersonic and it's all over. I change my major from Elementary Education to Communications the next semester with the goal of having a career in the music industry. At my college radio station I bullshit my way into the role of production director and pitch them a show called West Chester To Manchester that I host throughout college. Before graduating, I'd interned in LA at Virgin Records and hosted weekend shows on Y-100 Philadelphia's alternative station. People advised against taking this career path many times, and I usually told them to get fucked. I felt the attitude and swager of Liam and Noel, it made me think anything was possible and no one was going to stop me.
Over the years I was fortunate enough to interview Oasis, share pints, and even drive the band to a gig. In a day where rock bands are few and far between, the timing couldn't be better for the return of one of the all-time greats, to save rock 'n' roll!
1. Supersonic
Supersonic was released in April 1994, and it was the first Oasis song I ever heard. Most of the lyrics were inspired by a few days Noel spent in Liverpool with his friends Tony and Chris Griffiths from the band The Real People. According to Noel, the main inspiration for the song came from Scott’s dog, Elsa, who was suffering from flatulence and hiding under the mixing desk while the band worked in the studio. This led to the lyric, "I know a girl called Elsa, she's into Alka-Seltzer."
2. The Masterplan
Originally released as a b-side to Wonderwall on October 30, 1995, The Masterplan later became the title track of Oasis's 1998 b-side compilation. Noel Gallagher has often remarked that The Masterplan is among the best songs he has ever written.
In Oasis: The Truth, Tony McCarroll, the band’s original drummer, recalls a pivotal moment shortly after Oasis was discovered by Creation Records boss Alan McGee in 1993. McCarroll recalls being at Noel Gallagher's Manchester apartment before a rehearsal, where Gallagher laid out his bold vision, the masterplan, for Oasis: they would have more swagger than the Stone Roses, be wilder than the Happy Mondays, and write songs better than those of the Inspiral Carpets—all while declaring themselves the best until the world believed it.
3. Don't Look Back In Anger
Noel was so excited about the potential of the song when he first wrote it that he performed an acoustic, work-in-progress version at a show at the Sheffield Arena in April of 1995. The performance was raw, missing the second verse and with a few lyrical differences, but you could tell he knew he had something special. Before playing, he mentioned that he had just written it the previous Tuesday and didn't even have a title for it yet.
Noel played demos of both Wonderwall and Don’t Look Back In Anger for Liam, asking which one he wanted to sing. Liam initially chose Don’t Look Back In Anger, but after some feedback from those around the band, he decided to switch to Wonderwall.
4. Live Forever
Live Forever was released on August 8, 1994, as Oasis's third single, just under a month before the release of their debut album, Definitely Maybe. No list of Oasis songs would be complete without it.
Noel introduced the song to the band for the first time during rehearsals in early 1993, and they were blown away. Creation Records boss Alan McGee later reflected that hearing the song was "probably the single greatest moment I've ever experienced with them."
The demo version starts with an acoustic guitar. However, when recording the album version, producer Owen Morris replaced this with the iconic drum intro.
5a. Half The World Away
Noel has admitted that the tune for Half the World Away was adapted from Burt Bacharach and Hal David's This Guy's in Love with You. He once remarked, "It sounds exactly the same. I'm surprised he hasn't sued me yet!" In 1996, he even performed This Guy's in Love with You live at a Burt Bacharach show at the London Festival Hall, with Bacharach himself accompanying on piano and conducting the orchestra.
5b. Fuckin' In The Bushes
No deep explanation, I'm just mad fer it. Piss off.
Paul Driscoll is the Executive Producer and President of indie617, the former Program Director and On-Air Host at WFNX and RadioBDC Director of Ops/Programming.
Patrick Hosken
Some Might Say
Acquiesce
Don’t Look Back in Anger
Cigarettes & Alcohol
She’s Electric
The first two cassettes I remember listening to in my dad’s Dodge Intrepid were Eagles’ Hell Freezes Over (yuck) and Oasis’ What’s the Story Morning Glory? (yum). I used to pretend tiny ant-sized musicians played the songs live inside the tape deck. Imagine a microscopic Liam ripping darts and telling an infinitesimal Noel he’s a potato while we drive to the McKinley Mall. Good fake memory.
I never realized how much the Gallaghers ripped off until I got older and heard a lot more music. And then I felt weird about Oasis for a while until I understood: The ripping off is the point. Filtering the highlights of mid-20th century rock, pop, psychedelic, etc. through a fuzzy stack and flattening it into a pancake that everyone in the world thinks is delicious. That’s what makes Oasis a perfect band.
Some might say the “Some might say / We will find a brighter day” part of Some Might Say is the pre-chorus. But I think it’s the chorus. It’s the bit that gives me goosebumps so it deserves better than to be relegated to a songwriting spare part. I guess Stephen Malkmus thought they were dumb but I’ll steal a Pavement line that sums up Oasis for me: “And they’re coming to the chorus now…”
Patrick Hosken is an arts writer at Rochester CITY magazine and a former editor at MTV News.
Anthony Kim
On January 9, 1998, Oasis alighted in the suburbs of Washington, DC, to play a show at George Mason University’s Patriot Center as part of their US leg of the Be Here Now tour, touring a bloated and misshapen mess that would plant the seed of their eventual demise. A grainy but entirely watchable video of the performance exists on YouTube, and when the camera pulls back far enough, it is entirely possible you can see the back of the head of a 16 year old Anthony Kim, attending his first ever concert. I can’t honestly say I remember a lot about the performance other than Noel’s acoustic set and the crowd lustily singing along to Wonderwall, but it should tell you something that before I saw Radiohead or Dylan or Godspeed You! Black Emperor (or Phish, cough) or any of the other acts I’ve seen and enjoyed in my lifetime, it was these loutish oafs from Manchester that I saw first.
Much like how the earlier seasons of The Simpsons have now been overrun in quantity by the seasons nowhere near as good, Oasis’ discography features seven studio albums, four either mediocre to okay, one (the aforementioned Be Here Now) more of an unfortunate experiment in cocaine production than anything else, and two generally considered among the finest albums of the 1990s. And in choosing the five songs for this list, I easily could have stayed within those two albums and their related b-sides, and that’s mostly what I’ve done, with one exception. Oasis was never the best band in the world, but they were sure as heck arguably the biggest, and I have a feeling their 2025 return will remind everyone of just why that was.
1. Supersonic
Live Forever is generally considered the masterpiece from Definitely Maybe, but for me that honor goes to their very first single, about as good an encapsulation of why people fell in love with these assholes from day dot. You’ve got everything that you could want from the band in one song – a tremendously catchy guitar line, Liam sneering his way through nonsensical lyrics that smush together Very British References with bad poetry and a Beatles nod, Tony McCarroll playing a solid beat and getting out of everyone else’s way, and a sense of inevitability that the best rock bands harnessed in their songs. Of course “cause my friend said he’ll take you home/he sits in a corner all alone/he lives under a waterfall/nobody can see him, nobody can ever hear him call” makes no sense, but much like it’s not the tale but who tells it, it’s not the lyrics but how they’re sung, and you needed a Liam Gallagher to sing them the way they should be sung. That said, if anybody else could sing them the way they could be sung, it’d be by someone who’s no stranger to Beatle nods himself.
2. Whatever
Whatever was Oasis’ first non-album single, released in the typically highly competitive Christmas season of 1994, and a perfect capper to their breakout year. Having eschewed orchestration for Definitely Maybe, Noel made the decision to bring in some strings for this tune, helping give it that anthemic feel that actually makes this the closest they ever got to actually aping those loveable lads from Liverpool. Liam gives maybe his best vocal performance here as well: low-key (for him) and sympathetic (for him) while retaining that same edge that made him so exciting in his pomp. Also, it’s one of the many songs with a co-writing credit that came from someone suing the band for plagiarism; in this case, Neil Innes, of Monty Python collaboration fame, for his How Sweet To Be An Idiot being lifted for the chorus. Oh, Noel, you impudent scamp.
3. Talk Tonight
Oasis finally barged their way to the toppermost of the poppermost with Some Might Say, which I had considered writing about here. Instead I decided on my favorite b-side from that very single, quite possibly their most affecting tune. The story behind the song has entered legend – Noel quitting the band on their ’94 US tour, ending up in San Francisco, befriending a woman that lived there and writing a song about how she talked him off the metaphorical ledge. Noel chose to sing this one himself with only acoustic backing, and while he hadn’t quite figured out how to get the most out of his limited vocal range yet (one imagines that, if he had, Liam would never have been in the band), his shakiness behind the mic only adds to the sparse loveliness of the tune. A wonderful counterpoint to the usual “oi, lads” power chord blasts of Oasis’ catalog, and the sort of song that can convert a nonbeliever in the band.
4. Cast No Shadow
My pick for the best Oasis album track (beating out Slide Away and – if it counts – Don’t Go Away by a hair), is a darker and more downbeat track than you’d expect from the band that gave you Cigarettes and Alcohol. Apparently written about and for Richard Ashcroft, it’s the echoing backup vocals from Noel that give this song added heft, as much as the stately tempo and the majestic orchestration and the eerie bended notes in the chorus. Funny enough, it’s probably one of the worst songs for Oasis to play live, as they would speed it up by about 25% and overwhelm the tune in syrupy bombast; Noel’s solo versions, restoring the original tempo, does it much more credit. One kinda wishes we’d gotten more of these (like, for example, Sunday Morning Call) and less of the generic rockers that plagued their later albums.
5. Stop Crying Your Heart Out
I could have written about at least ten songs I think are considerably better than this one, but I have a very soft spot for what is just about the most obvious “get out yer lighters” stadium-filling track Noel ever barfed out. And it really is their live versions from stadium shows that are the best way to experience this Heathen Chemistry (woof, that album title) standout. On stage, Liam’s muscular live vocals bulldoze the limp cliches, keyboards replace the treacly orchestration, and the duetting vocals on the chorus give it more gravitas. It is, indeed, the sort of song you want to get your lighters out for, and I have to imagine the Gallagher boys, two of the last true believers in the healing power of rock ‘n’ roll, would take that as a compliment.
Anthony Kim is an attorney in Rancho Cucamonga, CA, and has written for The Classical and Stylus Magazine. His first novel, The Secret Chord, will be self-published in September 2024.
Steve Marsh
Does anybody else who listened through the ‘90s remember how dour things were sounding by 1994? Kurt Cobain killed himself in April, Pearl Jam were suing Ticketmaster. Grunge had a hard core brine to it from the beginning, I suppose, but it really started to pucker mid-decade. Hip hop back then was still fun, but the East Coast and the West Coast were getting so angry with each other that Tupac was shot dead in 96 and Biggie would be killed in the beginning of 97. Somewhere in there, I started listening to Oasis. The UK had a completely separate media ecosystem, but I had this new thing called the internet, and I couldn’t get enough of Oasis—these cocky Irish brothers who had fought their way up out of the slums of Manchester to make fun of all the art school bands in London who thought they were smarter than they were. They gave hilarious interviews, and they made dressing for rainy weather—Clark wallabees and anoraks zipped all the way up—look cool. And as a resentful truck driver’s kid going to private college—still broke, still dumb, but so close to a bigger and better life for myself I could taste it—I found myself identifying with their whole hedonistic, fuck-aspirational-try-fully-prostitutional point of view. “Toniiiiiiiiiii-eye-ee-iiiight, you’re a rock and roll star!”
And yeah, they were really brothers, so they fought and made up and partied together, and then they fought again. They broke up on their first tour of America, but made up in time to play a bar in Minneapolis (I didn’t get to that show, but I bought a bootleg of it). By 95, Oasis had two albums, and Wonderwall was in heavy rotation on MTV, and sure those two albums would turn out to be as good as it ever got, but they had so many songs. In their first couple years as a band, Noel was writing so many great tunes he famously made his little brother choose between Wonderwall and Don’t Look Back in Anger—he wouldn’t let Liam sing both. If you’re reading an Oasis songs blog you know those two already, for sure, (and Live Forever) but here are some favorites out of the rest of em:
5. Cigarettes & Alcohol
This song showcases Liam’s Mancunian bray—the way he sneers through his vowels and consonants, asking: “Is it myy imaaa-juh-nay-shyun, or have I finally found something worth living for?” This is the band’s cynical challenge: life sucks, all you got are cigarettes and alcohol, what are you going to do about it? Might as well do a white line—you gotta make it happen!
4. Morning Glory
This is sort of the title track off their second album, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? It starts with helicopter blades and feedback from the radio—the brittle paranoia of the a.m. Then Noel hits a huge, grating riff and Liam hits you with another sarcastic challenge: “All your dreams are made when you’re chained to the mirror and the razor blade”—yeah right, now you’ve got a hangover and it’s time to wake up.
3. Stand by Me
I love the acoustic version of this song from the BBC documentary that was released on the night before the release of their third album Be Here Now. The two brothers are sitting by a pool, with Noel on acoustic guitar singing harmony, and Liam crouched in front of a microphone, singing lead. If you’re into Oasis, you’re into the central soap opera relationship of the band—bromantic love. And maybe Liam thinks he’s singing about a girl when he harmonizes with Noel “Stand by me/Nobody knows the way it’s gonna be.” But Oasis fans know what the two of them are singing about, and we’re rooting for them.
2. Acquiesce
This is one of the dozen or so songs that Noel had written in those first couple years that’s good enough to be a lead single on either of their first two albums. But instead Acquiesce became a rosetta stone for the band’s fans, with Liam singing, “I hope that I can say the things I wish I’d said” before Noel belts back, “because WE NEED each other/we BELIEVE in one another!” This is bro-rave shit—it’s meant to be listened to arm in arm with your mates in the pit, with 50,000 people behind you.
1. Slide Away
If there is one emotional posture that keeps recurring in Oasis songs it’s to yearn for something, to wish you were somewhere else doing something else, whether that’s a yearning for love or success or just drugs. Slide Away is Noel getting dumped by a girl—“My today fell in from the top”—and it’s a dream about getting back together. When Liam stretches his delivery of his brother’s lines to the limit you really feel them. The song wasn’t even a single on Definitely Maybe, but it might be the purest distillation of that early Oasis yearn for something bigger and better.
Steve Marsh is a writer who lives in Minneapolis. He’s on staff at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, and he’s freelanced for GQ, Vulture, Pitchfork and Victory Journal. If you have Oasis tickets, he can be reached at smarsh@mspmag.com.