‘The Dying Of The Light’: The song Noel Gallagher called his “classic songwriting”
It’s the early 1990s, and guitar music has gone gloomy. In the States, grunge bands that tackle weighty topics with gritty strums are gaining mainstream airplay, making the most of hair metal fatigue. In the United Kingdom, there’s an underbelly of guitarists discovering the art of stacking your pedalboard, burying melodies under layers and layers of distortion and fuzz. Enter Britpop.
In complete contrast with the guitar scenes that preceded and surrounded them, Britpoppers preferred to look back at the past rather than at the future. In their studios, there would be no experimentation with pedals or sludgy soundscapes, only bright strums and Beatles influences. It turned out audiences were looking for something a little easier on the ears, so bands like Blur and Oasis quickly blew up.
It wasn’t necessarily an innovative genre but, rather, a return to a more classic form of songwriting. Oasis rose out of the suburbs of Manchester with love for the Fab Four, which they channelled into radio-friendly melodies and brown bowl cuts. They found favour with the masses because their must was “just rock ‘n’ roll,” but updated for a contemporary, football scarf-wearing audience.
Decades on, this classic nature of their songwriting has allowed some of their biggest hits to endure to this day. Huge tracks like ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ and ‘Wonderwall’, with their sports chant-esque slurred vocals, remain just as singalong-worthy now as they were in the 1990s. As soon as they’re played on the radio or in a karaoke booth, it’s almost impossible not to sing along.
It seems that Noel Gallagher, one-half of the squabbling brothers at the centre of Oasis, tried to maintain this classic songwriting style when he embarked upon a solo career. After the demise of Oasis in the late 2000s, Gallagher took up leadership of a new project dubbed Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds.
He wouldn’t reach the same heights of success as he did with Oasis, but the sonic direction didn’t stray far from his Britpop days. Tracks like ‘If I Had A Gun…’ contain that distinctive Oasis-style strum and the same anthemic lyrical style. There was one song, in particular, that Gallagher saw as typifying his original style of writing.
During a chat with NME, the rock ‘n’ roll star chatted viewers through his second studio record, Chasing Yesterday, track by track. When he reached track five, ‘The Dying Of The Light’, he described it as “a song that’s more of my classic songwriting, if such a thing exists”.
Such a thing does exist, and it’s right there in ‘The Dying Of The Light’. The track isn’t quite as catchy as the hits he helmed in Oasis, but it’s driven by those bright acoustic guitars, by melodies that are pleasing to the ear, and by twinkling keys that add to the emotive nature of the track. Lyrically, the song deals with a universal feeling but simplifies it down.
“Gonna try my best to get there,” Gallagher sings, “But I can’t afford the bus fare.” It’s certainly a lyric that could have made it into an Oasis song back in the day. ‘The Dying Of The Light’ is undoubtedly Gallagher returning to his classic form of songwriting, to the beautiful simplicity of the Britpop days, to songs that are palatable to the masses.
