The Beatles cover Oasis recorded while “pissed as an arse”
If there were two things that the Gallagher brothers loved during their Oasis tenure, it was The Beatles and getting drunk. The band lived the archetypal rock and roll lifestyle, complete with flash clothes, trashed hotel rooms, and copious amounts of drink and drugs. As such, their reckless behaviour often bled into the recording and performing process, leading to a fair few disastrous gigs, along with some songs which are best forgotten. On the other hand, some of Oasis’ best-loved tracks occurred under the influence of one substance or another – namely, their crowd-pleasing cover of The Beatles.
Oasis were disciples of the Fab Four in every sense of the word. Everything from their songwriting to their haircuts was directly inspired by the work of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. In fact, The Beatles are maybe one of the only groups that neither Liam nor Noel have rallied against in interviews or onstage, thus showcasing the extent of their adoration. It should come as no surprise, then, that Oasis would often slip a Beatles cover into their setlists, the most prominent example being their version of ‘I Am the Walrus’.
Originally released by The Beatles back in 1967 for the Magical Mystery Tour film, Oasis found that the song was just as lovable in the age of Britpop. Throughout their performing career, the band performed the cover over 300 times and featured on the 1998 compilation album The Masterplan. Apparently, the band happened upon the cover while warming up at a Sony seminar in Gleneagles or, as Noel eloquently put it, “one of them shit things where all the twats in suits get together, and they roll on the new signings”.
“So we were doing the soundcheck,” Noel explained, “and we did ‘I Am The Walrus’. There was no-one there, it was empty”. Interestingly, it was the recording of that soundcheck in an empty room at a Sony seminar that made it onto the final album of The Masterplan. However, anybody who has listened to that record will know that ‘I Am the Walrus’ has crowd noise on it, so surely it can’t have been recorded in an empty room?
Luckily, the Oasis songwriter is on hand to set the record straight. In a track-by-track analysis of The Masterplan, he said, “I’m going to get in trouble for saying this, but the crowd noise was taken from a Faces bootleg album because it would look shit if you put ‘Live at Sony Seminar in Gleneagles’,” adding, “We had a version of it from the Cathouse in Glasgow, which sounded quite similar but it was fucking rubbish. So we thought, ‘Fuck it, no-one’ll fucking know.’”
It is a wonder that the Sony seminar version was good enough to make it to the album. After all, an empty hall in Gleneagles is hardly going to have the greatest acoustics. Added to that, Noel was apparently worse for wear during the performance. “I was pissed as an arse,” he affirmed, “It was ten in the morning when we got there, and I had to do these interviews with all these Sony people from around the world”.
Fittingly, given the circumstances in which it was recorded, the cover originally appeared as a b-side for the 1994 single ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’, on which it was listed as “Live Glasgow Cathouse June ’94”, though it should have actually been ‘Live Gleneagles Sony Seminar’, which, admittedly, sounds a lot less cool.
