(What's The Story) Morning Glory? Biography from Sony Records

Believe the hype: With their new Epic album, (WHAT'S THE STORY) MORNING GLORY, Oasis erase any lingering doubts that they are anything less than the premier English rock & roll band of the present decade. Here is a record brimming with that special blend of confidence and creativity, energy and personality, which characterises such past pop masterworks as the Rolling Stones' Between The Buttons, the Small Faces' Ogden's Nut Gone Flake, and the Beatles' Hard Day's Night. The successor to Oasis' debut Definitely Maybe (released August '94), (WHAT'S THE STORY) MORNING GLORY was co-produced by Owen Morris and Oasis Noel Gallagher and recorded at Rockfield Studios in Wales. It features the premier US radio and video track "Morning Glory" and nine more Noel Gallagher originals including the hard-rocking #1 UK hit "Some Might Say"; the current #2 UK single "Roll With It"; and the future classics "Hey Now" and "Wonderwall." There are several rewarding experiments with strings and mellotron, and a truly epic closing track, "Champagne Supernova," which moves majestically from delicate acoustic intro to towering Spectorian wall of electric guitars and back again. (The song's 7 minutes feel closer to three.) (WHAT'S THE STORY) MORNING GLORY is a remarkable achievement by a band which formed just about three years ago in their native city of Manchester. Signed to Creation Records, Oasis released their first UK single, "Supersonic," in April 1994 after they'd been playing out live for roughly a year. The follow-up, "Shakermaker," rose to #11 on the British chart, followed by Oasis' first Top 10 UK hit, "Live Forever." Definitely Maybe was released in August, '94 and promptly rose to #1 on the UK national chart -the fastest-selling debut album in UK pop history. At this writing (in August '95), Definitely Maybe has been certified gold in the US and double platinum in the UK. It has hung in the Top 20 of the UK album chart for a solid year, and sold more than two million copies around the world. Oasis made their US live debut during the 1994 New Music Nights festival, appearing at Wetlands on July 21. Their first full-scale US club tour began September 23 in Seattle, ending October 29 at a SRO (Sweating Room Only) show at Wetlands in NYC. "What separates Oasis from new American punk bands like Green Day and Smashing Pumpkins," opined The New York Post's reviewer, "is that these Brits look as they might actually mean it...In today's pop world of pre-packaged outrage and re-packaged dinosaurs, you can't ask for more than that. Stardom beckons." Appearing on MTV's "120 Minutes" on October 30, Oasis band performed live and premiered a new version of their "Supersonic" video. (This clip would go on to establish a new record for the longest chart run - 24 consecutive weeks- in the 11-year history of CVC Report, America's leading music video trade publication.) On January 28, 1995, it was back to Seattle for the start of a second headlining US tour of eight weeks' duration. This time, however, Oasis were playing larger venues - including San Francisco's legendary Fillmore and The Academy in New York - and selling out every show. Oasis' last performance in their original lineup took place April 26, 1995 on the BBCs "Top Of The Pops." Drummer Tony McCarroll was soon replaced by Alan White, a 22-year-old Londoner who made his first appearance with the band on the May 4 edition of "TOTP" when Oasis performed their #1 UK single "Some Might Say." In this year's BRIT Awards, the UK equivalent of the Grammys, Oasis was named Best Newcomver. And in the "BRAT Awards" sponsored by New Musical Express, Oasis walked away with Best Album (for Definitely Maybe), Best Single (for "Live Forever"), and Best New Band. In the summer of '95, Oasis performed at several major European rock festivals, including Glastonbury in England and Roskilde in Denmark, and appeared as the special guests of R.E.M. at their 100,000-strong show at Slaine Castle in Ireland. In October, Oasis will set out on their third headlining US tour.

Be Here Now Biography from Sony Records

They can't take it much higher, can they? Being on a stage in front of 125,000 people two nights running. Blasting out their brilliant noise and hearing an eighth of a million people roar back at them in appreciation. Hearing and seeing it, making it happen. It doesn't get any higher, does it? Liam and Noel Gallagher, Paul "Bonehead" Arthurs, Paul "Guigs" McGuigan and Alan White, collectively Oasis, have had ten months to ponder over that question, to listen to the sound of Knebworth echoing around their heads and figure out just where they can go next. In these ten months, every time they've gobbed on the floor, got engaged, looked at a house, had a haircut, flicked a V-sign, drawn the curtains, caught the plane, got married, gone down the pub - every time they've done anything that's had nothing to do with making music, they've made the front page of the daily papers. They could so easily have become consumed by that world of professional celebrity, become just another load of pointless zombies with suntans. What they've chosen instead, what they've been doing on and off for those ten months regardless of the media, is to immerse themselves in what they're best at - making a classic record. And if you want to know what it felt like to be on that stage at Knebworth - well, you're about to find out. 'D'You Know What I Mean?', Oasis first single in 18 months, takes you right back into the eye of their hurricane. It's a celebration of all that the band have achieved with their help of their audience. The band of the people, back playing for the people. In 1994, when Oasis first arrived, the scene they blew apart was parochial, piddling, introverted and meaningless. Where everyone else seemed to be making withdrawn, apologetic music, dicking around on the edge of getting it on, Oasis were so direct that it took them barely a couple of months to electrify British music. They drew together not only threads of other songs, but also a whole patchwork of existing musical ideals. They were obviously striving for what people in this country have always believed popmusic can achieve. From The Small Faces and John Lennon, via Punk Rock, through to The Stone Roses and Acid House, Britain's youth have always looked for a vision behind their heroes' tunes, a higher sense of common purpose in which to believe and find strength when the chips are down (which they usually are). Unlike any other band for some years, Oasis were after just that. What they had to say was uncomplicated (urban life sucks, love conquers all, drink beer smoke tabs, er, what else?), but then if you look at rock's greatest ideologues they never stay the course. Oasis were just interested in that mega cultural impact which had rarely been achieved since the '60s - for its own sake, for the excitement, for the sense of mass communion, for the pure buzz of music.

The Masterplan Sleeve Notes by Paul Du Noyer

The masterplan was, there was no masterplan. Except to write good songs. Oh yeah, and to be the biggest band in the world. A modest ambition, but it put Oasis on the road to greatness. "Me mam always used to say, God loves a tryer," Noel Gallagher says. "And I went, Why? Has he got a car?' She went, No, a tryer. Not a tyre." So the Gallagher boys did try, and if you want proof of how hard they tried then hear these tracks - B-sides, all of them, made by a band who believe a B-side is no excuse not to care. Outside of Britain it hasn't always been easy to hear Oasis B-sides. But in Britain or anywhere else, they sound majestic played back-to-back. We open heroically with ACQUIESCE which is one of those all-time "shoulda been an A-side" numbers. (Creation Records certainly thought so, and who could blame them?) The song is about friendship in the widest sense and not, as often speculated, about the Gallagher brothers themselves. Noel sings the chorus because, he claims, Liam couldn't reach the high notes. Or he was in the pub. Whatever, it was written on a slow train to Wales and made possible because Noel likes to travel with his guitar. It's no surprise that Acquiesce is present: via the Internet, Oasis fans were asked to vote on this album's choice of tracks. But the inclusion of UNDERNEATH THE SKY might have been "influenced" by Noel, who cites this as a favourite song. Its happy-wanderer feel was inspired by a pocket-book of travellers' quotes he came across, and the jollity's enhanced by a four-handed piano part courtesy of him and Bonehead (who tackles the tinkly bits, apparently). TALK TONIGHT is another self-selecting choice, from Noel's acoustic repertoire. Beautifully tender, its thoughtful air derives from a Texas studio session: Noel was back after his brief flounce from the band on a US tour: "Me and Liam had a disagreement, probably about what shoes he was wearing, so I'd fucked off to Las Vegas." It was an Oasis fan in San Francisco who talked him down off the ledge. The same reflective interlude gave us another song, in HALF THE WORLD AWAY (which is Paul Weller's favourite Oasis track). The pressure was already building, though, when Noel began writing (IT'S GOOD) TO BE FREE, at the start of those troubled American dates. He finished it in Las Vegas: "Cocaine psychosis," reckoned producer Owen Morris, detecting a Fear And Loathing vibe in that sinister guitar feedback. Accordion expert Bonehead donates the breezy coda, which lends a misleadingly cheerful touch to what was a deeply fraught Oasis session: "Believe me, it was horrible, it wasn't funny at all." The Morse Code segment, by the way, is meaningless so far as anyone knows. The oldest song here is GOING NOWHERE, written around 1990 before the band was signed ("It's about what we were going to do when we got a shitload of money off Creation"); it was not recorded until after the Be Here Now album, when there was a hankering for something less massive. Noel and drummer Alan White are the only Oasis members involved, with piano, brass and horn players to bring a vaguely Burt Bacharach atmosphere. Noel only wishes he knew another rhyme for "car" and "Jaguar". Nearly as vintage in its origins, however, was HEADSHRINKER: recorded for Some Might Say in'95, it was written about three years earlier, during the band's punkier phase. It's also one of Liam's greatest vocals, partly because of the freedom from pressure that doing B-sides can offer. Although a load of drug references were binned from the Iyric, a manic edge remains to this tale of an early girlfriend Liam could not shake off. It may start out like The Faces' Stay With Me, but Noel says he was thinking of The Rolling Stones at the time. And ROCKIN'CHAIR dates from Noel's days in Manchester, planning to leave his own girlfriend and dreaming of the good life down in London. FADE AWAY first surfaced on Cigarettes & Alcohol, and was probably elbowed off Definitely Maybe in favour of Slide Away. Since then the chorus alone has guaranteed its popularity with Oasis fans: "The dreams we have as children fade away... It's about growing up but not growing old," says Noel, echoing a John Lennon belief that you won't get anything unless you've got the vision to imagine it. It's a classic Buzzcocks trick, this, placing a wistful Iyric inside the most glorious rush of punk rock energy. That said, it was a relief for Noel to do a track like THE SWAMP SONG, which required no words at ali. Alongside Roll With It, The Swamp Song was a warm-up exercise for the Morning Glory sessions; it was also used to set the sound levels at Glastonbury, which is where Alan White's thunderous drumming was taped. Later on, when Paul Weller turned up for Champagne Supernova, he added The Swamp Song's harmonica and duelling guitars: "Very rock'n'roll," chortles Noel, "but we didn't manage to stand back to back once, which I was very upset about!" Its working title "The Jam" was scrapped, tragically. Contrary to previous credits, I AM THE WALRUS was not recorded at the Glasgow Cathouse, but at a conference of Sony executives, gathered to hear Creation's new signings. Oasis used to play it at gigs in Liverpool, as an act of bravado aimed at the local bands, even The Beatles never did this one live. Technical note: any "looseness" in Noel's guitar playing here is attributed to half a bottle of Sony-financed gin. Speaking of guitars, the soaring LISTEN UP used to boast a solo much longer than the one you hear in this version: Liam had wanted it shorter, so Noel had disagreed on principle ("If you don't argue with Liam he gets upset"). Four years later, Liam has got his way. The poppy STAY YOUNG, meanwhile, was first ear-marked to be "the Digsy's Dinner" of Be Here Now, until Noel wrote Magic Pie and dumped it. Stay Young wound up on D'You Know What I Mean?, and could have been another A side if its composer had actually liked the song. But he doesn't. (Audiences, who have more sense than songwriters, all love it ) But we end with a track that Noel Gallagher is definitely proud of. In fact he regards THE MASTERPLAN as his finest piece of work. Even Liam now wishes he'd sung it himself. The writing came easily, inspired in equal measure by a Japanese hotel corridor and a good, relaxing smoke. "I'm the best Iyricist in Oasis, is how I like to say it," Noel shrugs. "But to me this sums up your journey through life. All we know is that we don't know." Is it, we might wonder, sung to Liam? ("Please brother let it be") Again the answer is No. "We're all brothers and sisters," says Noel. And so we are, and so are Oasis whether named Gallagher, McGuigan, White or indeed Bonehead. They're brothers and they're tryers, all five. They try for themselves and they try for the rest of us No wonder God loves them.

Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants Biography by Sheryl Garratt

"If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants." scientist Sir Isaac Newton, in a letter to his colleague Robert Hooke, February 1676. Mid-1999. Noel Gallagher is celebrating the end of recording the latest album in a London pub with a late-night lock-in and liberal quantities of Guinness. At around 4am and in a state far from sober, he notices the new £2 coin for the first time, and particularly the quote from the great British physicist Isaac Newton that circles its rim. Inspired, Noel scrawls the words on a cigarette packet. Except he is so drunk that the next day it reads "Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants" instead of shoulders, and instead of 'album title', he's written 'a bum title'. Which, Oasis being who they are, ensured it would be the name under which their fourth studio album would be released. "People said it was too long," laughs Noel. "But then they said that about 'What's the Story, Morning Glory'". In fact, the title sums up one of his band's great talents. Only a handful of acts in the history of music get to define their generation. To know that right then, at that moment, no one is making music that is more important, that expresses more clearly the hopes and aspirations of the time. From the release of 'Definitely Maybe' in 1994 to the massive concerts at Knebworth in 1996, Oasis were indisputably that act. Since then they've started families, continued to tour the world, written 'Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants' and remained the indisputable world champions of rock'n'roll. Spokesmen for the chemical generation, they were five lads sticking a finger up at authority and having a ball at a time when partying was out of fashion. They made music to brighten the grey Major years, and took it all the way to drinks at Downing Street and beyond: a rock'n'roll band for people who hadn't had a band of their own for a long, long time. But Oasis were also unique in that they didn't speak for the future by denying the past. Though it never sounded anything but contemporary, their music paid open tribute to the Beatles, the Sex Pistols, the Stone Roses: the three decades of British rock that had come before. Oasis have always stood on the shoulders of giants, which is why they towered above their peers. For the band, the party started some time in 1993 and continued, pretty much non-stop, until 1997. As Noel says, "We did our share, and then we did everyone else's who couldn't afford it." But then it stopped being fun. One night, Noel remembers going to a film premiere with his wife, and deciding just for the hell of it to stay straight and sober. Sipping mineral water, he stood at the bar with the friends he'd had since moving to London, watching them do the obligatory cocaine shuffle to the loos and back. And after a couple of hours, he had a revelation. "It suddenly dawned on me that I didn't like any of them. I said to Meg, 'Are these really all our friends? Have they really been in my house? But they're wankers!'" That was two years ago. He hasn't taken any drugs since. "It's made me feel better about myself. A lot healthier. A lot more clear. It was great at the time, but it came to the point where I just couldn't be bothered having the same conversations with the same people in the same chair in the same fucking house every week about UFOs. I got sick of waking up with a golf ball up my nose and cotton wool for a head. I look back on it as having some brilliant, brilliant laughs, but also having too many stupid conversations with people I didn't necessarily like." Even Liam has calmed down a lot too. The irony, of course, is that 'Standing On The Shoulder of Giants' is the most psychedelic Oasis recording to date. "When I first played the likes of 'Who Feels Love' to people, they said, 'Are you sure youâve stopped taking drugs?'" laughs Noel. But it's an album more about negotiating the comedown than celebrating the highs, about self-indulgence and coming through the other side older, wiser - and ready to make a fresh start. There's even a touching, tender song written by Liam ('Little James'), although Noel denies that this means their stormy relationship is any better - or worse - than it's ever been now that fatherhood is upon them both. It's the first time the band have worked with prolific studio whizz Mark 'Spike' Stent (U2, Madonna, Bjork, Massive Attack), and the collaboration was a fruitful one: for the first time, Noel says he was working with someone who understood club culture, who could get the sounds he'd heard on dance records and apply them to an Oasis album, For the first time too, there was someone who was able to stand up to his musical excesses, to tell him when enough guitar was enough. "He was good at stopping me from going mental in the studio." The album was recorded in France, then reworked in England after the departure of band members Paul 'Bonehead' Arthurs and Paul 'Guigsy' McGuigan. "Musically, it's a fresh start," declares Noel. It is also, he admits, a transitional record, made mainly after the old members had left, but before their replacements had been recruited. "It goes about a third of the way to where I want to be with the band in about five years." The new line-up featuring rhythm guitarist, Gem (formerly of Heavy Stereo), and bassist Andy Bell (formerly of Ride and Hurricane #1) alongside Noel, Liam and drummer Alan White made their debut in Philadelphia in December 1999. The full world tour starts in Japan in February 2000, and covers the far east, North and South America, and Europe, hitting the UK in July for the sold out stadium shows at Wembley, Bolton, and Edinburgh. "I'm as interested as anyone to find out how it's going to be," says Noel. "The first time I looked across the stage and Bonehead and Guigs weren't there it was a bit weird. But the main difference is that it's a lot better musically, because Gem and Andy are such good musicians." He's not sure how often Oasis will tour after this one, but Noel Gallagher is in this for the long haul. "I could happily sit in the studio forever, writing music. This album is good, but the next one will be better. And that's the way you should feel about music - I wouldn't like to record the perfect album, because then that would be it. I hear faults in every single track here, but by the same rule, I think it's probably the best album you'll hear this year. And there will be another 10 or 20 after this. There's a lot more coming." Oasis, then. A new band. A new century. A new direction. And a fierce commitment to writing great songs and performing them with passion - which, of course, is nothing new at all.

Heathen Chemistry biography by Robert Crampton

Eleven years after their first gig, eight years after their first album, five years after the mid-nineties madness started to subside, here's no mystery why millions still love Oasis: honesty. The men are honest, the music is honest. We trust Oasis. That's why, one Saturday morning this winter, when 120,000 tickets went on sale for the band's two summer shows at Finsbury Park, Noel Gallagher was able to take a call from his manager by lunchtime to say that all the tickets had gone. "That's without them hearing any of the new stuff," says Noel, shaking his head in admiration. "For all the fans knew, we could have made a reggae album." They haven't made a reggae album. What they've made is Heathen Chemistry: explosive, yes; experimental, no. It's another, great, Oasis album; their fifth. "We've moved on a wee bit," says Noel. "But to re-invent ourselves completely we'd have to be contrived and we're not capable of that. I couldn't take on an alter ego and I know Liam couldn't because I'd be stood behind him going 'you look like a twat'. I don't think I'd look good in leather trousers anyway. We do Oasis music and that's it." Honesty again. Similarly, there's nothing too deep and meaningful about the album's title. It came from a T-shirt Noel bought in Ibiza. "I love this record," says Noel. "But I would say that wouldn't I?" With any other pop idol, of course you'd share his cynicism. Coming from a man so ruthlessly self-critical as to virtually disown the band's third album, a man who is scathingly dismissive of the marketing hype that threatens to take over his industry, you pay attention when he says: "It's a better collection of songs than the last two or three. It boils down to that: the songs are better. It does get more difficult. You can't just write Raspberry Fields Forever." "I don't know if I'm a better songwriter," he says. "But there is something in the air around the band that breeds better songs." He is reluctant to analyse it further, but admits that Liam contributing three songs and Gem Archer and Andy Bell one each might well have forced him to raise his game. "Maybe it's a competitive thing, I don't know. Keith Richards said "you don't go after the songs, the songs find you." "The best songs," he says, "pour out of you. You sit there with a guitar and a piece of paper and a pen, get the first line right, the rest of it comes immediately." That happened to him several times last summer. "I was living in a hotel near Buckingham Palace. Warm day, fuck all on the telly, in love with my girlfriend. I wrote She is Love in ten minutes. Live Forever was like that. Slide Away was like that. They're the songs that mean something to other people. You write it, put the kettle on, come back, sing it into a tape recorder, play it back and go: 'yeah, that's finished.' Fast forward six months and there's 60,000 people in a field singing it to you. What the fuck's that about? That's magic, as Paul Daniels once said." Noel conjured up Stop Crying Your Heart Out in similar fashion. Buskers be advised: learn it quickly; this track will be the Wonderwall of its time. If She is Love is about Noel's new girlfriend, many will assume that Force of Nature is about his ex-wife (I certainly did). But they'd be wrong. "I'll have to answer this a million times," he says wearily. "I wrote it for a film with Jude Law and Jonny Lee Miller a year before I got divorced and I've got the video to prove it. There you go. I'm going to bring that video to all my interviews for this album." In any event, it's a cracking song. OASIS biog. 2 It's no surprise that Noel still has what it takes - and now it turns out that his brother has too. "When I heard Born on a Different Cloud," says Noel, "I didn't think Liam had written it. I thought he was lying. But he always said, with everything he's been through, if he hasn't got it in him to write songs like that he'd be a waste of space. It was gonna come out one day." Now, it has. Liam's big brother glowed with "massive relief and pride." If it sounds like they're getting on well, that's because they are. "I've grown to love that boy so much," says Noel. "He is real. People say he plays up to his image but he's always been like that: lippy, loudmouthed, funny. Now he understands that when you're working you can't go on acting like you're sixteen when you're thirty. As soon as he started writing songs, he stopped being a pisshead." Thanks to that change, and - Noel is keen to stress - the calming influence and expert musicianship of Gem and Andy, the recording of Heathen Chemistry was sober and relaxed, unmarked by tantrums or walk-outs. The energy and attitude that have always been the band's strengths went into the music, not the myth-making: and it shows.