“I insisted”: The one Oasis song Noel Gallagher never allowed Liam to sing
When you’re the primary songwriter in a band, it’s easy to become a little power-hungry. After all, you’re out there making sure that every musician is getting paid when out on the road. Hence, the responsibility of coming in with new material can cause anyone’s head to grow a few sizes too big when they start making the rounds on the touring circuit. While Noel Gallagher managed to keep things fairly level-headed among his bandmates, it’s not like he couldn’t have the final say on which songs would be shared with the rest of Oasis whenever he went into the studio.
Then again, Noel was never known to be humble regarding his songwriting gifts. Countless interviews have shown him to be defiantly proud of his talents and proclaiming himself to be one of the biggest songwriters since The Beatles, so it’s not like he was lacking in self-confidence compared to the other Britpop heavyweights. But if Noel wrote the songs, Liam was the perfect mouthpiece to deliver everything.
Although the former’s voice suited some of their greatest tunes just fine, Liam was the one who had the attitude and the look to pull everything off to a tee. Not many people can manage to stay perfectly still when they play and somehow engage every single person in the room. Without even touching the mic stand, Liam was absolutely magnetic whenever he sang tunes like ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’, always toeing the line between someone spoiling for a fight and an old-school crooner.
There was no contest who was going to sing the better rock and roll songs, notwithstanding Noel’s excellent vocals. Even when the band became more of a committee than a malevolent dictatorship in the 2000s, it made no sense for the latter to be the one to sing tracks like ‘The Hindu Times’ or ‘Lyla’. But there was some overlap between Noel’s sweeter material and his brother’s rock and roll songs.
Liam may have done a version of ‘Lord Don’t Slow Me Down’, but there’s an organic feeling to the way that Noel shouts his way through the track, and even ‘Songbird’ was proof that ‘The Chief’s’ little brother did have a softer side. But when it came to Heathen Chemistry, Noel said that no other person was more qualified to sing ‘She Is Love’ than he.
The song may have only taken a few minutes to get down, but given how it was about Noel’s relationship with his partner at the time, he knew that it would be a cold day in hell before he gave Liam a chance to sing it, saying, “It took around 40 minutes to record. The chords go round and round and round. I was living in a hotel room, and I had a new girlfriend and…you know. It’s about being really happy on a Sunday morning. I’m chuffed with the lyrics. It’s the only one I insisted on singing on. Then Liam accused me of nicking his arrangement from ‘Songbird’, not realising it was written, recorded and arranged six months before.”
Admittedly, there are a few similarities between ‘Songbird’ and ‘She is Love’, but certainly not enough to warrant plagiarism accusations. Liam’s ballad of the record is a lot more cut and dry compared to everything else, whereas Noel’s lighthearted tune feels like something that Paul McCartney would have made when penning some of his ‘granny music’ tracks when first starting out with Wings.
Although Noel eventually became less democratic about which songs he wanted to sing in the group later, this kind of tune feels most like a precursor to what he would do in his solo years. Liam may have been the frontman for a good reason, evident whenever he took to the stage, but there was no way that anyone could deliver a tune like this with as much passion as Noel did.
