“Our moment”: the album Noel Gallagher thought would be Oasis’ peak
Any band is normally about more than flying blind and seeing where their songs take them. Outside of everyone trying to make the best music they can, there’s usually a certain plan they have for what happens when they reach the top or where they plan on taking their music once it catches the ear of the public. Although Noel Gallagher only saw Oasis going up, he knew that everything would hinge on specific releases.
However, in the early days of Oasis, there was no one else in England who could touch them. By the time they released their first single, ‘Supersonic’, their momentum was already starting to build as one of the most honest bands to rock the UK since Sex Pistols. But Noel was only getting started for what the rest of the decade had in store for them.
If Kurt Cobain represented a sharp change in music in the early 1990s, the Gallagher brothers embodied everything great about the decade. Since ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was built off a certain degree of anger and frustration on Cobain’s part, Gallagher was writing about living forever and the joys of being in a rock and roll band despite not knowing if he would ever see those heights.
But if Definitely Maybe was the proof of concept for what Oasis could do, What’s the Story Morning Glory blew everything into the stratosphere. Suddenly, Noel had become the kind of seasoned songwriter that he had always dreamt of, and when the rest of the group followed behind him, tunes like ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ were being looked at as modern classics for the Britpop movement.
When you hit the ceiling on the second record, there’s no place to go but down, and Be Here Now is the clearest indication of that. Despite tunes like ‘Champagne Supernova’ pushing the production to the limit, hearing the band fill up two separate recording consoles’ worth of tracks meant that everything sounded like it was either clipping the entire time or actively trying to give the listener tinnitus.
What’s even more tragic is when Noel talked about his thought process for Be Here Now, saying, “Recording [What’s the Story], nobody realised that that was our moment. I thought our moment was the one after. That’s when I started to overthink it, on Be Here Now.” But the reason Oasis’ third outing doesn’t work has nothing to do with the songs. It’s that no one knew when to stop.
The excess of being in a group for that long started to look increasingly ridiculous, and by the time everyone was in fur coats, who really cared anymore? This was supposed to be a small indie band, and now here they were, making the kind of overblown production that Axl Rose must have followed to the letter when putting out Chinese Democracy with Guns N’ Roses.
But really, most people should be lucky that we even got that kind of momentum from a group in the first place. Be Here Now may not have done what everyone envisioned it would at the time, but it does put a little bit more shine on the classics that it stands next to.
