Wasn’t There Then

Right now, you can’t turn on the internet without stumbling across someone, somewhere telling you that it’s 25 years since Oasis released Be Here Now.

The language is telling:

Fastest selling album in UK history …

Biggest selling UK album of 1997 …

Chart-topping in 15 countries worldwide …

People are flagging the numbers to push the anniversary for two reasons:

1) Because there’s money to be made in persuading people to buy something they’ve already bought before.

This is an essential part of the current business model of the music industry.

It’s why legacy acts constantly repackage albums you’ve already bought.

We’ve all heard Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road, right? Even if we were never into the Beatles, those songs are stitched into the fabric of our collective histories. Well, here’s the digital remaster for the CD age; and here are the demos for the box set; and here are the vinyl reissues; and here are the new vinyl reissues, but this time they’ve been remastered not by George Martin, but by his son, Giles …

If that’s the way we’re going, why don’t we get the granddaughter of the Abbey Road tea lady in to give us her perspectives?

How many sugars did John take with his tea? Did that affect his vocal performances, or was it more the heroin and LSD?

We’ve already heard the songs. We already know the story. What are we getting here that enrichs our experience of the music?

Are we looking for new insights into the art and practice? Paul McCartney telling you yet again how he wrote Yesterday in a dream isn’t going to help you in writing your own Yesterday. If you want to do that, you have to do the work yourself - and it’s hard, and it takes time, and there’s no guarantee of success, if by success you mean monetary reward and fame. Those are beyond your control. Doing something well, engaging with the process, learning, growing, developing are all you have agency over.

Reselling the past on the nostalgia ticket is why bands who were massive in the 60’s, 70’s or 80’s can still sell out stadium tours. Not because they’re producing anything artistically viable, but because.

Because people realise what they had when they were young when they get older and they realise what they’ve lost in growing old - and want, if only for one night, to feel young again.

Because singing along to the songs you sang along to then is a surefire way of doing that. Music is one of the most powerful triggers of nostalgia. The intro of a song overheard in passing on the radio can take you right back to where you where and what you were doing and what you were feeling when you first heard it.

Because older people have disposable income that lets them leverage that feeling.

Because people will always buy what they already own.

First principle of car dealerships.

Glorifying the past, which is the British disease, dries up the future. And there are implicit dangers in beatifying the individuals who were part of significant cultural events and their work, which I’ve explored here.

2) They’re pushing the numbers when they talk about Be Here Now to persuade people to revisit the album because they can’t push the music.

Be Here Now was not great, musically.

Yes, millions of people bought it …

But millions of people also stopped playing it after half a dozen spins.

Back in the early to mid-nineties, Oasis were the great white hopes of British music. All Mancunian swagger and Liam Gallagher’s tabloid magnet ability, coupled with Noel Gallagher’s knack of cutting-and-pasting together melodic songs that sounded like they meant something, they rode a rocket to success with Definitely Maybe and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory. No-one noticed that what was being sold by Liam’s admittedly brilliant vocal performances as guttersnipe poetry was actually Noel writing with a rhyming dictionary; and no-one seemed to care that what was being sold as songwriting genius was actually plagiarism that resulted in lawsuits: a riff and a hook from paedophile Gary Glitter here; an entire Stevie Wonder chorus there; David Bowie's bridge over here; Status Quo's boogie there; Marc Bolan's Get It On riff there; Cortez the Killer for Slide Away; and the entirety of The Rutles Free To Be An Idiot lifted for Whatever ...

When Noel did manage to write his own tunes, they were all the same. Wonderwall is the same as Talk Tonight which is the same as D'You Know What I Mean. Honest. They’re the same chord progression. Noel came out of the gate saying he wanted to be the best songwriter of his generation - which was a great line, but the reality was that he wasn’t even the best songwriter in Burnage.

The reality is that Oasis were their generation's Slade rather than the reincarnation of The Beatles.

That’s fine.

In fact, that’s more than fine.

That’s great.

Dancefloor’s still fill at weddings for Cum On, Feel The Noise and Merry Christmas, Everyone will be played as long as Christmas is celebrated anywhere. Every generation needs three chords played loud with a chorus your milkman can whistle, and pop stars only get to be ‘artists’ if they keep producing hits. Find me at a festival somewhere and I’ll sing along.

But just how far short Oasis were of their self-proclaimed aims was made painfully apparent by By Here Now.

The fastest selling album in UK history; most units shifted in a week; biggest album; longest album; heaviest album ... all of the plaudits that were thrown around to suggest how momentous it was then (and that are being thrown around now) hid one essential fact:

It was shit.

As well as having the moment and the momentum, Definitely Maybe and Morning Glory were short enough that you could enjoy them and then play them again without feeling you’d overdosed. Both had taut songs, nothing overly long. Both had hooks aplently. Then, the magpie tendencies were being seen as charming rather than an absence of talent (have you heard Noel’s solo stuff? He only gets to still make it because he’s Noel Gallagher and the people who liked Oasis when they were twenty still buy it now they’re fifty to play-pretend that they’re still twenty); and the absence of meaning was being sold as meaning not yet found.

That’s a very teenage way of winning an argument, isn’t it: if I have to explain it, then you just don’t get it.

Yeah? Let’s see how you feel about that line when your cardiothoracic surgeon uses it just before your quadruple bypass. An artist, and by artist I mean anyone engaged with any creative pursuit, which encompasses everything from music to engineering to cracking a chest cavity open, should be able to explain the how and the why as much as the who and the when and the what.

If you were being generous (and we always should be …) Be Here Now was basically a good 35-minute album hidden inside a 71-minute cocaine blizzard. (You can always tell an album mixed on cocaine. Cocaine obliterates your ability to hear top end, which leads to musicians who use it in the studio turning it up, which results in mixes where everything is toppy, even the bottom end … Go back and listen to a bit of Be Here Now with that in mind. See?).

People play games like this all the time. Who was the most important Beatle? (sixty years on, if you haven’t worked out that they were all essential, you’re a moron …) What would … And Justice For All? sound like with bass guitar? (Terrible, because the recorded guitar and drum frequencies are occupying its space. Re-engineer it and it’s different album by a different band). Why have other people made careers out of copying Nick Drake without people calling them on it? (Because there are Mozarts and Salieris in this world, and all the Salieris want to be thought of as Mozarts …); Why won’t Pete Townshend stop explaining Tommy? (That one might just be me …).

But if you’re willing to play, you can make a perfectly decent third Oasis album out of Be Here Now.

Here’s mine:

Side One:

D’You Know What I Mean?

My Big Mouth

Stand By Me

I Hope I Think I Know

Side Two:

It's Getting Better, Man

Don't Go Away

The Girl In The Dirty Shirt

Stay Young

There you go.

Pithy, punchy, chock full of tunes, even rejigged it’s still not as right people, right songs, right place, right time as their first two, but it’s a much better listening experience than the official release turned out to be.

Because, unfortunately, when it came time to make their great and much-heralded leap forward, the self-proclaimed greatest band of their generation had nothing to say but proclamations of their own genius, none of which were supported by the work. The Beatles had songs that reflected their moment; and what was happening. Oasis's manufactured rivals, Blur, mined ideas of Englishness and identity and sixties Mod culture with self-referential awareness - and then got out before the formula became a trap. When it came down to making their career-defining statement, though, it turned out that Oasis had nothing to say. We’re great because we say we are only works when you have the goods to back it up. Muhammad Ali would have been a gobby sideshow if he hadn’t backed up the bravado in and out of the ring.

Oasis didn’t.

Be Here Now was the end of Britpop, which limped on into the noughties landfill Indie like Razorlight and the nonsense that was The Libertines (If any Guardian journalists are reading right now: stop interviewing Pete Doherty, please. He's produced nothing artistic of note, and while addiction is horrific, he is typical of the breed, being self-obsessed, self-pitying and self-motivated to a degree that would be defined as clinical narcissism if professionally examined and diagnosed. You’re enabling him, and making him a significant figure when he’s not). Even at around the same time as Be Here Now’s release, it wasn’t roses in the UK’s musical garden. Yes, Elastica were great for one album until the drugs kicked in and they ran out of other people's licks, but Embrace were always terrible. As for Menswear et al, the least said the better. Chart stuff? It’s all chart stuff, stoopid. But if we have to go there: S-Club-Seven, Blue and the Spice Girls. The Spice Girls had great tunes, to be fair, but do I really want my daughters growing up thinking that the central message of girl power is get your tits out and drink and drug and be as boorish and stupid as the boys?

(No, in case you’re wondering … ).

The coda to Be Here Now is that Oasis never made another good album; and Noel and Liam only release them now when they have another interview to promote.

When I interviewed Jarvis Cocker for Exposed magazine during lockdown, he talked about how Britpop was nothing to do with Pulp - it was just a convenient label they got tagged with.

Pulp had actually come out of the eighties, where pop had manifestos and ideas - as it had in every generation going back to the fifties, including C’mon Everybody … Pulp’s credo was that there was beauty in every day things, even in the suffocation of living in Sheffield terraces where everyone knows everyone else's business and no-one is better than they ought to be. Britpop, ultimately, was the children of the sixties generation trying to have their own cultural moment. But the thing about the sixties was that it was a genuine culmination of massive historical forces coming together: the age of colonial empires coming to an end; the end of industrialisation and manufacturing in Britain at least, the release from trauma of two world wars, a new generation coming of age at a time when being young was cool for the first time, and having money in your pocket to spend on more than survival.

You can’t engineer that.

Jarvis Cocker reviewed The John Lennon Letters when they were published, and we discussed it during our interview. He noted that The Beatles are now automatically treated hagiographically. They’re elevated and we are told that they were special, over and over again. We’re told this because the bands from those times are money in the bank to companies: their product, which we all have anyway, is endlessly sold and resold to us.

What’s forgotten now they’ve been repositioned as a resaleable brand is that The Beatles were four working-class boys from Liverpool, a tough, industrial town in Northern England.

They were never meant to reshape the age in their own image.

They were never down to succeed.

They were factory fodder, as everyone was in England then.

They were down to go to work, keep their heads down, not rock the boat and maybe be shot and killed if the elites had another war and needed cannon fodder.

Far from being special, the only noteworthy thing about The John Lennon Letters is how ordinary they and he was.

And that’s the point.

The Beatles were not extraordinary, superhuman individuals.

They were ordinary people who did extraordinary things.

Which is why rather than buying up every new release of the same songs as holy relics and acquiesing in touching the hems of every rehashed offering as if they were and are secular saints, we should remember that the central message they gave their age.

It wasn’t: All You Need Is Love.

It was: We Made It, You Can Too.

Talking to people who were alive and the same age as The Beatles in the sixties the thing they took from them was: we can do it too.

And that’s one of the many reasons the sixties was a Big Bang moment. Britpop, the 90’s and Oasis were people trying to recreate that Big Bang with corner shop fireworks. Same guitars, same clothes, pretty much the same drugs, same chord progressons, and the same mining of the same influences. That’s fine. I was alive then. I sang along - just like I sang along to my parents’s sixties and seventies tunes; and my grandparents fifties and forties tunes. Because it’s music - and I love music.

Don’t Be Here Now 25 years on.

Don’t Be Here Now because it wasn’t there then.

Oasis ran out of steam when it became clear that they really had nothing to say other than we're great because we say we are.

Noel should have released the b-sides as the third Oasis album and called it a day.

That would have been a killer third album.

©℗ A. I. Jackson

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