The Oasis song Noel Gallagher wrote by mistake: “I don’t like the guitar solo”
Guitar music mutated into new, strange forms in the 1990s. The United States saw the rise of a new style called grunge, which concealed catchy choruses under dark lyrics and growling guitars. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom spawned shoegaze, its name alluding to the bands’ excessive use of pedals to distort their strums. Audiences were intrigued by this gloomier, more alternative usage of the instrument, but that didn’t stop Britpop from emerging and excelling in the same era.
At odds with the doom and gloom of the guitar scenes that surrounded them, Britpoppers returned the instrument to more melodic stylings. There was no distortion or fuzz like the shoegazers, only bright chords and catchy choruses. There were no weighty thematic focuses like within the grunge scene, only laddy tales of British youth. The genre offered something softer to willing audiences, and bands like Blur and Oasis were propelled to the top as a result.
Britpop took heavy inspiration from the guitar bands of the 1960s, perhaps most notably The Beatles and The Kinks. They called back to their more classic approaches to songwriting, concocting catchy guitar riffs and singalong-worthy choruses. “I’m not the godfather of Britpop,” The Kinks singer Ray Davies once clarified during an interview with The Guardian, “More a concerned uncle.”
Oasis completely modelled themselves on The Fab Four, but they also borrowed inspiration from The Kinks. In fact, Noel Gallagher once directly compared an Oasis tune to the ‘Waterloo Sunset’ band. During a conversation with Melody Maker, the songwriter spoke about his dislike for Be Here Now reject, ‘Stay Young’, and compared it to The Kinks.
The song was one of the first that Oasis recorded for their third record, Be Here Now, which Gallagher suggested was because it was one of the weakest. “I don’t like it,” Gallagher commented before making the perplexing claim that he wrote the song by mistake. “Why it didn’t go on the album is because when I got back to England I wrote Magic Pie,” he explained, “Sounds like the Kinks as well I think. I don’t like the guitar solo on it. I don’t like the sound of it either.”
‘Stay Young’ featured Oasis’ characteristically bright strums and anthemic vocals, with lyrics that urge you to “stay young and invincible”. It doesn’t quite sound like a song that Ray Davies would helm, but it is an example of the more melodic stylings that Britpop tended to gravitate towards. Despite believing that it sounded like one of the genre’s biggest inspirations, Gallagher disliked the song so much that it was omitted from Be Here Now in 1997.
The song was released as a B-side to the album’s lead single, ‘D’You Know What I Mean?’ and found more favour with audiences than anticipated. A year later, it would appear on the band’s compilation album of B-sides, The Masterplan, alongside a Beatles cover and the iconic ‘Half the World Away’.
Though Gallagher’s suggestion that ‘Stay Young’ “sounds like the Kinks” may be a bit of a stretch, it is easy to feel the influence of Davies and his bandmates on their catalogue and across Britpop in a wider sense. Their bright strums and gorgeous melodies were formative to bands like Blur and Oasis, who updated them for a modern audience with football chant-style vocals and laddy lyricism.
