The iconic Oasis album Noel Gallagher hates hearing: “I fucking hate the sound of that record”
There’s probably no one on Earth with a higher opinion of Oasis’ music than Noel Gallagher. From the first time he opened his mouth to do an interview about his material, Noel has never minced words about being in the greatest band in the world, making one classic after another throughout the 1990s before going out in a blaze of glory after a cancelled show in 2009.
With the benefit of hindsight, though, Noel has learned to reevaluate a handful of his greatest albums. They might not have been entirely the first of their kind, but they single-handedly ensured that they wouldn’t be the last. The band’s legacy transcended music and entered the realm of cultural phenomena. In some corners of the world, they are perceived not only as one of Britain’s biggest bands but a distilled representation of Britain in general.
The peaks and the troughs of the band were so pronounced, like the seismic shifts in Elon Musk’s hairline, that ranking their back catalogue in some sort of qualified order should be a simple task, however, despite the fact that the great and the god-awful mix about as distinctively as oil and water, pulling them apart is a difficult task in itself. Their early gold run offered up a succession of records that prove as difficult to pull apart as chewing gum and hair, while Oasis’s 21st-century slump offers an indistinguishable pile of stink.
When reviewing his earlier material, Noel has stood by the fact that he doesn’t like the band’s third outing, Be Here Now. Even though the band were on top of the world and was staking their claim as one of the most incredible acts that rock and roll had ever seen, their overindulgence of drugs hindered the record in Noel’s mind, thinking that it was a missed opportunity compared to their earlier work.
That critical analysis even applied to the band’s defining moment, What’s the Story Morning Glory. Building off the momentum of their first handful of singles, the group’s sophomore release catapulted them to rock legends, with one masterpiece after another like ‘Wonderwall’ and ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’.
When talking about the making of the record later, though, Noel thought that the production could have been much better, telling NME, “I don’t like the sound of Morning Glory at all. I fucking hate the sound of that record. It’s got all this crunch”.
Granted, the crunch Noel was alluding to helps give a handful of the songs merit. While the tender moments like ‘Wonderwall’ may have a sparse production, the overblown sounds of ‘Champagne Supernova’ helped create a cacophony in the listener’s head, putting them into the same drugged-out state that Noel describes in the lyrics.
Although Noel had an equal amount of bile for tracks off of their 2000s comeback album Standing on the Shoulder of Giants, he still thinks that their debut Definitely Maybe is their finest moment, explaining, “I think the only album that’s perfect is Definitely Maybe”.
Compared to the production of Morning Glory, the group’s debut has a more punk aesthetic behind it, boasting the most straight-ahead rock songs that Noel would ever write, like ‘Rock n’ Roll Star’ and ‘Supersonic’. Despite not having the cleanliness of its follow-up, the songs even draw from the sounds of shoegaze music occasionally, crafting extended outros that lure the listener into a trance when they put on their headphones on songs like ‘Slide Away’ and ‘Columbia’.
Even though Noel may have thought that the execution was better on their debut, he knew that every one of Oasis’s albums had more than a few flaws in them, recalling, “That’s just what they are. They’re not perfect by any means. And if you did make the fucking most perfect album and you accepted it was perfect, it’s over. What’s the point after that?”.
While Noel may have mixed feelings about the group’s most successful outing, it has helped influence any aspiring songwriter who’s wanted to plug in their guitar and hear music that excites them. What’s the Story Morning Glory may not be perfect in Noel’s mind, but that’s not accounting for the massive impact that it’s had over generations of rock fans.
