Oasis' Definitely Maybe by Niven Alex

Author:Niven, Alex
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

tried to attack Noel Gallagher.

Reports of the incident vary. Early accounts suggested

that Gallagher was punched in the face, but he may

have hurt himself with his own guitar in the mêlée. (In some uncharitable versions, Gallagher stormed off stage in fury because the damaged guitar was an expensive

Les Paul borrowed from Johnny Marr.)40 Whatever

the details, both the gig and the BBC broadcast were

called to an abrupt halt. A near riot ensued as the

Newcastle audience shouted ‘Manchester, soft as shite’

at the empty stage and later clambered round the band’s tour bus when it attempted to leave the venue. The next morning, the right-wing UK tabloid newspaper the Daily

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Mail reported the incident under the title ‘An Orgy of Violence’. The mad blood was stirring.

2

The violence at Newcastle was unfortunate. But it

was a predictable reaction to a dark element in early

Oasis songs that could act as a provocation in certain

contexts. Oasis might have been capable of extraordinary positivity, but they were, at their core, a marriage of heaven and hell. On the one hand, there was the idealism of ‘Live Forever’ and the belief in a populist, humanist music that could act as a healing influence after the

suffering and division of the Thatcherite eighties. But equally, Oasis songs are full of venom and rage. Despite their ethos of brotherhood and solidarity, the image of the embittered individual who wants to shun the world

and crawl into a hole is never far from the surface in the band’s early output.

The isolation theme is a particularly strong presence

in the B-sides that accompanied Oasis’s first singles.

These often-brilliant works reveal a melancholy tone

that does not quite fit with the optimism of the main part of Definitely Maybe, and they deserve at least a cursory glance in any reading of Oasis’s early development.

‘Take Me Away’, released along with ‘Supersonic’ in

April 1994, was one of the first songs to demonstrate

Noel Gallagher’s fierce misanthropy. Over a minimally

arranged backing track that nods at 1960s exotica and

easy listening, Gallagher sings plangently of his desire to escape from a place where things ‘fall apart’ into an

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imaginary landscape far away from Manchester’s urban

hinterland. He also steals from The Beatles’ ‘Octopus’s Garden’ in wishing to be ‘under the sea’. Solitary

confinement was one of Gallagher’s favourite metaphors, even on this, Oasis’s first release.

The isolation theme is picked up in ‘Sad Song’, a bonus track included on the vinyl version of Definitely Maybe, which was apparently written in the course of a single

night. While ‘Take Me Away’ recalls Burt Bacharach

and Harry Nilsson, ‘Sad Song’ contains echoes of Paul

McCartney and Neil Young. Another plaintive Noel

Gallagher vocal is backed by a lush twelve-string-acoustic rhythm track. In a reversal of ‘Live Forever’ ’s light-and-shade harmony, ‘Sad Song’ ’s verse is in A minor (the A minor seventh is once again the magic ingredient), while its chorus slips into a brighter C major sequence.

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