Liam Gallagher on the bands who dominated the 1990s
Chances are that nothing would be accurately able to depict the whirlwind around Oasis in the late 1990s. Most artists had already seen Nirvana take over the world at the beginning of the decade, but if Kurt Cobain was talking about the pain that he felt inside, the Gallagher was reminding everyone that they had the potential to take on the entire world if they were up for it. And while everything they did was a tribute to the 1960s, Liam Gallagher considered Oasis and two of their Britpop peers to be the true successors to all the bands they idolised.
Throughout every piece of Oasis’s journey, it didn’t take most people long to figure out where they got their ideas from. John Lennon and Paul McCartney were practically baked into their DNA from the minute they put their first songs together, but Britpop wasn’t only about trying to ride off the coattails of the British Invasion.
Looking at Richard Ashcroft’s work with The Verve, he wanted to make something psychedelic that hardly anyone had stumbled on. Outside of pulling a little too liberally from The Rolling Stones for bullshit copyright reasons, ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ is still one of the finest songs to come out of the decade, and the rest of Urban Hymns isn’t that far behind with tunes like ‘The Rolling People’ and ‘Lucky Man’.
But even in the context of Britpop, Ocean Colour Scene differentiated themselves through the power of the songs alone. Although they weren’t on the same level as Noel Gallagher or anything, albums like Moseley Shoals took the basis of Britpop and threw in pieces of everything from The Jam to old-school singer-songwriters like James Taylor into the mix on some of their softer progressions.
During their prime, though, it was about more than trying to make a good song to compete with the likes of Damon Albarn. It was about proving that songs about the people on the street still had the potential to get into the charts and change the world, and when all three bands occupied the top spots, Liam knew that the 1990s had found their answer to the British Invasion.
When discussing Liam’s demeanour during the tour for Be Here Now, Paolo Hewitt remembers him describing them as the three biggest successors to the original rock gods, saying in Forever the People, “At the hotel afterwards, Ocean Colour Scene’s bass player, Damon Minchella, comes over for a drink. He says, ‘Next week, The Verve will go in number-one on the album charts. That means the top three will be The Verve, Oasis, and Ocean Colour Scene’. Liam goes, ‘It’s like the 1960s, Beatles, Stones and The Who.’”
While it doesn’t necessarily take a rocket scientist to see which one Oasis falls under, The Verve are probably the closest to The Who in terms of having an overarching vision for their music. They may not have been around as long, but what Richard Ashcroft did with the group wasn’t all that dissimilar to how Pete Townshend operated on records like Who’s Next.
Since Ocean Colour Scene is still going, they have secured the same road-dog spirit as The Stones, perhaps with a bit more Bowie-style grandeur in the mix. Oasis may have still been the band that everyone identifies with that scene, but even if things were about to shift towards garage rock acts like The Strokes and The White Stripes, it did look like the 1960s were about to come back after years in the dark.
