Where did Oasis play their first-ever gig?
Although the majority of the music put out by Oasis throughout their time together was the brainchild of guitarist and occasional singer Noel Gallagher, the songwriter arrived late to the group. It was actually his younger brother Liam who led the band to begin with, fronting the ensemble his friend Paul ‘Bonehead’ Arthurs had gathered together and naming them after a leisure centre in the south of England.
Liam and Bonehead first fashioned their group as a grunge-edged shoegaze band, taking after the likes of The Jesus and Mary Chain and Ride with Nirvana’s guitar sound thrown in for good measure. At the same time, Noel was still touring the world as a roadie for Madchester outfit Inspiral Carpets. When he phoned him one day, he was shocked to hear from his mam that kid brother Liam had suddenly got into music and started his own band.
On his arrival back in Manchester after being fired for bad behaviour on tour, Noel went to see Liam and his friends during their first week of gigs in the city’s shoegaze scene. Oasis played an entire week of shows between August 14th and 18th, 1991, opening for local pioneers of the scene Sweet Jesus alongside the Catchmen.
While the band themselves might have been unhappy with their performance, one audience member saw it differently. “I was pretty impressed,” Noel recalled during the 2015 documentary Supersonic. “They had their own songs, and Liam didn’t look that out of place.” When the band asked for his feedback after the show, he told them, “It’s fucking great”.
But what was the venue?
Nevertheless, Liam and Bonehead felt they needed a stronger hand to steer the group and asked Noel to join them. First of all, as manager, but pretty soon, the eldest Gallagher brother was taking charge of the music, too.
The band returned to the scene of their first gigs two months later completely transformed, with one of Noel’s own compositions opening their set. ‘Columbia’ made it all the way onto debut record Definitely Maybe three years later, showcasing remnants of the shoegaze and Madchester influences they’d since transitioned away from.
Their initial stomping ground was one of Manchester’s main centres for new music in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Boardwalk. It was the place that had launched the likes of the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and the Man from Delmonte before them, and was known as a hub of acid house and shoegaze for acts up and down the country.
The three-storey building that housed the club had once been a church school before its conversion into a space for the performing arts in the 1960s. But it was when Factory Records A&R man Colin Sinclair bought the building with his family that it turned into a cultural focal point for underground musicians across Britain, and the place to perform for up-and-coming Manchester bands.
For Oasis, playing at the Boardwalk was a logical first step towards making music for a living. Yet it would take almost two years after those first gigs for anyone in the music industry to sit up and take notice of this noisy new band with a knack for melody. That would happen at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow when Creation Records founder and the group’s future manager Alan McGee saw them for the first time in 1993. Made in Manchester, spotted in Scotland.
