‘Bring It On Down’: the Oasis song created out of spite
“I had the riff, and it sounded like the Sex Pistols,” Noel Gallagher said about the guitar from the intro of ‘Bring It On Down’ as part of the 2004 project Definitely Maybe: The Documentary, “But you couldn’t really write a love song over the top of that, could you?”
Writing in the liner notes for a re-release of the album, Noel suggested it was an homage more than anything else, “It was a tribute to The Stooges, the MC5 and punk rock.” In the documentary and elsewhere in an interview with Melody Maker, Gallagher does suggest that he did have a specific kind of person in mind, and in the firing line when writing the track, though, saying that “it’s about the uninvited guest who turns up at parties and nobody likes, but everybody knows, who stays till the end.”
In contention to be the first Oasis single before they decided to go with ‘Supersonic’ instead, the song is unusually political for an Oasis track and combines a biting and relentless drum pattern with stabbing guitars and raucous, punk-like lyrics about outcasts and the underclass.
“For my part, all those songs that have a political undercurrent are real because I was just writing them from the heart,” Noel said in 2014. “I don’t sit down and think, ‘Politics: let’s get to the bones of this shit. But at that point, I was unemployed, in rented accommodation, trying to make it in the world, living from one week to the next not knowing if you’re gonna have enough money for a pizza. You are in a political situation even if you don’t realise it because that is the battleground. That is the essence of politics: accommodation, food and trying to make a living.”
The song proved a challenge for drummer Tony McCarroll in the studio, to the point that the group even recruited a session musician to play the part when McCarroll couldn’t nail it. “I’d been telling, or asking, Tony for two years, ‘It goes like this,’” Noel remembers in the documentary, almost equally parts bemused and annoyed at the struggle of his drummer to play the beat and playfully glad to be watching his efforts.
There was some vindication for McCarroll, though, when the new recruit couldn’t master the part, either. After some encouragement from rhythm guitarist Paul Arthurs, McCarroll picked up his sticks again, “jumps on the drum kit and goes ‘you mean, like this?’” and captured the part you hear on the album in the next take.
And while Noel Gallagher may have been exasperated by the two drummers over their playing on the song, he was more than pleased with how the instrument sounded on the finished record, saying: “I tell you what I do love about that song, is Owen [Morris, producer] got probably the fucking one of the mentalist drum sounds ever put on a record on them toms at the beginning.”
