An unwanted anthem: The Oasis song Noel Gallagher wished he had never written
Not every song can be a winner. Every artist has a couple of tracks they wish they could erase from their discography, whether it’s because they took an artistic misstep, failed to connect with audiences, or simply don’t match the direction of the project anymore. Guitar legends Oasis are no exception, though Noel Gallagher’s regrets certainly don’t stem from a lack of success or insecurity in his creative vision.
In fact, the song Gallagher wishes he could delete from history is actually one of the Britpop band’s biggest hits, a piece still beloved by the masses decades after its release. After a string of successes in the early 1990s, including their beloved debut ‘Supersonic’ and the iconic ‘Wonderwall’, Oasis delivered yet another banger in 1996 with the release of ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’.
The track featured all of the characteristics that had come to define Oasis: odes to the sounds of the 1960s and, more specifically, to The Beatles, alongside drawn-out, singalong-worthy choruses. The latter began with the anthemic line, “And so Sally can wait, she knows it’s too late as we’re walking on by,” a phrase that has been belted in pubs and clubs all over the world, but one that Gallagher would grow to regret including in the track.
According to biographer Paolo Hewitt, who wrote Forever the People: 6 Months on the Road with Oasis, Gallagher wasn’t exactly the biggest fan of ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’. “I remember him picking up his guitar and walking up the road to a prestigious MTV appearance to play ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’,” he recalled to MailOnline, “No bodyguards, no blacked-out cars. On the way, he said to me, ‘I wish I had never written that song.’”
It’s a statement that will take fans by surprise – how, and why, would Gallagher possibly regret writing ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’, a song that topped the charts and became integral to their legacy? Gallagher’s reasoning wasn’t to do with the piece itself but rather the questioning that would follow from its lyrics. “Because for the next year, everyone is going to ask me who the hell ‘Sally’ in the chorus is,” he explained to Hewitt.
Gallagher was right. Amidst praise for the song, audiences and critics longed to know who Sally was, who inspired that increasingly iconic chorus. For a while, Gallagher refused to give in to those questions, shrugging it off whenever the topic came up in conversation. But perhaps his evasion of the question was also down to the fact that he simply couldn’t answer it.
“I have no recollection of writing that,” he recalled in First and Last. “We were on tour, and once the gig finished, it turned into a strip club. And I often wonder, ‘Is Sally a stripper I met?’ Because we went out on a night out, and I woke up the next day, and there was the song on a piece of paper.” Noel’s account of the night doesn’t give audiences the answer they were looking for, but it gives us a new take on Sally.
Really, the girl in the song wasn’t inspired by a real person. Noel’s decision to include the name Sally was a sonic choice rather than an emotional one, which is perhaps why he dreaded the incoming questioning back in the mid-1990s. But it certainly wasn’t worth wishing away one of the most famous songs in his entire catalogue.
