“It was awful”: The Oasis song that destroyed Liam and Noel’s voices
Oasis have never been ones to take the most eloquent route whenever they speak their minds. Noel Gallagher wrote the song ‘My Big Mouth’ for a damn good reason, and it didn’t take long for most people to realise where they stood on something based on how they conducted themselves onstage or what they had to say about certain bands in interviews. Although Noel and Liam Gallagher have relied on their voices on more than a few occasions, one particular deep cut was enough to completely knock them out.
Before even getting to their vocal tones, both Liam and Noel couldn’t be more different in execution. While it’s easy to differentiate between who is singing what on any of their songs, Noel usually had the far cleaner tone in the vein of John Lennon, while Liam was able to snarl like a punk rocker and make his voice sound like it had a distortion filter over it without any studio trickery.
That said, Liam could still sing beautifully when he wanted to. The high notes that he hits in ‘Some Might Say’ have so much power behind them, and as much as a song like ‘Slide Away’ has been given its flowers as one of the best performances he ever gave, songs like ‘I Hope I Think I Know’ off of Be Here Now has it beat in terms of raw vocal precision and attitude.
Be Here Now does come with a few caveats, though. As much as the songs are fully formed, the decision to coat everything in as many instruments as possible and have every single song stretched out for minutes on end was going to do nothing to endear them to fans who wanted the traditional three-minute pop single.
That didn’t seem to matter to the Manchester legends much. After all, they were now being seen as gods among men, and if they wanted to make something strange, their fans would eat it up without question. When they ducked into record the bluesy song ‘Fade In-Out’ with Johnny Depp, though, both brothers could hardly produce too many notes for weeks afterwards.
According to Noel, the screams heard towards the end of the song severely damaged their vocal cords and put both of them out of commission for a while, saying, “ Me and Liam did a scream. We had to take a week off afterwards. It was awful. If you hear it on the record, it’s put through a harmonizer, and it sounds… it wasn’t very good. I’m closing my eyes now and thinking of it, and I’m thinking it’s not very good.”
Considering how the rest of the song hardly gets going, the scream is the one thing that wakes you up in the middle of the dreariness. There’s still a great song at the heart of it, but it never seemed fully realised until the band played it live, spending some time tinkering with it and kicking up the tempo so it sounded like a sonic avalanche when Liam came screaming in on the verses.
And if Noel hadn’t decided to put Oasis on ice for a little while after the tour, maybe they could have capitalised on this kind of sound. Standing on the Shoulder of Giants is still an interesting case study of what a band sounds like falling back down to Earth, but hearing an album where ‘The Chief’ channels his inner Peter Green may have been far more interesting than a psychedelic record.
