Can Oasis’ rise to stardom be credited to a missed train?
“People don’t like to believe in luck,” Alan McGee once said.
And while that is true, for the most part, it’s hard to believe that the moments leading up to Oasis’ discovery were anything but a hefty dose of luck and talent.
Everything the Gallagher brothers achieved, back then and even now, came from their embodiment of the working-class ethos. Or not so much ethos but a general attitude, towards everything from the music business itself to the idea of privilege. Before they “made it”, as it were, they weren’t enjoying their neatly-placed springboard from a bed of entitlement – because there was no such thing.
Instead, they were doing the one thing most working-class musicians do when trying to get a foot in the door and playing as many gigs as they could. Most of what worked around this time, for them anyway, was sheer hearsay. Word of mouth, as they say. And that, for a band like Oasis, was their saving grace. Just as it appeared for Arctic Monkeys so many years later, being talked about was what eventually brought them to Glasgow in May 1993.
They’d been invited to play with a group called Sister Lovers at a place called King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, likely a situation that one of the brothers sighed with a roll of the eyes before deciding it’s something they ought to do if they were to ever chance getting anywhere. But from there, a series of events painted this out to be a strange sort of fate, one that only worked by almost not working out at all.
After all, the first hurdle was getting through the door. When they got there, they were almost turned away because, apparently, they weren’t even on the bill. And then when they eventually got in, Creation Records founder McGee almost hadn’t been there either – only there by chance when he missed a train and went there with some time to kill. Turns out, though, that it wasn’t as cut and dry as that, and McGee was actually there because he had the hots for a girl there.
“The truth is, I was chasing a girl. That is why I went to King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut that night. I fancied someone,” he said. To McGee’s credit, and something that he often defends too, is that, despite what people love to say, his “discovery” of Oasis wasn’t entirely on a whim. There was something in Liam and Noel that pulled him in, something that could be pinned down to sheer instinct rather than taking the plunge out of something closer to boredom.
So while the truth of Oasis’ start is batted around like a juicy bit of trivia, missed train or no missed train, their rise would have probably coincided with McGee anyway. Especially with his general knack for being in the right place at the right time, and the Gallagher brothers’ unrelenting devotion to getting to where they needed, or wanted, to be. An authenticity that came from a bit of luck every now and then.
But with McGee, it also came from somewhere deeper that also knew how to spot their timely end when it came knocking. Because, in his view, bands like them often went on and on, not knowing when to stop, when all that filled their eyeline was the prospect of more cash. But in the end, when they eventually called it a day, McGee remembers it was done with more honesty than most of their peers could ever muster.
