Oasis and Pain

“Is It my imaginasheeeyunnnnn… or have I finally found something worth living for?” sings Liam Gallagher on ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’.

“You gotta roll with it, you gotta take your time, you gotta say what you say, don’t let anybody get in your way…” that’s Roll With It.

“‘I'd like to beee… somebody else…. and not know where I've been” - Shakermaker

“Toniiiiiight, I’m a rock’n’roll star” - Rock’n’roll Star

Look. Whether you’re a diehard fan, or, like me, you came for the invincible choruses and stayed for the nineties nostalgia, I think we can agree that nobody goes to Oasis for the lyrics.

That includes Noel Gallagher.

Someone once asked him what the lyrics to ‘Champagne Supernova’ meant. Big mistake. “I don’t fucking know,” he replied. “But are you telling me, when you’ve got 60,000 people singing it, they don’t know what it means?”

Exactly. Oasis were an amazing crowd band, but if you’re spending your time looking for deeper meaning in the lyrics to those early songs, let alone artfulness or poignancy, you’ve missed the point.

Or so I thought.

Then I watched ’Supersonic’, Mat Whitecross’ documentary about their early years. (Spoiler alert).

About halfway through the film, a music journalist recalls one night in the nineties when she was on tour with the band, staying in the same hotel. She picked up the phone in her room and was surprised to find it was Liam, in the hotel lobby, freaking out.

She went down to find him boiling over with anger.

At god.

“Do you believe in god, do you think there’s a god?” he ranted “Cos I don’t…. Cos if there’s a god, all that wouldn’t have happened.”

This is how Whitecross introduces the traumatic topic of what Noel and Liam’s dad did to them.

“My dad used to knock me mam about,” Liam recalls, years later. “There was many times when it got like that.”

Peggy, Noel and Liam’s mum, talks about her ex-husband hitting Noel as well: “He used to kill Noel,” she says, “Noel was the one who got it the most.”

In one of the most moving moments of the film, Noel talks about it for the first time as well.

“Yeah,” he says, as matter of fact as he can. “My dad used to beat the living daylights out of me.”

Liam remembers his hotel freakout. “I was definitely angry with life and that,” he recalls. “Shit with my dad and just... life in general. I was an angry young man.”

Noel also talks about not wanting to talk about it.

“I’ve never felt compelled to either talk about it or write about it,” he says. “I know that I think it’s noone else’s business.”

But he does say this: “I think it benefitted me in the way that it made me withdraw into my own world. And from that came the learning to play the guitar.”

These moments give us a glimpse into how dark life at home must have been.

That completely changed how I understood Noel’s lyrics.

Finding out about it was like a prism. The lyrics to those early classics went in one side monochrome and came out the other multicoloured, fascinating.

Because Oasis lyrics don’t work like normal sentences.

Normally when I listen to lyrics, I want to know “what does this bit mean?”

Oasis taught me to stop listening to each line, and instead to zoom out and start listening to the whole.

Because when you take in the words from those early songs, step back from them, squint, and look at them together, like a magic eye or a word cloud, they form a vivid impressionist representation of a mindset and a feeling.

The right question isn’t ‘what do the songs mean?’

It’s ‘why do they celebrate what they celebrate?’

Because what ties together the things they sing about in those early songs - cigarettes, alcohol, rock and roll, drugs, buying music from Mr Sifter when you were just sixteen – is the glorification of escape.

If you, like Noel, were the kind of man who doesn’t want to talk about it, who, in fact, wants to not talk about it, to be somewhere else, maybe even someone else, maybe the point would be to use lyrics more to distract than to signify. To shut out pain. To remind a generation bred on grunge that guitar bands don’t have to mine private hurt, they can also try to overwrite it by celebrating defiance and euphoria.

I’m not saying I have some private insight into Oasis’ lyrics. But I am saying that Mat Whitecross’ fantastic film enables us to tie their words and music, swagger and drive together into a story about overcoming pain.

It offers us an origin story of the characters Noel and Liam Gallagher projected in the nineties, one about the power of rock’n’roll to make you more powerful than the man who beat you as a child.

Is it my imagination, or have I finally found something worth living for? You’ve got to say what you say, don’t let anybody get in your way. I'd like to be somebody else and not know where I've been. Tonight, I’m a rock’n’roll star. For me now, these and other early lyrics, full of redemption, swagger, and escape, are the first words that came to the mind of a teenager running away, and a man determined to bury hurt and build something positive in its place. Don’t look back in anger. I heard you say.

(From winter 2019).

• My name’s Asher; I make pop music with strange stories in it.

• It sounds like this.

• And if you’ve read this far, then you’re cordially invited to my next gig in Soho, London on 21st Feb in Soho.

• If you would like to know when I post more writing, play more gigs, or release music, please do sign up on here. There’s lots more to come…