Glory seekers
It is 25 years since Oasis brought out their iconic album (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?. MARION MCMULLEN finds out how recording it led to a fight between the band’s brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher
‘WE DON’T claim to have invented anything new. We just play rock and roll music,” insisted Noel Gallagher in 1995, “and rock and roll will never die.” (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? entered the UK album charts at number one, with 269,000 sales in the first week. when it was released 25 years ago, on October 2.
It went on to reach number one in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Sweden and Spain and made the top 10 in every major market around the world.
The release – packed with anthems such as Wonderwall, Don’t Look Back In Anger, Roll With It, Some Might Say and Champagne Supernova – was recorded in just 12 days at the fabled Rockfield Studios in Monmouth in Wales and became the best-selling album of the 90s.
It has gone on to become the UK’S fifth best-selling album of all time and has notched up more than 22 million global sales over the years.
Noel wrote the bulk of his new songs on acoustic guitar in a blaze of creativity and produced the album with Owen Morris. It was released just 14 months after the band’s debut album Definitely Maybe, at the height of Britpop madness.
Owen said: “Recording Oasis is easy. You stick some microphones in the room and they perform. People know when something is real and they can smell b******t a mile off. Oasis make real music, for people to enjoy.”
The band were booked into the studios for five weeks, but only two of them were spent working, as there was an enforced break in the middle when Noel and Liam fought over who was going to record the lead vocal on Don’t Look Back In Anger.
Liam said in 1995: “When our kid went ‘right, you’ve got a choice, Wonderwall or Don’t Look Back In
Anger’, it done me head in. I said, ‘I wanna sing both, you d**k.’ But I chose Wonderwall ‘cos it was right and it happened. But I don’t think I could have sung Don’t Look Back In Anger the way he sung it. I think it’s great.”
He added: “That line ‘So Sally can wait’ – that was me. I’m not gonna tell you what it’s about but we was in America and Noel was doing this song. And I walked up to him and said, ‘you know what you’re singing there? Sing ‘So Sally can wait’. And he goes, ‘All right’, and he sings it. He won’t admit it, ‘cos he’s like that.”
Noel has admitted though: “Liam came up with the word Sally. I was doing it at soundcheck. I was singing ‘So ... ‘Didn’t have that word. He said ‘Who’s Sally?’ I went ‘What do you mean?’ He said ‘So Sally can wait?’ And I went, ‘F***ing genius. You’re not having any money for that by the way.”
Sessions for the album were fast, with the band rarely spending more than 24 hours on a song.
The Modfather, Paul Weller, contributed backing vocals and a psychedelic lead guitar solo to sevenminute epic Champagne Supernova, and stayed on to play guitar and harmonica on the instrumental jam known as The Swamp Song.
Noel said of Champagne Supernova: “That’s probably as psychedelic as I’ll ever get. It means different things when I’m in different moods. When I’m in a bad mood, being caught beneath a landslide is like being suffocated. The song is a bit of an epic.
“It’s about when you’re young and you see people in groups and you think about what they did for you and they did nothing. As a kid, you always believed the Sex Pistols were going to conquer the world and kill everybody in the process. Bands like The Clash just petered out. Punk rock was supposed to be the revolution but what did it do? F**k all.
“The Manchester thing was going to be the greatest movement on earth but it was f**k all. When we started we decided we weren’t going to do anything for anybody, we just thought we’d leave a bunch of great songs.”
The Gallagher brothers became poster boys for a new vision of Cool Britannia, leading their Manchester band triumphantly through the biggest open-air concerts the nation had ever seen, culminating in two nights at Knebworth in August, 1996, in front of a quarter of a million people.
The gigs sold out in record time, with more than two and a half million applying for tickets.
Liam said: “When I’m on stage, I just feel like gettin’ on with the job. Tunnel vision, straight down the line. I got a serious job, y’know what I mean?”
Noel said in 2010: “We were just making it up as we were going along because no one had ever been this big before so we didn’t know what was going on. Everyone was having a ball.”
Big Brother Recording is celebrating the 25th anniversary with limited edition releases. Vinyl, available from the official Oasis online store, includes a replica of Noel’s handwritten lyrics for Wonderwall. Go to oasismusic.lnk. TO/MG25PR to order and visit oasisinet. com for more details.
THIS new series from the alwaysmarvellous Grayson Perry was filmed in the US last year, before we’d heard of coronavirus. But in the months since then, with international protests about racism and police brutality, and with their election looming, it’s become even more relevant.
Over three parts, Grayson examines the issues of race, identity, class and economic opportunities.
A cross-dressing British artist might not be the most obvious fit to explore what’s happening across the pond, especially as he’s travelling on a psychedelic chopper he designed himself, wearing a dayglow jumpsuit featuring a smiley cat, but actually Grayson is perfect.
He has an ability to connect with all types of people, and not only is he not willing to ignore the elephant in the room, he actively encourages everyone to stare right at it and talk about those things that make us uncomfortable.