The 2015 song that saw Noel Gallagher leave Oasis behind: “Vastly different”
In the heyday of Oasis, what you saw was what you got, and ultimately, that’s what made them the beloved band they were.
There was no pretence when the Gallagher brothers and co got into the studio. A raucous backbone of Noel’s four-chord sequences would start proceedings, before laying down a riff that sat safely within the pentatonic scale. Rolling drums and bass were added, and the volume turned up to ten, setting the stage for Liam’s full-blooded vocal parts to step forward and deliver rock and roll at its purest.
It was ultimately the best and worst thing about the band. When they were on song, performing raucous rock and roll tracks, there wasn’t a better band on the planet. But when the formula wore thin at the end of the 1990s, and songwriter Noel Gallagher was churning out replicas of a once successful model, you began to wonder whether they had what it takes to become adaptable musicians.
The world may not have wanted to admit it, but it took the band breaking up in 2010 for us to realise that Noel was capable of that. Unburdened by the global expectation of fans, he exercised the musical ambitions that had likely been rumbling ever since he first heard The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds’ self-titled debut record was very much the trusted formula ever so slightly rehashed. But on his sophomore record, Chasing Yesterday, he began changing tack with more dense experimental tracks. ‘The Riverman’ opened the album in suitable fashion before ‘The Right Stuff’ outrightly celebrated Noel’s newfound sonic liberation.
Against all odds, a bass guitar was centre stage and backed up by a reverberated horn section that was fitting of a Pink Floyd segue in ‘73. It had all of the indulgent experimentalism that a gruff ‘90s Gallagher would have labelled as inflated nonsense. But suddenly, he had graduated from gritty Britpop hero to a more mature songwriter.
“When you hear it, you’ll think, ‘It’s probably as removed from ‘Supersonic’ as you could possibly get’,” he said when promoting the album. There was a pre-emptive feeling that Oasis fans of old would hate this, but he knew that creating something that was the complete opposite of what had made him successful was the only way to grow as an artist.
He was cautious in delivering it, though; in fact, when he first wrote it, he did it in a more conservative style that would have jarred the audience a whole lot less. Discussing the two versions of the track, Gallagher said, “The [song] in this record is vastly different from the first one, which had a lot of noodling and fucking about. It’s become quite psychedelic, jazz, fucking whatever you wanna call it”.
It worked perfectly for this new chapter and saw Gallagher writing songs that weren’t hinged around a vocal performance. With his brother’s charisma removed from the equation, Noel could focus on other instruments and techniques that, in many ways, proved he was just fine without Oasis.
