The moment Noel Gallagher lost his way: “I went backwards”
Despite the fact that Noel Gallagher described Oasis’ third album, Be Here Now, as the sound of a band “fucking out of their minds on coke”, I actually think there are some good moments on the record.
Sure, it’s not as refined, energetic or crucially, socially revitalising as their preceding two records. And yes, ‘Stand By Me’ does in fact sound like the song a Benidorm tribute act of the band may have penned, when they felt bold enough to write their own material. But there remain some undeniably good moments on the record, namely ‘D’ You Know What I Mean?’ and ‘Fade In-Out’.
Obviously, Gallagher doesn’t do half measures when it comes to criticism, and so it’s unsurprising to hear him be so scathing about a record that didn’t quite hit the same heights as some of their previous hits, so what he actually meant to say was that Be Here Now was the album that marked the steady decline that eventually resulted in their break-up.
Stepping off stage from their triumphant Knebworth show during the summer of 1996, and into the studio for Be Here Now, there really wasn’t much more Oasis could do to assert their greatness. They were already at the very summit of the musical mountain, and as a band less inclined to shift their sonic identity, there was not a whole lot more that awaited them within the heady formula of gritty Britpop.
So as culture changed, and Oasis’ music didn’t change with it, the songwriting felt a little bit tired. Nothing they wrote after ‘Champagne Supernova’ ever really captured the zeitgeist in which they were living, and slowly but surely, they became almost parodies of themselves.
It wasn’t really until Noel Gallagher stepped into the shoes of his solo career that his songwriting could feasibly evolve and create tracks as brilliant as ‘It’s A Beautiful World’ or ‘Be Careful What You Wish For’.
So when he had a moment to breathe a much-needed sigh of relief and look forward to his creative future as a solo artist in 2011, he said, “I’m a better songwriter now than I was ten years ago, absolutely, but I went backwards at some point.”
Adding, “From the start of Be Here Now to Don’t Believe the Truth, I didn’t know what I was doing, songwriting-wise… I didn’t have any particular inspiration or direction, I was writing songs for the sake of it and just waiting for something to happen, then I wrote ‘The Importance of Being Idle’ and ‘Lyla’, and it went up from there.”
You can forgive Noel for falling into that trap, however. The very reason why he was rehashing sonic ideas and writing on autopilot was that there was a time when that formula was absolutely bulletproof. With his brother at the helm, those gritty, albeit simple, rock songs had everything you could ever want from music.
But for the return we saw in 2025 to be as triumphant as it was, both Gallagher and the rest of the world had to step away from a band that had given us so much and allow the music to move on.
