The Oasis song inspired by an insult: “Your music’s shite”
The vision Noel Gallagher had for Oasis’ debut album Definitely Maybe was to make the loudest album on the pub jukebox, which also guided how the album was mixed. Fair play to them, as an album heralded as the starting gun of the so-called ‘Loudness Wars’, they achieved that with aplomb. However, it was also the vision for how the album was arranged too. While the band carried the accusation of being Beatles copyists, they were also ripping off the Sex Pistols, and they wanted the album to hit like Never Mind The Bollocks had two decades previously.
Left to his own devices, Noel’s first thought to achieve this was to smother the album in as many layers of distorted guitar riffs as possible. I mean it too well; a version of the album had already been finished when producer Owen Morris came on board, and the first thing he did was cut the guitar overdubs on each song by half. There were still over 30 per track.
However, it’s telling that some of the album’s most direct and honest moments come from when they turned everything down and trusted nothing but Liam’s vocals and Noel’s songwriting. The album’s final track, coming in after the astonishing ‘Slide Away’, couldn’t be more of a departure from that track’s starry-eyed romanticism. To the point that ‘Married With Children’ seems to be a bitter, deeply cynical response to it. The ‘Slide Away’ couple, ten years and two kids, after those moments of dazzling, all-encompassing love, curdled into a bitter reality.
Liam lets the snarl fade into tired disappointment as he reads his lass the riot act for all her supposed wrongs. Saying he “hates the way that you are so sarcastic, and you’re not very bright” before shit-talking the poor girl’s books, friends and, crucially, her music. That key lyric, “Your music’s shite, it keeps me up all night”, was actually the starting point for the whole song, except Noel wasn’t dispensing with that withering put-down, but rather its recipient.
Noel has mentioned on a few occasions that the downpour of great songs that informed the first batch of Oasis records came to him without him knowing what was going on. Inspiration would just strike, and he’d have to write it down. On occasion, inspiration would strike when he was in bed, and he’d jump out to try and put down what he’d imagined to paper or tape, much to the chagrin of his girlfriend Louise Jones, who was often woken up by this.
One fateful time was one too many, and Jones told him to come back to bed because, in her words, “Your music’s shite anyway, it keeps me up all night.” Thus, Noel added that line to his backlog of possible lyrics and took his first steps towards Definitely Maybe’s slightly baffling epilogue. However, as with literally anything Noel Gallagher has ever written, there’s also a lot of his relationship with Liam in there too, especially as the songwriting progressed.
In fact, the title came after seeing the American sitcom of the same name and not recognising it as Jones and him but Liam and him. He once told Melody Maker, “I looked at them two in the show and looked at us two, and I thought, that’s us, that is!” Maybe, in that case, we should all have seen 2024’s seismic reunion announcement coming. After all, as they fortuitously sang, “It will be nice to be alone for a week or two / But I know then I will be / right back here with you.”
