| "Oasis sound best to me when I’m in a bad, self-indulgent mood." – Will Self
In April 1994, three days after the corpse of Curt Kobain was discovered, Oasis released their first single in the UK, "Supersonic." A reverbed guitar riff introduced the sneer of then 21-year old Liam Gallagher, singing his older brother Noel’s lyrics: "I need to be myself/ I can’t be no one else/ I’m feeling supersonic / give me gin and tonic." The existential credo of the angry young man paired with a ridiculous rhyme. If there was a tectonic shift in rock’n’roll that spring, it was led by Oasis, Blur and, later, Radiohead. Grunge was dead. Metal was stillborn. That same year Guns ’n’ Roses began studio work on Chinese Democracy, which still awaits release.
Now, 12 years, six albums — all of which entered the U.K. charts at No. 1 — and sales in excess of 60 million records, Oasis have released Stop the Clocks, a collection of the band’s favourite songs, although probably pushed into existence by the record label Sword of Damocles hanging above the brothers. Stop the Clocks is made up almost entirely of music written, recorded or released during Oasis’s 18-month starburst of creativity, from April 1994 through October 1995. Of the 18 tracks, five come from Definitely Maybe (1994) and another five from (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? (1995), while four more are fan-favoured B-sides from that period, including "Acquiesce." This vintage Oasis track pairs Liam’s snarl with another punchy lyric: "I don’t know what it is / That makes me feel alive/ I don’t know how to wake/ The things that sleep inside." The first of two Stop the Clocks discs concludes with another B-side, "The Masterplan," which Noel Gallagher once called the best song he had ever written.
Their first two albums were great, but…
If there is one cliché that underlies almost all pop music writing, it is this – what an artist or band produces during their early period is ultimately their greatest work. It is as preposterous as it is occasionally true. While U2’s Boy (1980) and October (1981) introduced an electric new sound, and while R.E.M.’s Murmur (1983) and Reckoning (1984) are superb records, only a fool would claim they are better than any number of later works. This tends to be born out in concert. Bands, like people, get terribly bored. Why play songs they wrote 10 or 20 years ago, about someone or something they don’t really care about anymore?
And yet, the release of Stop the Clocks makes a pretty good case that the first two Oasis albums were their zenith. By the time Be Here Now was released in late-August 1997, with the paparazzi nipping at the band’s heels, Noel Gallagher did what all artists need to do: create something new. Its menacing opening track, "D’You Know What I Mean?" is one of many major songs missing from Stop the Clocks, although fans will always debate the blind spots of any retrospective.
So, with this album, are Liam and Noel Gallagher acknowledging that Oasis is finished? Or what amounts to the same thing, that their best work was a decade ago? On YouTube, there is a clip where Noel is asked if he would ever write another record like Definitely Maybe? Noel gestures to his younger brother Liam and says, "he might, but I won’t. ‘Live Forever’ and ‘Supersonic,’ I wrote those songs when I was 21 and living on the dole. That’s obviously not me anymore."
This is the rub of rock ’n’roll. Musicians, even Mancunians, grow up and move on. Hope I die before I get old sounds more and more like a joke. The final song on Stop the Clocks is "Don’t Look Back in Anger." In the final verse, Noel sings, "Please don’t put your life in the hands/ Of a rock ’n’ roll band / Who’ll throw it all away."
This is also the gist of Oasis. Noel Gallagher will be 40 next spring, as Curt Kobain would have been. |
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