The Oasis song Noel Gallagher never figured out: “I have no idea”
No one needs to have a degree in music dissection to understand what Noel Gallagher is talking about half the time. For every Oasis song that cuts to the point, there are more than a few abstract lyrics that lay on the psychedelic sounds too thick half the time. Gallagher likes to be cagey about what his tracks are actually about, but he admits that ‘Champagne Supernova’ still confuses him to this day.
It’s not like the Britpop epic has an extensive lyric sheet, though. Given that there are only two verses, a chorus, and a bridge spread across seven minutes, Gallagher wasn’t going to spend his time making subpar lyrics to fit the song when the best line had clearly already been made.
Even by Noel’s standards of writing confusing lyrics, ‘Champagne Supernova’ does stand out as one of the weirdest tracks he ever put to paper. He may have been trying to capture a drug high, but someone being able to slowly walk down a hall and be faster than a cannonball feels like something a stoner came up with and thought it was some sage proverb that no one had unlocked.
For Gallagher, even he has given up trying to decipher what the piece is all about, recalling, “[Audiences] think that it’s the greatest thing. They’re sitting there crying like it’s a football anthem. That’s an amazing thing, and I stood up there playing it, and part of me is thinking, ‘What is this song about? I have no idea.’”
Then again, the fact that it doesn’t make sense might be the point. While critics may get all riled up about Noel Gallagher not putting his philosophy on life down on paper when he goes into the studio, ‘Champagne Supernova’ may be the one track where the nonsense plays to its benefit, like The Beatles’ ‘I Am the Walrus’.
Considering Gallagher was such an enormous fan of Nirvana’s style of songwriting, there might be some lingering influences from how Kurt Cobain used to write. While Cobain himself would have said that a lot of his lyrics didn’t make any sense in their classics, every single line seemed to have one or two meanings attached to them.
That might be more in line with what’s going on here. A line like “Where were you while we were getting high” might just be some stoned-out piece of jargon that Noel decided to shoehorn into the song. Still, it could also be an ode to the more innocent days before growing up, where all that there was to worry about was getting stoned on the weekends and escaping the rest of the day.
Those kinds of interpretations aren’t for Noel to decide anymore, though. Once they are brought into the world, everyone will have their own interpretations of what his words mean, and it’s up to everyone else to draw their own conclusions about whether the song is a drug-fuelled soundscape or something more poetic. It might be gibberish on the page, but the way that it makes the people feel is more important than any kind of throwaway lyric.
