Noel Gallagher on “the last significant song I wrote” for Oasis
Noel Gallagher is always a musician working on instinct. From his slew of hits with Oasis to the wild adventures of his solo career, Gallagher has become one of the biggest musicians in the world by following his nose and creating timeless melodies that are still moving hearts to this day. Although Gallagher has never been one to badmouth any of his newer material, he admits there was a clear snap when Oasis started to fall apart.
While making the album What’s the Story Morning Glory, Gallagher was still riding the momentum of his previous material, writing songs out of nowhere and turning them into classics like ‘Morning Glory’ and ‘Champagne Supernova’. Although most of the album’s songs were finished well before they went in to record them, the B-sides he wrote for the project were equally as brilliant.
When talking about that era in the Morning Glory retrospective, Gallagher remembered when he wrote the song ‘It’s Better People’ while all of the band’s gear was being loaded out of the studio. Having to set everything back up, Noel whistled through the song in an hour, only to be told that the single for ‘Wonderwall’ needed a B-side.
Going into the studio with his guitar, Gallagher created the backing track for what would become ‘The Masterplan’, featuring the most brilliant chord changes of his career. Though Creation Records hesitated to have a song as good as ‘The Masterplan’ out as a B-side, Noel stood his ground, putting it alongside the band’s most famous song.
When talking about putting the song together, Gallagher thought that ‘The Masterplan’ marking the end of an era for Oasis material, recalling: “‘Wonderwall’ was going to be a single, we were a track short, and we needed a B-side, and I would go off and write a B-side. It turns out that everything I wrote was amazing. ‘The Masterplan’ might be one of the last of the great, culturally significant songs I ever wrote.”
Considering Gallagher’s disdain for the band’s subsequent album Be Here Now in recent years, ‘The Masterplan’ marks the end of what he considers to be the iconic era of the band. Not including any Be Here Now songs in the best-of collection Stop the Clocks, Gallagher was keen to discuss the significance of ‘The Masterplan’, explaining in Lock the Box, “I said ‘You told me to write B-sides, and that’s what I’ve done’. But they’re like, ‘It’s too good’. And I said, ‘Well, I don’t write shit songs’. Fast forward a few more years, and I said, ‘Can we put ‘Masterplan’ out as a single.”
While some of Oasis’s best material never made it onto any of their albums, Gallagher is happy that fans have to go digging for their greatest songs, saying, “I kinda like the fact that there are B-sides that should have been A-sides. I wish fans would stop going about them. That makes Oasis what they are. You don’t just get to sit and listen to it on an album. There are another 12 tunes. [Songs like] ‘It’s Good to Be Free’, ‘Rockin Chair’, ‘Headshrinker’, ‘Listen Up’. Those were good enough to launch any band’s career.”
Although Be Here Now may have brought an abrupt halt to Oasis’s momentum, ‘The Masterplan’ remains one of their definitive statements. Just a few years after becoming the biggest band on Earth, Gallagher proved that he was still the same boy from Manchester on this gorgeous ballad.
