The 2000 Oasis album Noel Gallagher couldn’t stand: “I had no drive”
Even for someone who claims to be one of the eternal gods of music, Noel Gallagher has been far from perfect.
If you’ve looked at the sensationalist headlines that he’s made over the years, you probably already know that, but for the three or four people that don’t, it’s probably not the best idea to wish that some of your biggest musical adversaries die of AIDs in print whenever working on stirring up controversy. But even if Noel has managed to put his foot in his mouth numerous times over the years, he has the ability to admit when his songwriting has stalled more than a few times back in the day.
Whenever you’re talking about Oasis, though, every single fan seems to go back to Be Here Now as the moment where everything went wrong. The band were clearly coked out of their minds, and they released an album that was nothing but a bunch of meaningless tunes about being one of the biggest bands in the world. Or at least that’s the narrative that everyone wants you to think half the time.
Because aside from the conceptual idea of pushing every single song to the max, the songs themselves are still fairly solid. If the whole thing had been given a proper remix, we probably wouldn’t have been having a conversation about the record to this day, but since it managed to stop the band’s momentum dead in its tracks and cost them half of their bandmates, it’s hard not to see it as anything but a failure.
After all, Noel had already figured that the end of Be Here Now was going to be the end of his career, but after trying his best to keep the band going throughout the 2000s, Standing on the Shoulder of Giants was the first time he felt like the songwriting had got in the way. Be Here Now still saw him making killer melodies, but this was the first time the band seemed to sound completely different.
That should go without saying since they were missing Guigsy and Bonehead, but Noel felt that the whole record shouldn’t have been made in the first place, saying, “We should have never made Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants. I’d come to the end. At the time, I had no reason or desire to make music. I had no drive. We’d sold all these fucking records and there just seemed to be no point. I went ahead and did it, even though I had no inspiration and couldn’t find inspiration anywhere. I just wrote songs for the sake of making an album.”
But the fact that Noel didn’t have that much inspiration feels like him intentionally trying to take a step backwards as well. If you think about it, going back and making a less polished record would have been exactly what the fans wanted after Be Here Now, but even if Noel thought his songwriting was at an all-time low, the fact that he could still come up with the goods on tracks like ‘Gas Panic!’ gave a bit more insight into what he was working on at the time.
Getting one of Liam’s songs on the record was the first time that he was willing to relinquish a little bit of control, but a lot of Noel’s songs are a lot more introspective this time around. This was the sound of a man that had finally touched the sky and was on his way back down to Earth, and even if he had more than a few bags to unpack along the way, it was interesting enough to hear him trying to make the best tunes that he could.
Because even if Standing on the Shoulder of Giants wasn’t the best album in the world, you can’t say that it’s lacking in inspiration. The fact that the band were able to make an album after Be Here Now is commendable enough, but hearing Noel start to make music again was a lot more interesting than to see the band trying to spin their wheels and try to be the same Britpop band they used to be.
