Definitely Maybe: track by track - how Oasis' debut album spoke to me

The summer of 1994, and the opening line to Oasis’ debut album, the first album that, as a then 14-year-old, I really cared about getting my hands on, and the opening salvo of Definitely Maybe felt to me like a gobful of career advice from a snarling Manc. You see, I was born to be a third, fourth even, generation coal miner. That was what men on my dad’s side of the family - proudly - did, yet that option was - cruelly - being taken from us. Our working futures, we felt at the time, were being stolen from us and we knew little else, except that we’d need to be something else. Then, suddenly, I … we … had Liam Gallagher swaggering towards us, spitting and shouting at us all: do something about it then, kids. Nobody can do it for you. Time waits for no one and life is short…

—

Rock ‘n’ Roll Star

I recall vividly the sense of anticipation ahead of getting my hands on Definitely Maybe. The crackle of giddiness amongst like-minded lads. Just like Noel and Liam, we loved football - it was all we had, really - and we loved each other … like brothers, some might say. We played together. Went on holidays together. We slept together - sleepovers were commonplace as kids, often in tents each others’ back gardens; we fought one another, and woe-betide anyone from another village who tried to fight one of us.

But we weren’t bad kids. We were good kids, in fact. With hard-working mums and dads whose ritual it was to once a week go the miners’ welfare to relax amongst their own friends, with the dads having worked six days straight of 12-hour shifts, underground, often in the treacherously dangerous pitch-black darkness - on hands and knees in poisonous slurry - whilst our mums juggled their own jobs, too, but also the cooking, cleaning, school runs and more.

My generation, just as the song goes, knew it wasn’t going to be easy to find a way out, some didn’t make it, but for our mums and dads they’d earned the right to step through that portal where, for one night a week, they could sing and dance and drink and smoke like, well, rock ‘n’ roll stars. All at once, two generations united by two Mancunian brothers whose lyrics offered hope to those of us in the foothills of our lives and gave permission for momentary, euphoric escape to those working hard to bring us up right and proper.

Which is why we were made to work for the thing, because that was how life was. So, first, we had to earn the money to buy it. There was no quick-and-easy - and necessarily legal - download button in our day. No Napster or LimeWire. No Amazon, Apple or Spotify music. If you wanted it, you had to pay for it and to pay for it, you cleaned dad’s car, you mowed the lawn, you washed the pots all week and only then would you be awarded the money to cover your bus fare to town and back, queue up at HMV for hours on end, pay for the album itself and perhaps grab a bag of chips - with scraps, natch - if you were lucky. Little wonder, then, I wanted to be, if not a rock ‘n’ roll star - I can no better play a musical instrument than I can fly a Typhoon - then somebody…

Shakermaker

…and, if Shakermaker is anything to go by, Noel and Liam did, too. They didn’t want humdrum city jobs any more than we wanted to go down the dying mines: I’d like to be somebody else, and not know where I’ve been. Here was a yearning for more that fitted with our own sense of purpose, or lack thereof - we just didn’t know how to express it … until now. To understand better, it’s worth picking up a copy of The Truth: My Life as an Oasis Drummer by Tony McCarroll, the original drummer and founding member of Oasis. He tells us how when, one a butcher, one filing for an insurance firm; Noel working the stores of a construction firm with a bust-up foot, Liam fighting at school - resulting in him being cracked around the head with a hammer. Humdrum, hard-knock lives - in the context of wanting to be a world famous rock star - being lived by young lads, who were just a bum-chord away from a life of drug addiction and crime. With hindsight, I don’t believe we were perceptive enough back then to be able to understand and articulate the parallels; we didn’t notice them so much as live and breathe them. Throughout Oasis’ early work there is a desire for change; for more. A plea to be liberated. I’m free, to be whatever I, whatever I choose and I’ll sing the blues if I want. I’m free to say whatever I, whatever I like if it’s wrong or right it’s alright.

If you’re not convinced by the opening line of Shakermaker, flip over to the B-Side of the single release where you’ll find one of my personal favourites, D’yer Wanna Be a Spaceman? What kid doesn’t, though for me, then, editing newspapers was up there with astronaut - it just wasn’t something lads like me got to do, and that, I think, is why this one resonates with me; not because of its musicality or its technicality but because it feels visceral. Meaningful. Existential, even. D’yer Wanna Be a Spaceman is his Thundercats roar to a downtrodden generation. Guitar held aloft, his own Sword of Omens: do we want to stay on dying planet Thundera, or do we wanna fight for something better? Noel is Lion-O and D’yer Wanna Be a Spaceman is his hypnotic beam of light, piercing from his instrument into the night sky, enthralling and energising the young Panthros and Tygras of working class Britain: It’s funny how your dreams change, as you’re growing old you don’t wanna be no spaceman, you just want the gold…we can just forget about feeling down, we can just forget about life in this town. I can still sing every word, from memory, three decades on…Thundercats, Thundercats, Thundercats … hoaaaaaa!

Live Forever

Like most working class forty-somethings today, I know that the best rock song of my years will follow the haunting four-note whistle that precedes Live Forever. It’s part of our DNA. Pavlov’s bell for the Britpop generation. It is a whistle that blows full circle; with one listen it is a carefree tune blown from the lips of a loved one pottering about in an octopus’ garden, in the shade, the next it is a mortician’s melancholic musing, blown to no-one along a hospital corridor. Then: dum-tsk-de-dum, dum tsk; dum-tsk-de-dum, dum tsk…Maybeeeeeeee…I don’t really wanna know…how yer garden grows…

Again, a point-blank refusal to blend in; to be shepherded into normality; to be ignored. Not only will you hear us now, you’ll hear us for all of eternity. Live Forever isn’t, as its previous two tracks are on the album, so much a yearning for change, as it is an F-U! we’re awesome. An unashamed, unabashed, unflinching ballad to their own belief in their own brilliance. If D’yer Wanna Be a Spaceman was Noel as Lion-O, rallying the troops, Live Forever is Liam as He-Man, ripping off his shirt and roaring ‘I HAVE THE POWER!’ and by association with the music, right then, so did we…

Up in the Sky

…and it was that empowerment that was hard to find, hard to feel as a teenager in a mining community in the early ‘90s. Margaret Thatcher had put her foot on the throats of mining families a full decade earlier, slowly squeezing the life out of industrial Britain. Out of us. We were gasping for air, let alone confidence and power. Suddenly we had these working-class heroes - our playground union reps - willing to lob rocks at the Establishment. There are those who like to denigrate Noel’s genius, suggesting all of his early work, at least, is nothing more than drug-addled ramblings fashioned as euphemisms for chemical highs, but this one was for us; all of us: Hey you, wearing the crown, making no sound, I heard you feel down? Well that’s just too bad, welcome to my world…Hey you, up in your tree, you want to be me, but that couldn’t be, ‘cause the people here, they don’t hear you calling…

…but we did. We heard Oasis. These were anthems for a youth doomed by circumstance. There would be no easy way out, but now we had music to march to along the way. We heard the melodies; we memorised the words; we believed in them…

Columbia

…even if we didn’t always understand them. Step forward Columbia. Should anyone have been in any doubt about the lifestyles led by wannabe rockstars in the ‘90s, Columbia is exhibit one, two, three and all of the rest. It is a hedonistic, kaleidoscopic fug lying low in the valley of Definitely Maybe. Up In The Sky was the night before. Columbia is the hangover, yet, through that haze of the headache remains that sense of something else coming; something bigger, better: There we were, now here we are…I can’t tell you the way I feel because the way I feel is oh so new to me…

Supersonic

…and if Up In the Sky was the night out and Columbia is the come-down, then Supersonic is the hair of the dog. What makes you bad makes you better, as they say, and even Noel Gallagher accepts (though he did say that possibility p*sses him off somewhat - that his writing may have been improved by the influence of cocaine in particular. Supersonic epitomises that sentiment of his. Noel is quick to tell anyone who cares to listen that Supersonic was written in 10 minutes flat, and that - given this was their debut single - all at once blows every other songwriter out of the water, whilst affirming his ridiculous talent. A masterpiece brought to the boil faster than a Pot Noodle. It was, as the name suggests, Concorde in a sky full of prop-planes, oozing self-belief: I need to be myself, I can’t be noone else…I’m feeling Supersonic, give me gin and tonic. This was Oasis hurtling down the runway of popular culture, ripping up the tarmac in their wake, preparing for a take-off that would enable them to see things we’ll never see...

Bring It On Down

…but if you are going to fly supersonic on Concorde with a skinful of G&T, you better be ready for what comes next, and Bring It On Down feels a little like that to Definitely Maybe: What was that sound ringing around your brain? Today was just a blur, you gotta head like a ghost train. A ghost train to the next haunted station. The next track. A segue to something else. Listen to the 40-second intro; it sets a rail-ride rhythm that carries the entire track towards one of Oasis’ signature classics. It can’t sign off, though, without reminding us of who we are and why we’re here, gathered, in the music of this album: You’re the outcast - you’re the underclass…but you don’t care ‘ cause you’re living fast.

Cigarettes & Alcohol

In our house, cigarettes and alcohol were as ever present as the carriage clock on the mantelpiece; mum smoked, dad smoked. Mum drank, dad drank - they still do drink. It wasn’t so much a lifestyle as the lifestyle, and the inevitability of my brother and I colliding with fags and booze wasn’t deemed tragic or sad or disappointing or anything like that. More a rite of passage into adulthood, I suppose. As it turned out, I never did touch a cigarette, nor do the white line. What I did do, though, is recognise our family in the lyrics of the song. That portal that mum and dad used to step through; hard-earned escapism in a smoke-filled tap room filled with friends and family whose hands were sore and nails were dirty but as the nicotine and alcohol combined, love and laughter enveloped them: It’s a crazy situation, but all I need are cigarettes and alcohol. Permission and recognition, all in one. You could wait for a lifetime to spend your days in the sunshine…Live life. Do what makes you happy. We haven’t got much but we’ve got each other. Is it worth the aggravation, to find yourself a job when there’s nothing worth working for?

Digsy’s Dinner

This is where the Definitely Maybe party starts to wind down. The smoke-filled room clears, the blood runs a little cleaner and the big tidy up begins. In the context of the album, and the way it is constructed as a whole, Digsy’s Dinner is the moment on the theme park pirate ship where the whine from the tyres that have taken you on an adrenaline-fuelled ride start to whine a little differently. More slowly, as they take the sting out of the experience. Some say Digsy’s Dinner - a song about going to someone’s house for lasagna - is Noel taking the p*ss out of Blur, the posh kids of Britpop, others say it’s him proving that with a good melody, good timing and song construction, any lyrics go. Not so much lasagna, then, as the kebab at the end of the night; food to soak up the excesses of the previous eight tracks. It’s the back door boogie, without telling your mates you’re…

Slide Away

…slipping out of the back door without anyone knowing, and heading home to someone you love, and as love songs go, Slide Away is almost peerless in the pantheon of British rock music. Every girl I ever fancied as a hormone-addled boy: I dream of you, and all the things you say. I wonder where you are now. When I married the woman with whom I’ve shared the last 20 years of our lives, I lobbied hard for Slide Away to be our first dance: Now that you’re mine, we’ll find a way, of chasing the sun. Let me be the one, who shines with you…we’re two of a kind, we’ll find a way. Now, there were two of us with dreams. Two of us whose dads worked the pits. Two of us for whom there was no easy way out. And now, we’re…

Married With Children

…happily married with two little boys and every now and then, Mrs Mitchinson will tell me: that music’s shite, it keeps me up all night, up all night.

–

Right, how do I get my hands on some tickets, now that London, Manchester and Edinburgh have been given an extra night of Gallagher-fuelled fun?