Noel Gallagher names his favourite Liam Gallagher performance
Oasis fans aren’t going to find too many nice words between the Gallagher brothers. If there’s anything expected from Noel and Liam’s behaviour, it’s usually dysfunction, either from taking shots at each other in the press or pulling out of gigs because of how volatile their personalities can be at times. For all of the mudslinging between Britpop’s favourite sons, Noel has a soft spot for one Oasis song, specifically because of his brother.
When talking about Oasis’ classics in the box set Lock the Box, Noel singled out ‘Slide Away’ as one of his favourites, saying: “I think it’s [Liam’s] best ever singing on that”. Noel also mentioned breezing through the writing of the song as well, recalling in a documentary on their debut album, “We actually phoned Johnny Marr and asked him could we borrow some of his guitars because we didn’t have that many. He sent down this Les Paul, I took it out of its case, and the song wrote itself”.
Though ‘Slide Away’ was always meant to be a pivotal song on the group’s debut album Definitely Maybe, it took a lot of work to get there. While the original plan was to make the record in Monnow Valley because of its proximity to The Stone Roses’ recording studio, the end result sounded soft, according to longtime Oasis roadie Mark Coyle. After re-recording the album at Sawmills Studios on an island, Creation Records’ Alan McGee was still dissatisfied with the songs, thinking they didn’t sound close to what Oasis was capable of in a live setting.
Although the band couldn’t afford to record the album incessantly, lightning struck when they got producer Owen Morris to remix the tracks they originally had. Aside from the acoustic demo of ‘Married With Children’ that closes out the album, Morris took the tracks and boosted them as far as they would go, employing a ‘brick walling’ technique whereby every instrument is pushed to the maximum limit it can go before sound compression.
Morris did include a handful of vocal overdubs, but the version of ‘Slide Away’ is from the original Monnow Valley sessions. Noel wasn’t the only one who thought that ‘Slide Away’ was Liam’s finest moment. Guitarist Gem Archer also singled out ‘Slide Away’ as a favourite, remarking, “I don’t know if they did it as part of the album sessions, but that was the vocal, and they would build stuff around it. You always get those tracks where you’re like ‘That’s a keeper’, y’know?”.
Coyle would later praise Liam for his refusal to change his accent when he sang, saying: “He had a very Mancunian delivery which, at the time, the bands that were coming out of Manchester, they weren’t singing in fake American accents. The singers used to sing as they talked”. Though the melody of ‘Slide Away’ might not be the most difficult in terms of range, Liam exceeds in what emotion he puts into his vocal, sounding like he means every word he’s singing.
For years, Oasis used the song as a staple of their live set, being one of Liam’s shining moments on the mic. Although Noel would incorporate the song into his solo catalogue once the band split up, Liam would continue to make ‘Slide Away’ a staple of his live shows. There’s an old saying that no one sings a tune like its composer, but Liam turned Noel’s song into his own from the first time he sang it.
