Who plays the cello in the Oasis song ‘Wonderwall’?
For all its credentials as a busker’s go-to tune on acoustic guitar or a paean from a husband to his new wife during the drunken karaoke section of their wedding party, ‘Wonderwall’ is actually a pretty sombre tune. As in it’s pretty but sombre, like a gothic masquerade. The song has a slightly eerie feel about it, unlike anything else Oasis songwriter Noel Gallagher has come up with.
This feel primarily comes from the three different minor-key modes the track bridges by inverting a pentatonic blues scale made up of the basic notes we’d find in most 12-bar blues songs. But it’s underlined by the arrival of a cello around a minute into the song, which plays the root notes of the song’s minor chord progression on repeat.
The decision to add a cello to the recording was likely inspired by Beatles song ‘Eleanor Rigby’, where prominent use of the instrument gives it an overtly mournful character. In ‘Wonderwall’, however, Oasis strike a careful balance between the dark overtones of the verses and the brighter chorus, which Gallagher almost takes into a major musical mode to reflect the hopeful resolution provided by the lyrics.
It’s the cello sound that allows the track to straddle these pronounced tonal differences between the verse and chorus, making it sound markedly different from any other chart hit from the mid-1990s. This instrumental element of the recording is as iconic and recognisable as the simple three-chord pattern known to every high-street guitarist. Which is why it may come as a shock that the instrument being played isn’t actually a cello at all.
So, what is it then?
In fact, the “cello” in Wonderwall is really a mellotron, an analogue synthesiser invented in the 1960s which can be found in many classic tracks of the psychedelic era. The mellotron can be made to sound like a variety of instruments according to which part of the magnetic tape connected to its keys is played.
It fell out of use when more advanced digital synthesisers were developed to produce a virtually limitless array of tones in the late 1970s. But when bands like Oasis returned to ‘60s music for inspiration, there was a revival of the mellotron in rock music three decades after its initial popularity. And arguably there’s no ‘90s mellotron part more famous than the one in ‘Wonderwall’, even if most listeners aren’t aware that this is the instrument being played.
…and who plays the part?
Since Oasis decided not to opt for an actual cello in the song’s recording, they didn’t bother with hiring a session player for the part, either. Instead, Paul ‘Bonehead’ Arthurs, the band’s rhythm guitarist and go-to keyboard player on their first two albums, is the musician playing the mellotron on ‘Wonderwall’.
To throw fans off the scent, though, when the song was released as a single the director of its music video Nigel Dick decided to include a brief clip of a cellist appearing to play on the song. Sorry, cello fans. That’s just a red herring. It was Bonehead on the keys all along.
