“Write a song ourselves”: The first song Oasis ever played together
Every band has to cut their teeth playing tunes that they’ve grown up on. No one arrives on the scene fully formed, and it sometimes takes a few years of working as a decent cover band before an act starts to really gel as a unit onstage. When Oasis first rose to the occasion, though, Noel Gallagher helped give birth to this class song off of Definitely Maybe out of thin air while they were first jamming.
If there was any song that the Gallagher brothers should have started with, it should have been half of The Beatles’ discography. Their whole sound and style was indebted to the Fab Four, and even if they had a little more attitude in their delivery, there’s no denying that Liam was born to sing John Lennon’s melodies at some point.
Before the band formed, though, Noel had already started to become one of the greatest songwriters of his generation. He was a long way from writing tunes like ‘Live Forever’, but when looking at the work he was doing in the background for Inspiral Carpets, chances are that he had a lot of potential Oasis songs and demos in the bag before he had even begun jamming with Liam and Bonehead.
During their first few jams, there were already hints of brilliance that would come later, including the now-famous clip of them rehearsing ‘All Around the World’ in their practice space before it turned into their cocaine-fuelled version of ‘Hey Jude’. That classic rock worship may have taken them far in the rehearsal space, but it was nowhere close to what music was like in the clubs.
Fans were still knee-deep in dance music, and since The Stone Roses had a history of making hypnotic grooves, it wasn’t out of the question for the Manchester lads to take a stab at a dance-centric tune of their own. It was never going to be on the same level as C+C Music Factory or anything, but once the band found the chords for ‘Columbia,’ they knew that they had found something no one could put their finger on.
The band had only got together for a few rehearsals, but Noel knew that the potential was already there from the start, saying, “One Sunday afternoon I was at home when our kid rings up and says, ‘You coming down for a jam?’ I’d never played with anyone else ever. I went, ‘Alright.’ I’m asking, ‘Do you know any Beatles songs?’ ‘No.’ We sit there for hours and hours, dead hot and sweaty, and it’s great. Same the next Sunday and – just because they didn’t know any Beatles, really – we decide to write a song ourselves and I come up with what turns out to be ‘Columbia’.”
That is, if you take Noel at his word. Based on what everyone else has said about the tune, ‘Columbia’ is more of a joint affair than ‘The Chief’ let on, considering the fact that Bonehead helped write the chord sequence and Liam was the one who came up with the hook line of ‘I can’t tell you the way I feel’.
Regardless of who wrote it, there was no denying that the band had started themselves on an upward trajectory, and it was only going to get more extravagant as time went on. The basis of ‘Columbia’ might sound a bit naive today, but it was only the first step for a band that would eventually become a giant.
