The Noel Gallagher song that made his “jaw hit the floor”
Artists can spend countless hours fine-tuning every element of the composition until they have fulfilled their vision. However, as Noel Gallagher has discovered throughout his career, sometimes the best tracks are written within moments and discarded without any thought.
Gallagher has often known whether a song will strike a chord with the general public upon writing it, but his predictions are not always accurate. Famously, the former Oasis guitarist didn’t foresee ‘Wonderwall‘ becoming an international hit that would define his career, and it wasn’t until he brought the track to his record label that he realised its potential as a single.
However, upon penning ‘Live Forever‘, Noel knew he’d created a song set to outlive him and live up to its title. “I’d listened to enough music to know that was a classic,” he once told MOJO of his first thoughts on the Definitely Maybe track, which his friends didn’t initially believe he’d written and believed must have been a cover.
During the 1990s, many of Oasis’ best songs didn’t make the cut on their studio albums and were thrown away as B-sides, eventually repackaged as The Masterplan. Years later, Gallagher made a similar error with his High Flying Birds when he forgot about the existence of ‘Dead In The Water’, which he omitted from his 2017 album Who Built The Moon?
The LP, which Gallagher described as cosmic pop, had a distinct theme throughout the entire record. In contrast, ‘Dead In The Water’ is a stripped-back acoustic number similar to his finest work, but it was accidentally discarded by Gallagher.
During an appearance on Radio X, Gallagher recalled its creation and how he eventually found a home for the song: “I was doing a radio session in Ireland and no more than a few days earlier, I’d written that song in under two hours,” he said. “I hadn’t played it to anyone. So I was sat with headphones on and the sound in the room was so amazing that while the engineer was messing around with this mic, I just started singing it for myself. I forgot all about it, fast forward the album’s finished, the inevitable question: have you got any bonus material? I said, ‘We didn’t record any B-side material’.”
He continued: “Then someone in my office said, ‘What about that song you did that day in Dublin? The one about the water?’ He got in touch, and they said, ‘Oh yeah, we recorded it’. My jaw hit the floor – what’s special is that I’m singing it for myself. I listened to it and thought, it has to go on the album because I want to play it live.”
Although ‘Dead In The Water’ didn’t appear on the standard release of the album, it was listed as a bonus track. Typically, these additional songs are viewed as disposable and rarely impact listeners, but ‘Dead In The Water’ immediately stood out as the record’s high point.
In another world, if it weren’t for a reminder from a colleague, ‘Dead In The Water’ wouldn’t have ever seen the light of day. Yet, the raw recording has become one of his most adored solo cuts, a staple of his live sets, and a poignant reminder of Gallagher’s songwriting brilliance.
