The one song that “changed everything” for Noel Gallagher
Noel Gallagher would probably be more than happy to talk about how he paved the way for a new brand of rock and roll. After the grunge wave started to die, the arrival of Oasis marked a major turning point for Britpop, where fans were finally ready to make music that felt a little more optimistic about life. Although Gallagher liked to talk a big game with every single song he ever put out, he admitted that the real turning point for Oasis came when he wrote ‘Live Forever’.
Before he even got started with Oasis, Gallagher was already becoming a savvy songwriter when he was a roadie for the band Inspiral Carpets. Once he got the chance to see his brother Liam’s band, he thought that they could use his songs to become massive, bringing in early drafts of tracks like ‘All Around the World’ and ‘Bring It On Down’.
Even though Noel had been listening to the indie scene bands like The Stone Roses and Primal Scream, he knew he wanted to make his living the way his heroes did. Armed with a guitar and his songs, the best Oasis material felt like it was ripped straight out of 1966, playing the pieces that The Beatles and The Rolling Stones would have played had they been influenced by the sounds of punk rock.
When the band got signed to Creation Records at the insistence of label head Alan McGee, they had yet to write those few songs that would send them over the edge. While ‘Supersonic’ would be written on a whim as the band were working on the beginnings of the track ‘Bring It On Down’, Noel knew that he was playing with perfection as soon as he hit the chords for ‘Live Forever’.
As Noel recalls, he knew that something else was at play when he wrote the track, recalling in Supersonic, “Oasis were going on for about six months, a year, and I was writing songs just to amuse myself, and one night I went down with this song and everything changed. And Bonehead said, ‘You’ve not just fucking written that. That’s no way that’s your song.’”
Despite the guitarist’s insistence, the track was all Noel’s, having the same kind of spirit that he had been aiming for since the early days of the band. It might not have been the biggest-selling work ever yet, but Noel knew that he had crossed a songwriting threshold, saying, “I knew enough about music and about songs to know that that was a great song. Then I thought, this is happening. No matter if anyone takes notice of it, this is happening.”
Once the band started gaining momentum off of Definitely Maybe, ‘Live Forever’ would end up becoming one of their signature tunes, sounding like the kind of snide John Lennon-style vocal with an optimistic message that Paul McCartney could have written. As the band played on, though, Noel was just getting started writing his own masterpieces.
For the rest of the 1990s, Noel would end up spitting out even more classics, each one more soulful than the rest, like ‘The Masterplan’ and ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’. Oasis were poised for stardom for years after their debut, but if ‘Live Forever’ hadn’t been written, who knows if the band would have still been slogging it out in clubs across Manchester?
