“Just stupid”: The Oasis song Noel Gallagher said meant nothing to him
There’s no rule that says an artist needs to have a deep relationship with any of their songs. As much as some might feature their most personal lyrics, there are just as many that have words thrown together on a whim to make sure that everything flows nicely. While Noel Gallagher never claimed to be an expert wordsmith whenever he sat down to write a song, he admitted that one of his biggest 1990s hits was complete nonsense from back to front.
Then again, almost every one of Oasis’s greatest songs wasn’t about being Bob Dylan in the lyrical department. As they said in the opening song on their first album, it was only rock and roll, and that meant making music for people to lose their minds to rather than worrying about whether one word in a tune would have a crucial impact on society.
That’s not to say that Noel didn’t take care of his lyrics. Having a hero in John Lennon means that some lyrics would be personal, and tunes like ‘Talk Tonight’ or even ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ took the basics of rock and roll and transformed them into lyrics that could tug on anyone’s heartstrings.
Even if ‘Champagne Supernova’ features one of the sillier lines to come out of the 1990s regarding walking down a hall faster than a cannonball, it’s oddly poetic in its own way. While that song, in particular, may have the meaning of life hidden away in it if listened to under the influence, it still works as a surreal piece of poetry that wouldn’t have felt out of place if it had been released in 1966.
Once Oasis started to believe their own hype, though, Be Here Now ended up featuring some of the strangest lyrical detours of their career. While the lyrics behind the bonkers title ‘D’You Know What I Mean’ are fairly straightforward, a line like ‘Pigs don’t fly/never say die’ at the end of ‘All Around the World’ is clearly the work of someone who maybe overdid on cocaine before they sat down for their writing session.
From where Noel was sitting, though, ‘Stand By Me’ made no sense at all to him, saying in 2000, “When I listen to some of the lyrics of ‘Stand By Me’, for instance, they’re just fucking stupid. They’re just rhyming; it’s just mucking around; it just doesn’t mean anything to me. When I listen to it on the radio I think,’ What was I fucking thinking?’”
While there was the one autobiographical line at the top of the tune regarding Noel cooking himself a meal and then throwing up, going from that to being tired of talking on the phone doesn’t exactly evoke the same sentiment that the chorus suggests. And considering this was when Noel was working on autobiographical material like ‘Gas Panic!’ and ‘Where Did It All Go Wrong’, there’s a good chance that he was looking back and realising how off the rails the lines had become.
Then again, there was probably no other way to convey this kind of tune than using these nonsensical lines. Their biggest inspiration had always been tunes like ‘I Am The Walrus’, and on this seven-minute experience, they at least matched John Lennon’s knack for creating surreal pictures in the listener’s mind.
