“I personally wouldn’t have”: The Oasis song Noel Gallagher never wanted to release
When Oasis was first starting, there was no question about who the leader was in the group. Noel Gallagher wasn’t given the nickname ‘The Chief’ by accident, and by the time they got to work on projects like Be Here Now, the whole band were basically just being given the chords of every song and being told how it went when it came time to record everything. But something changed in the gap between albums leading into the 2000s, and when working on Standing on the Shoulder of Giants, Noel admitted that ‘I Can See a Liar’ should have probably never seen the light of day.
Then again, the entire band was already in for a bit of a shakeup when it came time to work on the new material. With Bonehead and Guigsy leaving, they were now down to half-capacity, and after going through a drug-addled madness, Noel was now trying to become a completely different style of rock star without the drugs.
Although the greatest Oasis albums had to do with a bunch of Manchester lads trying to take on the entire world, Standing on the Shoulder of Giants was the first time that Noel sounded insecure. ‘Gas Panic!’ was already one of the most haunting songs that they had ever written, but looking through the entire record, it definitely feels half-finished by comparison.
‘Fuckin’ in the Bushes’ is a great way to introduce everything, but outside of that, tunes like ‘Sunday Morning Call’ are some of the more snoozy ballads that Noel ever wrote and ‘Where Did It All Go Wrong’ is a good indication of when their time in the sun started to cool a little bit. And regardless of how confident Liam was as a songwriter, ‘Little James’ is far from worthy of being counted among Noel’s classics, especially with how midtempo it is.
By the time you get to ‘I Can See A Liar’, though, it feels like the adrenaline starts pumping again out of nowhere. The entire record is downtempo, but this is the kind of tune that felt like a more chill version of ‘Bring It On Down’, complete with the same kind of Sex Pistols-style guitar licks.
Despite being one of the few rockers on the record, Noel never felt comfortable putting it on the final album, saying, “I personally wouldn’t have put [it] on the album. But Liam was, like, ‘It’s the f***ing Sex Pistols; we’ve got to have some fast ones on there because it’s a bit medium-paced.’ There’s a couple of songs that got shunted off onto B-sides of singles which should have gone on the album, but it’s either the singer sulking or, you know, have some semblance of f***ing normality in the studio.”
Then again, if they had brought some of those B-sides out from the vault, it could have been a far more balanced album. A tune like ‘Let’s All Make Believe’, for example, is far from the peppiest songs that they have ever written, but if it were put on the record in place of ‘I Can See A Liar’, we would be looking at one of the more introspective albums that Noel ever made.
Still, the disjointed nature of Standing on the Shoulder of Giants just does a better job of illustrating where the band’s head was at the time. This was the sound of them licking their wounds, and no matter how far they came to reaching the top of the mountain, no one really prepared them for what happened on the way down.
