Oasis - Shop-Window Britpop

Definitely Maybe came across right away as a little pop-rock gem, loved both by critics (certainly favourable and enthusiastic in registering a new phenomenon that had bloomed more or less out of nowhere, with no producers or handlers pulling the strings behind it) and by the public, who didn't take long to throw themselves into Oasismania. The new Beatles had knocked on the doors of show business, and show business threw those doors wide open. Definitely Maybe is a concept album about youthful abandon ("Live Forever", "Supersonic") and the desire to become famous ("Rock 'n' Roll Star").

By now Oasis were playing along with being hailed as the "new Beatles", the new rockstars. They took a standoffish approach to their new hero status, giving interviews always with visible reluctance. A strong clash of personalities emerged between the two brothers, who often found themselves coming to blows, feeding the "trivia" of an off-stage life that was always decidedly shaky. During the American tour, Noel Gallagher skipped a few dates, fuelling the thoughts of those who already saw them heading towards the end of their run, in the mould of one album wonder bands.

Back in England, something peculiar happened. For Christmas, Oasis decided to release a new song, not featured on the album, essentially a gift for the fans. It was called "Whatever": the song is among the finest Noel Gallagher ever wrote, pure melody, simple guitar chords and a wonderful orchestral touch. "Whatever" became an instant hit, with a video on heavy rotation virtually everywhere, and the band's rise to success was now assured. Incidentally, the b-side of the "Whatever" single was "Half The World Away", sung by Noel Gallagher: an acoustic track, with a catchy melody that was instantly beloved. This very habit of enriching their singles with equally valuable extra tracks would later lead the band to collect this "hidden" world on a compilation, just as worthwhile and interesting to discover. The single "Whatever" was such a success, well beyond expectations, that it became necessary to reissue the debut album Definitely Maybe as a double CD, adding the Christmas song among the official tracks.

After a change on drums (Alan White took over from Tony McCarroll), the band spent the whole summer in the studio recording the new album, which hit the shelves in October 1995. Before its release came an unprecedented press campaign that created the "Britpop" phenomenon, artfully constructing a rivalry between Blur and Oasis. It was the Britpop battle: on one side the snobbish intellectual types à la Damon Albarn, on the other the rough, working-class grit of Oasis. A rivalry invented and built with the sole purpose of selling more newspapers, but one that benefited the bands involved as well – and not just a little. It should also be remembered that neither Oasis nor Blur made any real attempt to tone things down, well aware of the financial returns it brought, and so for a while both bands scheduled the release of their singles with perfect synchrony (the "duel" between "Roll With It" and "Country House" became legendary). The strange ways of the music business.

Autumn arrives, and so does (What's The Story) Morning Glory? (1995). The expressive urgency of Definitely Maybe, with amplified guitars and plenty of youthful bravado straight out of "I want to be a rock 'n' roll star", gives way to a far more delicate and harmonious sound, with orchestration, strings and melody. The Beatles influence becomes more pronounced, and so, following in the wake of "Shakermaker", come "Hello" and "Roll With It". The impression right from the start is one of greater compositional maturity: in the space of just two albums, Noel Gallagher proves he has found the formula for his own songwriting, managing to perfectly combine an innate melodic gift with a more than solid sonic structure.

They're still just pop tunes, through and through, but managing to elevate them is no small feat. Credit must go to Noel Gallagher for pulling it off with disarming ease, writing a handful of unforgettable songs and earning his place in the sun of the pop music scene. "Wonderwall", but above all "Don't Look Back In Anger" (with Noel Gallagher on lead vocals for the first time on an official album; his actual first appearance on vocals was on the "Supersonic" single's b-side "Take Me Away") rightfully belong in the pop songbook of all time. Songs celebrated, played and sung by everyone, everywhere. "Wonderwall" is the calling card, the international passport that would let Oasis sit atop the charts across the world: America, Europe, Asia, Oceania. A song built on just four chords spread across verse-bridge-chorus, with a melody that strikes instantly on first listen. The power of pop. "Wonderwall" is the song of an entire generation.

Almost like a blow to the heart, there follows the gorgeous "Don't Look Back In Anger", an extraordinary ballad, the crystalline purity of a genius still in bloom yet already so complete. Songwriting so refined it even stirred the father of them all, Paul McCartney, who gave Noel Gallagher the most unexpected gift by declaring: "It's one of the best songs in the history of music". Perhaps it's the flight of fancy of a wise old man called upon to pass judgement on the new kids who'd come from nowhere, yet it's not so far from the truth. A piano straight out of Lennon (much speculated upon for its similarities to "Imagine") and a clean, flowing progression for one of the most beautiful melodies in music.

With these two gems, Oasis secured their place in music history just a year and a half after their debut. What makes (What's The Story) Morning Glory? a masterpiece is the extraordinarily high average quality of the songs on it. Take "Cast No Shadow", dedicated to Richard Ashcroft, a friend of the band: a dreamy variation on the classic Oasis archetype. Or "Some Might Say", the album's first single: a sing-song nursery-rhyme melody delivered with pronounced guitar work. The album closes with the magnificent "Champagne Supernova" (a single only in Australia and the US), featuring Paul Weller on guitar and backing vocals: the track manages to combine pop melody, distorted guitar scales and an emotional tension that defines its seven-plus minutes.

Oasis hit the mark, delivering what would have seemed unthinkable not long before, making their detractors squirm in their seats, and becoming a pop icon. From this moment on, everything would be different. Their lives, their music, the way the press and the public perceived them. Gossip crept into their lives and told practically everything. Given how irrelevant all this side material is to a musical monograph, and given the writer's complete lack of interest in it, we'll choose to skip over this aspect of the band's story. It's worth noting, however, the importance of this moment of tabloid exposure for their popularity. Perceived as the new heroes of who-knows-what, Oasis became the main talk of the music and trend magazines of the era. Just as Lennon and McCartney had been before them, and as Pete Doherty or Amy Winehouse would be after them. An unstoppable wave of approval, seasoned with the youth world's wholesale embrace of the Gallagher cause, set off Oasismania.

Used to the basements of Manchester's working-class tower blocks, Oasis brought the roughness of a British pub after a Saturday match into the heart of the British jet-set. A role model for underprivileged teenagers, the Gallaghers were frequently photographed scrapping with each other or clutching pints. Their rough, volatile temperaments, both in public and private, became musically relevant the moment Liam Gallagher started arbitrarily deciding which gigs to show up to and which to skip. His older, wiser brother would learn his little brother's vocal parts and perform them solo. There was talk of separation, of hatred, of an impending split. But once again, the logic of money and opportunity won out. Friends again, together again, brothers in arms once more.

With Be Here Now (Sony, 1997), the Manchester band's best and most recommendable run of releases comes to an end. Riding the long wave of well-earned success, Oasis now played up to being new idols of the masses, feeding the hosannas of those who truly believed they were the new Beatles. And so they carefully crafted an overly elaborate cover, packed with nods here and there to the world of the Fab Four. As they say, strike while the iron's hot. Not that this is inherently objectionable, but certainly their much-vaunted discomfort with the press and the frivolous world of showbiz turned rather easily into winking self-awareness when it came time to cash in.

With two well-above-average albums already behind him, Noel Gallagher manages to squeeze a few more minutes of attention out of his Muse and puts together a thoroughly respectable record. The gritty single "D'You Know What I Mean?" shows a greater bite to the guitars, as does "My Big Mouth". But these aren't the things worth highlighting. Added to the Oasis songbook are "Stand By Me", which tries to find the right aim in the style of "Wonderwall", "Don't Go Away", a Beatles-esque pop ballad beautifully sung by Liam (at his vocal peak on this album), and the closing "All Around The World", which ventures fully into Beatles territory, quoting the chorus of "Hey Jude"; "Magic Pie" pales in comparison to the songs Noel had sung in the past.

On Be Here Now, melody is the chimera sought and found ("The Girl In The Dirty Shirt"); there's nothing on the record without a solid chorus: Oasis once again prove themselves skilled melody-makers, capable of effortlessly writing a dozen hummable tracks, songs that delight the guitar-loving crowd who had found in Oasis a goose laying golden eggs for their beach-holiday playlist. Also worth noting on Be Here Now is the greater attention paid to arrangements and string orchestration, which enrich otherwise straightforward pop-rock tracks: think of the already mentioned and captivating "All Around The World", but also "Stand By Me", embroidered with strings and backing vocals.

For Oasis, a period begins of welcome distance from the constant spotlight of gossip. After four years of hits, high-calibre songwriting, chart records and shows around the world, the Gallaghers took some time to relax. Both grappling with their own shaky marriages, they decided to set aside musical projects and everything else for a while.

Their record company, however, couldn't afford to leave the roster's best-performing machine idle, and so in 1998 they released a collection of b-sides, chosen via a public poll on the band's official website, titled The Masterplan (1998). Having released a staggering number of singles over the years (averaging 5 per album), Oasis had always accustomed their fans to expect hidden gems tucked away as b-sides of the official singles. The Masterplan thus set out to bring this vast sea of gems to light: tracks like "Talk Tonight" or "The Masterplan" (for this writer, the best Oasis song alongside "Wonderwall") can be called nothing less. The latter achieves the pop perfection of a "Don't Look Back In Anger", with an added, ever-building pathos that can't help but draw the listener in. Simply perfect.

What's astonishing about the compilation is the quality of the compositions, especially considering these are tracks released only as singles and never featured on official albums. Further proof that, between 1994 and 1997, Noel Gallagher was living through his golden period as a songwriter. Among the many highlights, certainly worth mentioning are "Half The World Away", the Beatles-esque "Rockin' Chair" and "(It's Good) To Be Free". "Going Nowhere" is the most orchestrated and elaborately arranged track in the Oasis catalogue, while "Underneath The Sky" timidly knocks on psychedelia's door. There's also a live version of "I'm The Walrus", a tribute to their spiritual fathers.

The collection The Masterplan is a thoroughly successful record and well worth recommending.

After a three-year hiatus, Oasis return with Standing On The Shoulder of Giants (2000), an unconvincing record. In fact, it's with Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants that the Mancunian band's lesser period begins: flat, unmemorable songs, a desire for renewal that's too scattered, and an inability to write pop songs of even middling quality. Over the previous two years Noel Gallagher had rummaged through the drawers of the past, gathering the best of what he found and handing over good songs released both on official albums and as b-sides on singles. Oasis's 2000, instead, opens with "Go Let It Out", a faded version of their earliest material, continues with the pure-Lennon acoustic ballad "Little James" (written for the first time by Liam Gallagher) and the forgettable "Gas Panic", and closes with the decent "Roll It Over", a "Champagne Supernova" for the new millennium.

Noel Gallagher sings on the syrupy "Where Did It All Wrong", which opens the door to a more "roots"-oriented, almost Neil Young-esque sound (later picked up and developed on subsequent albums), and on "Sunday Morning Call", the album's most successful ballad and the only one worthy of a place in the Oasis songbook. All things considered, a dreadful album.

Once recording on the album was finished, the Oasis line-up underwent major changes: out went Bonehead, due to family issues, and in came former Ride guitarist Andy Bell (here on bass) and Gem Archer (ex-Heavy Stereo) on guitar. Despite Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants being the worst record of their career, the ensuing tour proved a resounding success, further fuelling the idea that Oasis had by now become a brand and a pop event to be seen and experienced regardless of the quality on offer.

The extraordinary stadium tour is documented on the band's first official live album: Familiar To Millions (2000). The record captures the concert of 21 July at Wembley Stadium in London. Alongside the album (released, among other things, in two versions), a DVD of the same title also came out, immortalising the band on stage. It must be said that Oasis can't really be considered stage animals, and their shows are for the most part a sing-along mass. The setlist more or less rounds up the best of their catalogue. Among the standout tracks are a cover of Neil Young's "Hey Hey, My My" and the Beatles' "Helter Skelter".

Two years after the Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants disaster, Oasis play the card of a tentative return to the past with Heathen Chemestry (2002), but it's clear just how scarce Noel Gallagher's inspiration had become (he being the main, almost sole, author of their earlier hits), to the point that songwriting duties were opened up to the rest of the band. Liam Gallagher thus steps up as a songwriter, managing to put his best self-penned songs to music ("Songbird", incidentally, is also the first single released that wasn't written by Noel Gallagher). Andy Bell and Gem Archer follow suit: new writers wanted for the Oasis cause. The musical framework is heavily Beatles-esque, with countless references (from lyrics to melodies), but above all there's a growing interest in thicker, almost bluesy sounds. This is, to all intents and purposes, where the second life of the Gallaghers' music begins (already hinted at, as mentioned earlier, in "Where Did It All Wrong"): no more pop melody at all costs, no more songs stuck in the merely repetitive, no more overly tidy musical structures — instead, a return to roots, to blues-rock guitar riffs, to the transatlantic sound of the Kinks and the Byrds.

In short, in the Oasis discography the sixties flavour is no longer just Lennon and the Beatles (even if the pure-Lennon streak remains in tracks like "Songbird" or "Born On A Different Cloud"), but also an entire generation of bands straddling pop, rock and blues. Hence the Doors in "A Quick Peep", the Who in "All In The Mind" and the Kinks in "She Is Love". Alongside this path only just begun, the recurring motifs of their whole career keep resurfacing: there's the delicate pop ballad sung by Liam ("Stop Crying Your Heart Out"), somewhere between "Don't Go Away" and an updated version of any Lenny Kravitz ballad, and the pop-rock ballad sung by Noel ("Little By Little"), which echoes "Don't Look Back In Anger" while adding suspended chords (almost Pink Floyd-like). "Little By Little" is a stadium rock anthem, easy to hum along to from the first listen, with no pretensions and nothing to prove. It's the best Oasis manage to produce in this tired phase: "Little By Little", "Songbird" and "Stop Crying Your Heart Out" don't really hold up against the songbook of the first three albums, even though they rank among the best tracks of this new phase. The Manchester band do better than on Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants and reinvent themselves with a new musical identity, embracing their rock origins.

The ideas, though, are still not clear, and it's hard to settle on a direction. And so the initial studio sessions with the Death In Vegas duo, brought in to produce the new record, are soon called off. The results were simply too unconvincing. Better, then, to pursue the path gradually taking shape on Heathen Chemestry. And so, after the departure of drummer Alan White, replaced by Ringo Starr's son Zak Starkey, Oasis's sixth official album is released.

With Don't Believe The Truth (2005) the sound developed on the previous record is refined even further, almost entirely shedding the britpop inflections. So even a typically Oasis-style opening track like "Turn Up The Sun" is given new flavour, with greater musical attention and fuller instrumental codas. But this growing confidence with the new sound is already felt on "Mucky Fingers", a rock-blues number that reeks of the Rolling Stones from the title alone. The songs are no longer built on a simple verse-chorus-verse structure, but give more room to instrumental passages, especially in the closing sections. The journey from britpop to pop-rock-blues has reached its destination.

Trying to compare today's Oasis to the Oasis of ten years earlier is frankly difficult, precisely because of how much their music has changed. It must be said that quality is exactly what gets lost in this transition: while in the past their compositions reached genuinely high levels, in this new phase even their best material fails to match a "Wonderwall" or a "Live Forever". They're playing on different courts now, and generally the best player on hard court rarely dominates on clay as well.

That said, it must nonetheless be noted that it's precisely from Don't Believe The Truth onwards that Oasis manage to climb out of the pit they'd fallen into. There are no perfect ballads, but certainly impossible to overlook are the Lennon-esque "Love Like A Bomb", the blues-rock charge of "Lyla" (a bit too close to the Rolling Stones' "Street Fighting Man", to be honest) or the near-psychedelic ballad "Part Of The Queue" (perhaps the most successful track). Liam Gallagher closes things out once again playing a Kravitz-like figure doing a Lennon impression on "Let There Be Love" (which, worth noting, represents the first genuine duet between Liam and Noel).

The surrounding material, however, is too elusive and unfocused: at times it sounds decidedly repetitive, while on other occasions it winks a little too knowingly at ecumenical stadium pop-rock ("A Bell Will Ring").

Don't Believe The Truth is certainly the album of their rebirth, but there's still plenty left to sort out.

Stop The Clocks (2006) is a collection, a rather contentious one at that, of Oasis's best tracks, not something the band wanted but something imposed by their record label. It's hard to see the point of an Oasis best-of, especially one lacking any unreleased material. The tracklist is made up of hits from the previous six albums along with a handful of b-sides chosen by the band. For the occasion, Noel Gallagher and Gem Archer held a dozen acoustic shows (guitar and voice) to mark the album's release.

Now elder statesmen of pop, Oasis returned in 2008 with Dig Out Your Soul. The record is the full flowering of the sixties/seventies sound that has marked the Manchester band's recent "back to the past" years. Getting into the details of the new material, it's hard not to call this a rather solid album, thick and layered in structure, with foundations firmly sunk into a tradition (that glorious lineage of giants like the Beatles, the Who, the Rolling Stones, Small Faces) revered and gloriously traced through every single pulsing chord of every single track. That alone wouldn't be much news, given how much the band has written over the years, but what really strikes is the cohesion of the overall sound, its surprising complexity and its extremely well thought-out construction (the average track length tops four minutes, with frequent instrumental digressions and a pace that's always very controlled, hypnotic and meditative), combined with writing that's far more elegant and "rich" than their last, not always brilliant, outings.

Listening to tracks like "The Turning", the highly effective single "The Shock Of The Lightning" or "Falling Down", you can sense a greater maturity, a sure touch in the arrangements, and a notable ability to shift register and tone significantly from one song to the next. Liam Gallagher's voice is in great shape, the drum parts (handled by Zak Starkey, following in his father's footsteps, who seems to have rejoined the ranks after briefly cutting ties with the band) are tight, and the overall mood is one of psychedelic hard-blues with frayed edges (just listen to "Bag It Up", "The Nature Of Reality" and "Waiting For The Rapture", along the Cream–Yardbirds–Jeff Beck Group–Pretty Things axis), capable of tightening into rougher pub-rock outbursts ("Ain't Got Nothin'"), alternating with ballads whose romanticism never tips over into excessive sweetness (this is especially true of "I'm Outta Time" or "Soldier On"). If Oasis are showing signs of life after a long creative dark patch, it's also thanks to a more collaborative songwriting process: it had become clear that Noel alone could no longer carry the weight of writing entire albums by himself.

The summer of 2009 was one of the hottest for Oasis. Noel, in particular, seemed the most willing to reveal possible futures for the Manchester band. At first, some interviews hinted at an increasingly likely solo career. A sign of restlessness? A desire for a change of scenery? To become the new English storyteller, leaving the teenage antics to his brother? Plenty of theories were floated. Then, at the end of August, with just three dates left on the tour, Noel, after yet another blow-up with his brother Liam, decided to walk away from everything. Tour and band.

To clarify what had happened, Noel released a statement on the official website, which read: "It's with some sadness and great relief to tell you I will not be making any more music with Oasis. People will write and say what they like, but I simply could not go on working with Liam a day longer. I'd like to apologise to all the people who bought tickets for the shows in Paris, Konstanz and Milan." Is this just the latest sibling skirmish that will, as usual, end with a kickabout in their parents' garden? Or is this time something more? Whether this story deserves a definitive full stop, well, it's best to wait and see.

Oasis Knebworth 1996 (2021) is the audiovisual document of the famous two-day live run that, as the title already makes clear, the band played in Hertfordshire on the 10th and 11th of August.

Those shows captured the Gallagher brothers and co. at the peak of their glory, riding the worldwide success of (What's The Story) Morning Glory, the unstoppable launchpad for their entry into the Britpop pantheon.

Good old Liam keeps forging ahead undaunted with his solo career, and after releasing an interesting live album in 2020, featuring his performances for the MTV Unplugged TV show, in late spring 2022 C'mon You Know saw the light of day, his third album outside a band.

The record adds nothing new to his prestigious body of work, instead revealing unexpected signs of indulgence, a trait that the feisty Liam has never dished out easily.

The album glides by between fine Britpop romps ("Everything's Electric") and fine cross-pollinations ("Better Days"), but unfortunately there are plenty of tracks that feel like mere filler.

A different story applies to the project that in 2024 brought Liam together with John Squire of the Stone Roses, a connection that reaches far back, all the way to the Oasis concert at Knebworth in 1996.

Squire himself, who mainly thanks to the debut album he made with his Stone Roses in 1989 had been one of the triggers that set off the Britpop bomb of the '90s, had voiced his disagreement with the movement that quickly sprang up afterwards, but made a notable exception precisely for Oasis, whom he considered the only ones to possess that certain something needed to write history.

It's no coincidence that, in 1996, as a clear mark of recognition, the Gallagher brothers invited Squire on stage at their legendary Knebworth concert, to let his inimitable guitar shine on "Champagne Supernova" and on the cover of the Fab Four's "I Am The Walrus". That's exactly the moment when the relationship between John and Liam began to settle into something lasting.

The mutual admiration and ongoing contact grew more intense over the years, with repeated declarations of respect made in the press, right up to those early June days in 2023, when a now-solo Liam invited Squire back to Knebworth to join his band once again on "Champagne Supernova", just as had happened almost thirty years earlier. It was there that a reinvigorated Squire played Liam some unreleased songs, confiding to the fiery former frontman of Oasis that only his distinctive voice and charisma could finally give his compositions real meaning. Liam needed no further convincing.

Squire carried on writing with renewed verve, long buried under layers of dusty tedium. The rest is all contained in the ten enjoyable tracks that make up this self-titled album, songs that go down easily and carry a scent of nostalgia.

After years of feuding and uncontrolled rumors, 2024 brought the sensational news of the reunion: Oasis have reformed and will play 15 shows in 2025 across the UK and Ireland. With the two eternal rivals writing on social media: "The planets have aligned". And the adventure begins again.

Contributions by Francesco Giordani (“Dig Out Your Soul”), Cristiano Orlando (“Oasis Knebworth 1996”, “C’mon You Know” and “Liam Gallagher & John Squire”)

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