The Oasis song Alan McGee called a “piss-take of Blur”
The 1990s saw the rise of Britpop, a new music genre characterised by a love of British culture, beer, and pop chart battles. The laddish culture which surrounded this new wave of guitar music led to infighting within the genre, most famously between heavyweights Blur and Oasis.
The battle of Britpop saw the two bands fighting for chart success, particularly when their singles ‘Country House’ and ‘Roll With It’ went head to head in 1995. The conflict was exacerbated by the press, which encouraged listeners to choose between the posh Londoners and the working-class Mancunians. Antagonism also began to increase among the bands themselves as they got caught up in the manufactured rivalry.
A year before the battle hit its peak, Oasis were already penning songs that seemed to poke fun at their Britpop peers. Their 1994 debut record, Definitely Maybe, featured a song called ‘Digsy’s Dinner’, which Scottish music industry stalwart Alan McGee once dubbed a “piss-take of Blur”, when speaking with XFM.
The Creation Records co-founder suggested that the song looked to ridicule their rivals, demonstrating how easily they could outdo them: “I don’t think Noel’s ever admitted to that,” he said. “It’s a piss-take of that Britpop thing. It was Noel proving that he could do that in his sleep.”
The song was created during a studio session with a friend of the band named Peter Deary, also known as Digsy, who took up the mic and began singing about lasagne. It may have started out as a joke, but once Gallagher took on the drum part, ‘Digsy’s Dinner’ was born.
The finalised version of the song is a simplistic track with classically Oasis guitars and a piano riff, over which Gallagher declares, “What a life it would be if you could come to mine for tea, I’ll pick you up at half past three, we’ll have lasagne, I’ll treat you like a queen”.
It’s ridiculous and romantic at the same time – in its simplicity and normality, it becomes endearing. Digsy later also received a nod in the title track of Oasis’ 1997 album, Be Here Now. The lyrics declare, “Your shit jokes remind me of Digsy’s”.
Gallagher has since joked that ‘Digsy’s Dinner’ couldn’t be written now – not because it ridicules Blur, but because of its simplicity. In Rachel Daniel’s Isle of Noises: Conversations with Great British Songwriters, he stated, “If you wrote ‘Digsy’s Dinner’ now, The Guardian or the music papers would destroy you. It’s a song about going to someone’s house for lasagne – you only write songs like that when you’re free of inhibitions.”
Though the band have never confirmed whether or not the track was penned to make fun of their Britpop counterparts, ‘Digsy’s Dinner’ remains a Britpop staple in its own right and one of the greatest songs to be written about lasagne.
