The not-so-popular Oasis B-side that deserved to be a single
Noel Gallagher would be the first to tell you that he doesn’t write shit songs. Any composition that’s left his head and moved far enough down the assembly line to become a demo is probably worthy of a quick listen. This is why Oasis fans have long treated the band’s vast catalogue of B-sides with just about the same reverence as their singles; often debating the best of the lot and which songs would have held their own as the A-side.
After a quarter-century or so, a consensus has nearly formed on a few of these. Noel himself had some regrets that ‘The Masterplan’ got relegated to ‘Wonderwall’’s’ backside, later calling it “one of the last of the great, culturally significant songs I ever wrote.”
Fans also tend to think of ‘Half the World Away’ like a single rather than a B-side, maybe because the 1994 track wound up as the beloved TV theme tune for The Royale Family. And then there’s ‘Acquiesce’, flip side to 1995’s ‘Some Might Say’, which many have long believed was a sort of anthem of friendship and brotherhood—a statement of Noel’s actual feelings for his dingbat brother. Noel has repeatedly crushed that interpretation over the years, saying he was “annoyed” by that reading and that Liam never even learned what the word “acquiesce” meant.
Nonetheless, the song about brotherly love, in a generic sense, would seem like a good shout for the playlist on Oasis’s upcoming reunion shows. One song you almost certainly will not hear on that tour, despite Liam occasionally revisiting it in his solo shows, is the Oasis B-side that truly deserved to be a single: ‘Cloudburst.’
A very early number that landed on the dark half of ‘Live Forever’ in 1994, this big noisy tune—with its Madchester-y wacka-wacka riffage and soaring Liam vocals—is not a “better” song than ‘The Masterplan.’ And it’s certainly not one of your classic sing-along and wave-your-arms Oasis deep cuts. If we’re being honest, it doesn’t even really sound like Oasis at all, which might admittedly be part of its appeal.
The ‘Live Forever’ single, with ‘Cloudburst’ sitting as track three on the CD release, came out in August of 1994. Just a few months later, in a very interesting passing of giant ships in the night, The Stone Roses finally released their second studio album, Second Coming. The fact that the Roses’ return seemed to miss the mark probably had a lot to do with the simultaneous ascent of Oasis and the cultural move beyond some of the early ‘90s sounds the Roses had helped popularise. If you listen to ‘Cloudburst’, though, you would have thought Oasis and The Stone Roses were still side by side on the crest of an identical wave. This was the Gallaghers’ rosiest recording and a sort of tip of the cap to one of the bands that had most influenced them over the five years prior, with Noel doing his best John Squire impression throughout.
With most of the other popular Oasis B-sides, if you could travel back in time and magically transform them into singles, it probably wouldn’t move the proverbial needle much on how the band itself would be perceived then or now. However, if ‘Cloudburst’ had received an early push in the wake of ‘Live Forever’, it certainly could have had some interesting aftershocks. Would Oasis have been seen more directly as The Stone Roses’ acolytes? Would Second Coming have received kinder reviews from critics who’d now see it aligned with the vital sounds of the moment? Would Noel have leaned it a bit further, in the ensuing years, toward songs with less conventional structures and more psychedelic, layered jamming?
I guess we’ll never know. Not only was ‘Cloudburst’ a B-side, the band didn’t even seem to like it enough to put it on their 1998 compilation of B-sides, which was called, of course, The Masterplan.
