Carnage comes to Rockfield: When Oasis went to Monmouthshire
With its sleepy parsonage, half-timbered Almshouses, and frosted meadows, the village of Rockfield is about as bucolic as it gets. In other words, it’s the last place you’d expect to find the 1990s most chaotic rock band working on their new album. In 1995, Oasis travelled to the serene Rockfield Studios to record What’s The Story Morning Glory?, an LP so blisteringly loud that many have blamed it for prompting The Loudness War of the 1990s, a trend that saw artists compete to create the loudest song on the radio, leaving a fair few people with tinnitus.
In 1993, Noel Gallagher and Co. were spotted by Alan McGee at an unplanned concert at King Tut’s in Glasgow. He immediately offered them a record deal with Creation Records, the UK’s coolest label by a mile. With that, everything fell into place. “I knew it was going to happen,” Liam would later recall, “It’s all fate, do you know what I mean? I understand it now, me – fate. Fate is just a word to some people.” By 1995, Oasis were basking in the critical and commercial success of their 1994 debut, Definitely Maybe. Success gave birth to chaos and hedonism in equal measure: “I could never understand it, you know, hotel rooms being smashed up – that’s like hard work,” Gallagher notes in Supersonic. “You can’t tell a 21-year-old lad to be professional.”
By the time Oasis got to Rockfield, they’d released a number-one album, developed a reputation for drunken violence during a ferry crossing to Amsterdam, become Cool Britannia’s flagship band, said goodbye to original drummer Tony McCarroll and welcomed Alan White into the fold. They were now enough of a success to step into Rockfield – the UK’s poshest studio – knowing they deserved to be there. “Noel had the songs and the arrangments; he was totally in control of the band,” recalled Rockfield engineer Nick Brine, “So that first week of Morning Glory, we were doing a song a day. Extraordinary.”
The band were about to become the most successful outfit in the UK. Beyond the confines of Rockfield farm, the UK media were concocting the Oasis V Blur chart battle that would culminate in the Battle of Britpop. Oasis, meanwhile, had their eyes set on the future. There was a sense that Noel’s new material was going to shoot them into the stratosphere. Chart domination felt inevitable.
That optimism was compounded by the band’s brilliant relationship with their producer Owen Wilson. After the fiasco that was Definitely Maybe, Wilson had come to understand Oasis’ sound better than anyone and possessed the talent to capture it on record. “I loved Owen,” Noel said. “Mental Welsh man. He was always setting fire to shit, and things were always blowing up because he had it too loud. No rule book. With his big mad laugh, going, ‘Yeah, let’s fucking have it.” They were the best times I ever had recording.”
According to Morris, Liam and Noel were on another plane during the recording of Morning Glory. Noel would show his brother a song once. Liam would then proceed to sing it perfectly the first time around. Noel would listen to it (again only once), check the phrasing and then leave to let Liam record a few more tracks. Morris would come to regard the process of making Morning Glory as the most natural and enjoyable experience he had ever had at Rockfield.
Of course, there were still arguments. Liam would often nip down to the local pub, The Punch House, while Noel was recording his guitar lines. One night, he met the local drug dealer and decided to bring a few people back to the studio while Noel was still working. “I probably shouldn’t have bought ’em back,” Liam later admitted. “But I thought we were a rock ‘n’ roll band, you know.” They ended up trashing the place. Somebody let off a fire extinguisher in the farmhouse; another broke one of Noel’s guitars. “It just exploded into a big fucking bunch of chaos like you’ve never seen,” Bonehead recalled.
Noel and Liam soon locked horns, hitting each other with anything they could get their hand on, including, at one point, a cricket bat. Wilson’s studio was completely destroyed, leaving the mixing console fizzing in and out of life. This all came as a bit of a shock to Alan White, who had only been with Oasis for two weeks and came to the conclusion that the band must be about to break up. “Nah nah nah,” Noel assured him, “This is going to happen all the fucking time.”
