How did Oasis get discovered?
Imagine if Brian Epstein had never wandered into the Cavern Club and discovered The Beatles or if Bob Dylan had never been spotted by Joan Baez and brought up on stage to duet. If one golden moment had been missed, the world might have missed out on history-changing artists. But luckily, fate always seemed to step in, or it did in the case of Oasis.
Part of what makes Oasis so beloved is their working-class roots. The Gallagher brothers are simply normal northern lads, just with the attitude and talents to rise to the top. But hailing from a small Manchester suburb and being raised by a low-income family, their origin wasn’t one all that conducive to hitting the big time. Music, like all creative fields, takes money. It’s the reason why working-class people are so underrepresented in these spaces and why making it typically comes easier to those with a level of disposable income, allowing them to pay for studio sessions, fund travel to and from early gigs, or even allowing them to not waste time working boring civilian jobs, but throw all their efforts into music.
The Gallagher brothers didn’t have that privilege. Instead, they had to do things the old-fashioned way: play as many gigs as they could in their local area, build up a following through word of mouth, and slowly grow the size of their crowds as they became hometown heroes.
The power of word of mouth cannot be underestimated. Building up a good reputation not just for being a great band but for being fun to be around or for a good laugh on the road will take a band far. In Oasis’ case, it took them to Glasgow. In May 1993, Sister Lovers, a group who rehearsed in the same space as them, invited them to come along up to Scotland to play on the same bill. That alone was a good opportunity, but when the audience of the night included Alan McGee, the founder of Creation Records, the small show at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut became a life-changing one.
It very nearly didn’t happen. When Oasis showed up for the show, they were initially refused entry as they weren’t on the bill. But they were simply an incredibly late addition, as promoter Geoff Ellis explained, “At the time, our offices were over in Pollokshields, and I was sitting in the basement when I got a call about 6pm telling me an extra band had turned up, some mates of Sister Lovers and was it OK for them to be added to the bill. I said well you know they’re sharing the backline with some other bands, we’re not expecting to pay them so I sorted them out with a few beers and everything.” The band were let in and onto the stage.
Everything about that night seemed to move in the band’s favour as if fate had set it up. McGee thought that too, as he just happened to be at the show that night for a random, last-minute night out. “People don’t like to believe in luck – they assume it’s too much of a coincidence that Sony sent me to the gig on a tip, but I really thought I was just going to surprise my mate,” he recalled in his autobiography, already being friends with the members of Sister Lovers.
The rest is history. McGee was wowed by the band and made it his mission to sign them, launch them in the UK, and help them become one of the biggest bands in history. However, while fate certainly played a hand, the real reason how and why Oasis were discovered was because of their friends, Sister Lovers, who orchestrated the whole thing, putting the band and the manager in the room together with an inkling that big things could come from that meeting.
But when did Alan McGee start Creation Records?
Alan McGee’s brainchild, Creation Records, was the result of many things. The Scottish music fan was already running a fanzine called Communication Blur, was in his own band, The Laughing Apple, and ran his own venue, The Communication Club. With so many fingers in so many different pies in the music world, launching a label seemed like the next challenge, and he took it.
The label launched in 1983, beginning with the release of ‘’73 in ’83’ by The Legends. From then on, it built slowly but surely, becoming one of the key independent labels of the mid-1980s indie boom as McGee worked with the likes of The Jesus and Mary Chain and Primal Scream. In 1992, to avoid going bust, McGee sold half of Creation to Sony, but then, only a year later, things changed when the label founder discovered Oasis, suddenly making him the manager and label boss of one of the biggest bands in the world.
