#dm30

Definitely Maybe 30th Anniversary Tour Promo (posted 24 August 2024)

Beyond all the noise about chart battles, sibling rivalry and Cool Britannia, the Oasis narrative was such a powerful one because it pointed to how a valuable new form of “oceanic feeling” – Sigmund Freud’s term for an all-embracing mass consciousness – might emerge in Britain in the dying days of the 20th century. For all its broadness and frequent crudeness, the collective mood that Oasis inspired was at heart an inclusive one, based on the desire to advocate a more demotic, more democratic way of national being, rooted in the lived reality of working-class experience.

Indeed, it is class more than anything else that shaped who Oasis were and what they meant to the wider public. While they were nothing like a definitive summary of working-class culture in its entirety (how could they have been?), Oasis summarised and celebrated a specific modern British working-class culture based on traditions of collectivity and uncovering the extraordinary in the everyday. The best early Oasis songs (Rock ’n’ Roll Star, Cigarettes & Alcohol, Don’t Look Back in Anger, Champagne Supernova) channelled the sense of communitarian empowerment that had been embodied in the best working-class pop music of post-60s Britain: the jukebox idealism of glam rock, the expressive howl of punk, the “chase the sun” euphoria of rave and, yes, the melodic humanism and collective scope of the Beatles.

But the Oasis sound and identity was also provoked into being by more antagonistic influences. Living in south Manchester in the Thatcherite 80s, the teenage Gallagher brothers would build up a deep store of anger at the savagely anti-working-class policies of a Conservative government intent on dismantling the welfare state and restoring the power of British elites who had been disenfranchised in the postwar years. Hence the angry, accusatory tone in so many of the best early Oasis songs, from the raging “outcast” and “underclass” of Bring It on Down to the “they” who will never see the things “we” see in Live Forever. This more melancholic, oppositional form of commonality is embodied in Noel Gallagher’s recollection that the Thatcher years were defined by the image of everyone he knew going to the dole office with their dads. Gallagher’s response, as Oasis biographer Paolo Hewitt once put it, was to create the sound of a council estate singing its heart out.

(1) rock n roll star (demo)

(2) shakermaker (live paris in-store)

(3) live forever (original demo or live paris in-store)

(4) up in the sky (monnow valley)

(5) columbia (white label or sawmills)

(6) supersonic (live in belfast 94)

(7) bring it on down (live in chicago 94)

(8) cigarettes and alcohol (demo)

(9) digsy’s dinner (live paris in-store)

(10) slide away (original demo or live at knebworth)

(11) married with children (demo or TCT version for ng vox)

extras/bsides:

sad song, fade away, listen up, its good to be free, half the world away, whatever, i will believe, cloudburst, take me away, spaceman