Getting High by Paolo Hewitt

Author:Paolo Hewitt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dean Street Press
Published: 2015-01-04T16:00:00+00:00

Thirteen

Liam Gallagher entered Mark Coyle’s bedroom in the Monnow Valley Studios in South Wales and told him to get the fuck up.

‘We’ve been waiting half an hour, you dickhead.’

Coyley made no response, just lay there sleeping. Liam went over and shook the engineer. ‘Oi, Coyley, get up.’

Coyley hated being woken up. It did his head in. He was one of these people who had to get their required amount of sleep. Woe betide anyone who prevented him from doing so. He came to with a start.

‘You fucking wanker,’ he shouted, ‘fuck off.’

‘Piss off dickhead and get up.’

Coyley raised himself up, grabbed some shoes by the side of the bed and threw them at Liam. Then he grabbed the lampshade and threw that too.

‘Fuck off, you madhead,’ Liam shouted, ducking the objects, but a huge smile breaking out on the singer’s face.

Then Coyley leapt out of bed and started running after the giggling singer. Outside, Oasis were sitting in their van waiting to travel to the Water Rats in Kings Cross, London. It would be their first proper concert in the capital, a prestigious concert people kept telling them. But they were unimpressed. To them, all gigs were important.

They already knew there was a buzz about this show. First off, ‘Columbia’ had brilliantly served its purpose by causing a real stir. It had received its premiere on Monday 6 December 1993 on Radio One’s increasingly important and popular Evening Session, hosted by Steve Lamacq and Jo Whiley, and had been regularly played thereafter. It was the first time a demo had been put on Radio One’s playlist.

In his report to Creation, plugger Garry Blackburn wrote, ‘Reaction to this track has been fantastic, discussed at playlist meeting on Thursday 16th, now on C-list [lists devised by Radio One, A-list being those records that are most played] as of Monday 20th, and has been kept on C-list as of Monday 27th December. We will not go heavy on this...’

He goes on to say that Mark Cooper at BBC2’s Later show, Gary Crowley at Carlton TV’s The Beat, The Word and The Big E had been serviced, and that ‘everyone very interested’.

Add to this, Marcus Russell’s strategy of slowly building up a fan-base while deliberately avoiding a high-profile show in the capital, and it was no surprise that the gig had sold out in minutes, leaving a substantial amount of people waiting outside the Water Rats trying to get in.

No doubt the band would have had sympathy for those unable to buy tickets but, as Marcus would have pointed out, it was better at this point to play a small place and have people clamouring to get in, than to satisfy everyone straight away. Marcus would repeat this game-plan until even he, two years later, had to finally cave and book the band into the biggest gig ever seen in Britain: two nights in Knebworth Park playing to a quarter of a million people. And even then, that would still leave one and three quarters of a million people disappointed.

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