The first song Noel Gallagher ever wrote
He has been hailed as one of the greatest songwriters of his generation, namely by himself. However, it is hard to deny the calibre of Noel Gallagher‘s songwriting. As well as releasing ubiquitous classics that have not only transcended him and his band Oasis but become so widely beloved that they are now a part of the global lexicon.
Along with his younger brother, Liam Gallagher, they took over the music world in the 1990s with their band Oasis with a blistering array of tunes. Built out of the cornerstones of Britain’s finest rock and roll exports, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Smiths and The Stone Roses, the Gallagher brothers and their merry band of Mancunian cohorts dominated the decade with number one albums and anthems as built for pint-spilling pub joy as stadium-sized revelry.
This unique ability to deliver local themes to a universal audience would make Oasis a giant of a band and allow Noel Gallagher to ascend the throne as Britain’s finest songwriter of the day. However, few people may know that while Noel is rightly considered the creative backbone of the group, he was actually the last Gallagher brother to join Oasis.
Noel would join the band in 1991, just a few years before they exploded onto the music scene. However, before he joined the group, he was still a prolific songwriter. According to one Oasis blogger, he had written countless tracks before joining the band, including a tape from 1988, when Noel was only 21, that includes eight unheard songs.
The tape was found ten years later and saw demos from Noel which ranged from the very good to the very poor. The tape would later be put up for sale at auction house Christie’s; however, it didn’t meet its valuation and was later sold privately. One thing we can be sure of is that it wasn’t Noel who bought the tape, as recalled in Paolo Hewitt’s 1999 book Forever The People: Six Months On The Road With Oasis when the purchase was suggested by manager Marcus Russell, “You’re joking, aren’t you? Spend six grand of my money for my songs? My own fucking songs. That’s wrong. I’m not having that.”
A later set of demos from the following year can be found widely online and do contain some snippets of the songwriter Noel would become. However, on that first set of demos was the first song Noel Gallagher ever wrote, ‘Baj’. In an NME review of the time, the magazine suggested that it was reminiscent of The Beatles’ classic ‘I’m So Tired’, which considering Gallagher allegedly first wrote the song at the tender age of 13 is no mean feat. Some lyrics read: “Here’s a million dollars go plant a bomb/ Here’s a million dollars take another mother’s son… Did it ever change anything?/ Show me how”.
When asked about the first song he had ever written by The Observer in 1995, Gallagher once again referenced the song, noting: “The best line was: ‘And on your badge, it says, ‘Wear A Badge‘,” showcasing his acerbic wit was something the songwriter was likely born with. Asked about how he got to write his first song by Q in 1996, the Oasis man responded: “I was in my bedroom. Winter time. It went G. E minor, C, D, the basic chords, right, and the chorus was, ‘And life goes on, but the world will never change’. I must have been smoking too much pot at the time. It was, I dunno, just to see if I could do it. After that, I wrote about 75 songs no one’s ever heard.“
Sadly, the song is unavailable online, so we’ll have to enjoy the demo tapes that came the following year and try to imagine just how ‘Baj’ may have sounded. But, for now, those tunes remain in the minds of a handful of people.
