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Oasis "Don't Believe The Truth" (2005)
Turn
Up The Sun/Mucky Fingers/Lyla/Love Like A Bomb/The Importance Of Being Idle/The
Meaning Of Soul/Guess God Thinks I’m Abel/Part Of The Queue/Keep The Dream
Alive/A Bell Will Ring/Let There Be Love
‘I’m
no stranger to this place where real life and dreams collide…’
Most Oasis fans will tell you that there’s no point
in owning anything the band made from third album ‘Be Here Now’ onwards and
that the band were only a pale shadow of themselves once the 1990s turned to
the naughties. They’re wrong. Time and again on albums three to seven Oasis
wrote the best music of the decade, pertinent emotional songs that dug a little
deeper than anything on the two knock-out albums from their youth. The problem
for fans is that Oasis lived their career backwards: the consistency and
purpose that often only comes with age happened early on in their career when
they hit the ground running and it’s on their later albums when Oasis
occasionally stumble through the noise and confusion. None of their final five
albums quite hits the spot all the way through and all of them, to some extent,
represent two steps forward and one step back. Time and again in the Oasis
canon a song will get you excited, make you cry, make you dance, make you learn
something about the band you never knew before – and then fail to follow it up.
Time and again each Oasis album was greeted as ‘their best since Morning Glory’
– and time and time again they got forgotten when the next album came out.
‘Truth’ is that problem writ large: it has the best solution yet to the ‘what
do we do now we aren’t young and hungry anymore?’ by writing singalong pop
songs celebrating having survived everything the world had to throw at you and
singalong pop songs about characters seen in the audience who are also young
and tired (no surprise that this is the most Who-like of Oasis albums, what
with that band’s part-time drummer Zak Starkey on drums, with The Kinks also
replacing the usual Beatley sounds as this record’s other key influence).
However ‘Truth’ is also the album where Oasis suffer the most from being on
auto-pilot, of ‘filling in’ songs that sound suspiciously familiar to what they’d
done before. The ‘truth’ of what Oasis are and what they represent is suddenly
more confusing on this album than all the others…
But you ignore the highlights of all of these albums
at your peril, with each album containing at least one nugget of gold that even
the superlative ‘Definitely Maybe’ can’t match. Songs like ‘Fade In-Out’ ‘Gas
Panic’ ‘Little By Little’ ‘Falling Down’ and this album’s ‘Keep The Dream
Alive’ are as good as music ever gets and had they all been put on one album
Oasis would have my favourite record of all time. ‘Don’t Believe The Truth’ ,
their sixth record, has more gems than most, with at least three other
absolutely classic Oasis moments (‘Lyla’ ‘Guess God Thinks I’m Abel’ and ‘Love
Like A Bomb’) and it’s no surprise that this album in particular seemed to win
critics and audience over in a way the band had never quite managed since 1997.
But, as all buyers of the later Oasis efforts know, there’s an awful lot of
dross to sit through too, with ‘Turn Up The Sun’ and ‘Mucky Fingers’ especially
the weakest songs Oasis ever recorded until...erm...the next album (when [141]
‘Get Off Your High Horse Lady’ beats anything off this record hands down for
sheer awfulness). There’s a confusion at the heart of this record (summed up
nicely by the contradictory title) that Oasis have finally worked out how to do
this and pull together – just as they seem to be growing apart.
Moodier and more ballad-filled than the average
Oasis album, ‘Don’t Believe The Truth’ is still quite an angry album. The title
of the record is one that’s confused many since the record’s release and is
notably free of the bravado of titles like ‘Be Here Now’ and ‘Standing On The
Shoulder Of Giants’. There’s a feeling of deception in the air and a cover-up
somewhere and I’m tempted to think that the band are trying to cover up the
cracks already showing in their relationship here, although frankly the only
way you’d know for certain is if you were a member of the band. Note this,
though: longterm drummer Alan White quit early on in the album sessions and
whilst no stranger to losing band members the way the band handled it was
particularly poor and in great contrast to the excitement when he joined the
band. The end apparently came when he had a spat with drinking buddy Liam after
one bottle too many; however Noel jumped on the split and proclaimed to the
press that Whitey had been kicked out the band for ‘having an attitude
problem’. This seems strange for the only band member loyal enough to stick
with the band through the ugliness of the ‘Be Here Now’ sessions (would Noel
and Liam have even been able to call themselves ‘Oasis’ without another member
of the band there across ‘Giants’?) Reading between the lines of what was said
then and since, it seems more likely that after a decade (the longest anyone in
Oasis lasted outside the brothers) Alan was just exhausted, tired of being the
buffer between the brothers, of Noel insisting on doing things his way, of Liam
leaving his vocal overdubs to the last minute, of the disagreements,
re-recordings, the endless tours. Playing the drums is a very physical job,
much more so than any of the others, and you’re often stuck behind the drums at
the back of the stage behind your bandmates with no eye contact all night. This
might be why so many drummers seem to quit AAA bands, much more so than other
musicians. The problems might yet have been resolved: Liam admits he was in a
mean mood the night of their argument, while a week off in the sun might have
done wonders. But Oasis didn’t want to bother – they wanted to push ahead with
new blood.
Very little, if any, of Whitey’s playing made it to
the final album. This might be because yet again the band discarded a whole
album’s worth of sessions, this time recorded in Las Vegas, admitting amongst
themselves that the album simply ‘wasn’t working’ (four of the tracks were
re-recorded for the record, none of them the best – everything else was
discarded).This wasn’t a crisis in itself (it was actually something of a ‘good
luck’ totem after the re-recordings made the ok ‘Definitely’ Maybe’ positively
great) but it’s not the sign of a band fully in control of themselves ever.
Though he lacks White’s sensitive-but-loud percussion abilities (instead going
for wild noise in the manner of his godfather Keith Moon), Zak Starkey is a
worthy replacement who gave the new sessions an added kick and whallop. The son
of a Beatle (Ringo if you hadn’t guessed, though their drumming shares little
in common), you sense that Noel and Liam would have hired him however good he
was, but actually Zak was great. He had been hired by the new-look Who and is
generally agreed to be their best replacement drummer for Moony: loud, hard and
exciting there isn’t a gig out there that would have suited him as well.
Unfortunately due to paperwork Zak was still technically a member of The Who in
2005 and was working for Oasis during his ‘time-off’. With both bands desperate
to have him and eager not to get in his way they came to an arrangement where
he could play with The Who half the year and Oasis the other, with the
understanding that Zak would be credited on ‘Truth’ as a ‘session musician’
(even though he’s clearly far more integral to the band sound than that and
ends up involved with more tracks than Liam!) This worked great for a year –
but then Oasis got sarky about Starkey: which band would he choose? In the end
Zak got neither: he left Oasis during the off-season of 2006-2007 and The Who
imploded (yet again) leaving him uncharacteristically quiet (a covers album in
2016 was his only recording and one-off gigs with The Who his only live
appearances in the past decade or so).
On the surface of the promotion for this album (made
with a much bigger push than ‘Giants’ or ‘Chemistry’) everything was all
smiles: Oasis were going to return to where they’d left off a decade earlier,
their new-look band had now grown and shaped into a live behemoth, they’d made
the best and most band-orientated record since ‘Definitely Maybe’. If anyone
brought up the change of drummers at all it was viewed in the light of keeping
the band fresh and youthful, as if Whitey was the only band member holding them
back. But that’s not how the album sounds: there’s a sense on so many of these
tracks of near-misses, of an annihilation that almost happened and a sense that
the storm still rumbles on thunderously until the next lightning break. What’s
notable now with the passage of time (well, seven years – that’s nothing for
our site’s standards I know but bear with me) is how much evidence is here
about the band’s split a full three years early and how, even more than final
album ‘Dig Out Your Soul’, you can hear the different worlds that became ‘Beady
Eye’ and ‘Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds’ competing for space on the same
LP. There’s suddenly a wide gulf between the songs that Noel is writing
(despair) and Liam (anticipation). The ‘rest’ of the band – the Beady Eye
quotient – get much more say into the album than ever before and Noel gets just
five of the album’s eleven songs to himself (a far cry compared to even the
fourth record).
You might expect Oasis’ chief to be sore: this was
his band, made to his vision and usually when a leading songwriter gets
suppressed in the writing credits it’s because of greed and avarice. But not
here. Noel said in interviews of the period that it was ‘about fooking time’
the others got their fingers out and started writing, claiming that he’d always
dreamed of being in a band where everybody pulled their weight. Nice as far as
it goes: it’s lonely at the top and it’s good to hear someone who’d already
made it promoting other songwriting talents that were about to, but I think the
situation goes further than that. After having an abundance of material all
written in obscurity in his early twenties spread across Oasis’ first three
years the songs have been drying up steadily for Noel. So far he’s got through
albums four and five by sheer persistence, writing out his misery and throwing
in just enough of a return to the old Oasis sound written on auto-pilot to keep
the band afloat. The increasing gap between Oasis albums (what used to be a
year is now more like three) is also a worrying sign of someone who doesn’t
have as much to say anymore. It must have been with a rare feeling of gratitude
towards his brother (however hidden) when Liam suddenly started coming up with
the goods and the hiring of two new Oasis members precisely because they were
tried and tested songwriters seems in retrospect like a canny move from a
songwriter who knows he’s facing a writer’s block crisis. Much more so than
‘Giants’ or ‘Chemistry’, ‘Truth’ is evidence that Noel was running on empty by
his mid-thirties. Certainly there seems to be a crisis of confidence in the
elder brother’s songs for this album, which either re-work his old ground
(‘Mucky Fingers’ is the fast and ‘Let There Be Love’ the slow versions of what
any semi-talented fan would churn out when asked to write a song for Oasis) or
that of others (the much-lauded ‘Importance Of Being Idle’ is so close to The
Kinks’ work that Ray Davies should probably sue and I’m quite surprised he
hasn’t). Only ‘Lyla’ (note the closeness of the name to another famous Kinks
single though this one is really what The Beatles would sound like covering a
Rolling Stones song...) really adds to his repertoire, a stunning production
number about the toughness of femininity that goes back to reflecting what he
sees in the band’s audience night after night for the first time in a decade.
Largely, though, the tenth anniversary of the ‘Morning Glory’ album finds Noel
chained not to the mirror and the razorblade but to his own artistic traps, not
young enough to write like he did in the first part of his career, not
miserable enough to write like he did in the second part of his career and not
yet sure what to do in the third part of his career.
Instead it’s the Beady Eye-type numbers that work
best, adding a poignancy and fragility unusual for Oasis at the time but one
that makes sense now that we fans know the ‘Different Gear, Still Speeding’
album to come. The tone of these songs is largely one of vulnerable defiance,
of seething tension about to explode into something big: ‘Guess God Thinks I’m
Abel’ is surely Liam’s song to his brother and their differences in this
period, their relationship poised on a knife-edge that could go either way;
‘Love Like A Bomb’ is the very sound of something about to explode; ‘The
Meaning Of Soul’ an angry punkish song desperate to strip away meaning and
words to reveal the urgent sense of need underneath everything. For all his air
of bravado arrogance there’s a sweet heart beating in the soul of Liam
Gallagher and it’s to his credit that he was brave enough to let it show so
early on in his songwriting (after all, whatever rock and roll star would write
his first published song about his son on [82] ‘Little James’?) All three of
his contributions are superb for this record, exploring recent Oasis themes of
doubts and fears but in a very Oasis way, with a sneer. Gem only gets one full
song but his ‘A Bell Will Ring’ is easily the best traditional-sounding Oasis
song on the record (astonishing for someone who’d only been with the band three
years at that time). It’s another song about something about to arrive, of
waiting to pull something out of the darkness that will suddenly light your way
(though unlike Noel’s songs of light he hears it as music, as a ‘bell’ that
tells him where to go). Finally Andy Bell blots his copy book with the tired
Oasis pastiche ‘Turn Up The Sun’, which is an intelligent but soul-less
re-write of every Noel Gallagher song since he joined the band, but he excels
like never before with the album highlight ‘Keep The Dream Alive’, a song about
carrying on in difficult circumstances as long as possible. Overall the theme
is one of a calm in between a storm: songs like ‘Abel’ and ‘Let There Be Love’
speak openly about searching for peace after a heavy conflict and ‘Keep The
Dream Alive’ all but admits that a lifelong dream is ‘over’ (and what bigger
dream could there be than playing in the best rock and roll group of modern
times?)
For some reason, though, Oasis chose 2005 to make
their big push to re-launch their career, after skulking (by their standards)
in 2000 and 2002. I’ve always wondered why: this isn’t something you do when
you are part of an unhappy crew but something that happens when you feel on top
of the world. The answer seems to have been purely commercial and financial.
Again, Oasis didn’t do things the ‘right way round’ in their career:
‘Definitely Maybe’ was so big so early that the band didn’t need to do the
fawning game, they had fans more or less from the first (give or take a single
or two to warm things up). The band had been given their own head and- thanks
to the weight and sales they still possessed – they were largely left to their
own devices even after McGee collapsed and Creation were bought out by the very
aptly named Big Brother. The label gave Oasis two records to pull their socks
up but wouldn’t give them a third; for the first time ever they
‘interfered’/’made suggestions’ on an Oasis record. After they heard back the
‘Las Vegas’ recordings they insisted the bands work with a big name producer,
Dave Sardy. A one-time member of the 1990s band ‘Barkmarket’ he was currently
hot after producing the band ‘Jet!’ Born almost simultaneously with Noel in
1967, he was the first producer the same age as the band rather than older:
while his production is crisp and punchy, it lacks the depth and poignancy of
any of the earlier Oasis CDs. He did though have an idea for how to modernise
their sound. After all, by 2005, all of Oasis’ Britpop rivals were dead and
buried or long forgotten in a sea of boy bands and girl bands and faceless pop
–few bands from the 1990s (only the Super Furries and Stereophonics) had forged
so hard for so long and the band’s skewered take on the music of the 2000s from
the eyes of representatives from ten years before was pretty much unique (like
much of the music around in 2005, this album is softer around the edges but
with a harshness and directness in many of the lyrics despite the gentler music
setting; think Muse and Kasabian, big that year). You can tell that Sardy is an
Oasis fan, but the production sound still doesn’t quite fit them somehow. More
successful was when Big Brother told the band there wasn’t an obvious catchy
hit single. Stung, Oasis went back to basics with their most promising tune
‘Lyla’, re-cutting it from a sleepy Noel-sung tune that exploded slowly into a
sizzling Liam-led hook-laden pop song. The most ‘pop’ moment in the Oasis
canon, it was probably a sharp move that resulted in better sales than the
singles from ‘Heathen Chemistry’. However maybe it was all that publicity that
came off: follow-ups ‘The Importance Of Being Idle’ and ‘Let There Be Love’
aren’t as obviously singles material but they did quite well in the charts too
(‘Idle’ becoming the band’s eighth and final UK #1).
What we have, then, is a band who feel close to the
end of their tether, ready to give up and call it a day, given a new launchpad
to their career in terms of a bigger publicity budget and a more commercial
sound. On paper this album is as soggy and vulnerable as any of its immediate
three predecessors; on record this album sounds oddly bouncy and catchy. No
wonder the end result confused so many fans – or that the band sarcastically
titled it ‘Don’t Believe The Truth’. Many of the songs are about not endings
but second chances, to be grasped while you can. If there’s a theme on this
album then it’s one of redemption: ‘Be no tomorrow they say – well I say more’s
the pity’ runs ‘Part Of The Queue’; ‘The sun will shine on you again’ goes ‘A
Bell Will Ring’; ‘Come along, let’s make it tonight!’ screams the end of ‘Abel’
in an eerie coda that exists outside the rest of the song; ‘Shake off your
tired eyes, the world is waiting for you’ goes the ‘new’ section of ‘Let There
Be Love’ left unfinished during the Las Vegas sessions; ‘Love one another!’
runs the chorus of opener ‘Turn Up The Sun’. It’s as if the final dying embers
of everything that drove Oasis on are re-igniting, with the band eager to make
up for lost time and realising how special the experience of being in this band
is.In short, this album could very nearly have ended up like ‘Let It Be’ but in
the end became ‘Abbey Road’, a last hurrah of getting together and remembering
everything that came before with a last gasp of the old working spirit before
the end finally comes.
One comment made at the time, only half jokingly,
was that at last Oasis has created something as good as the B-sides casually
thrown out during the first two albums. Now unlike most fans I still believe
that the band’s greatest work comes on their B-sides where the band don’t try
quite as hard so even though that comment was meant to be a sort-of put down,
it’s actually spot on for me. There’s certainly more adventure here than there
was for large passages of ‘Shoulders’ and ‘Chemistry’ and I say that as a fan
who loved both albums (with a couple of reservations). Played back to back with
the arrogant powerhouse of youth that was ‘Definitely Maybe’ and you can hear
much the writing has changed: songs about power, need and knowing winks to the
audience have been replaced by guilt and uncertainty, as if the dodgy future
laughed at on album closer [15] ‘Married With Children’ has now become a
reality. ‘Dreams’ are hard fought for and fading, not the certainty they were
on [7] ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Star’. There’s also that sense of worry that time might
pass before the narrators get a chance to put their point of view across –
something unthinkable for the unshaken belief that ‘you and I are gonna live
forever!’ What’s curious is that Noel (and to some extent Liam) are writing
these uncertain and fragile sounding songs at a time when they were still part
of the biggest act on the planet (even with less of a following from the glory
days of the mid 90s this album still became one of the fastest number one
albums of all time on release); by contrast the early Oasis standards was
written when Noel (and to some extent Liam) had nothing; on the dole, dismissed
by all and sundry and relegated to a life of clinging on, waiting for something
to happen. Oasis effectively end their career in a complete mirror opposite of
where they began (bar the stuttering attempt at re-starting over as a
psychedelic band on ‘Dig Out Your Soul’), with the world a troubled and
uncertain place. Sadly that’s the main reason why the songs on this album
weren’t (on the whole) taken to heart by fans the same way their earlier work
was – but it’s to their credit that Oasis should have gone on such a journey
and ended up by seeing the world through quite different eyes.
Or almost different eyes. Back in the day Oasis
B-side [37] ‘Acquiesce’s calls for brotherly love became one of the band’s best
loved songs, not least for the fact that Noel seems to have written the song
after a blazing row with Liam that saw the elder Gallagher brother walk out and
declare ‘Oasis are over’. In it the narrator, though frustrated, reaches out an
olive branch because ‘we need each other...we believe in one other...and I know
we’re gonna uncover what’s sleeping in us all’. Ten years – almost to the week
– Liam finally agrees with his elder brother on ‘Guess God Thinks I’m Abel’
declaring ‘Let’s get along...no one else could break us, no one else could take
us if they tried’. It’s as if Liam has
just realised how important everything Oasis stood for really was – and how
much he doesn’t want it to end (even if Noel is already looking to wash his
hands of it all). It’s a special moment and a neat reflection of what didn’t
change during all the years Oasis were around – that together the brothers were
unbeatable. Last album ‘Dig Out Your Soul’ is, reportedly, a hurried album
where Noel recorded his songs early on and Liam only did his vocals in the
final days (the ones originally put aside from mixing). If true, then that
makes ‘Truth’ the last real collaborative Oasis album and ‘Abel’ is a nice
place to leave the band, whatever you make of the rest of the album.
‘Truth’ then is a good album, but it gets many basic
things wrong. One thing that doesn’t quite work is the running order. A short
note: when I first got to know this album it was thanks to a copy very kindly
made for me by my friend Rob (who managed to beat me into the shops to buy it!)
Alas his computer of the time was almost as weird as mine and copied the songs
for the album in completely the wrong order. This running of the order – with
‘Keep The Dream Alive’ first and ‘Abel’ last – works an awful lot better than
anything Oasis came up with and while I own a ‘proper’ copy now I still
occasionally programme my CD player to play this record ‘the wrong way round’
because it sounds so much better like this; the one-two start of ‘Turn Up The
Sun’ and ‘Mucky Fingers’ is just awful, slowing the record down to a crawl, with
all the good stuff hidden away towards the end. My guess is that this album
would have been better received still with a superior track listing closer to
what my first copy randomly gave me! One thing I truly don’t understand though:
why is the front cover a bunch of garage doors with the title written on them?!
Considering this is the band who’ve given us flying globes, limousines in
swimming pools and a classroom full of pupils studying the band’s lyrics, it
seems a bit of a let down somehow and one thing the Big Brother marketing team
most definitely got wrong.
The
Songs:
‘I carry a madness everywhere I go’ is a great
opening line for a song (and album), but somehow [115] ‘Turn Up The Sun’ never
quite gets going, not mad fer it enough. Written by Andy Bell in full Oasis
style, its full of the power and the noise and the slight threat inherent in
the lyrics and comes with lots of Noel’s favourite ‘light’ imagery – it could
be read as an invitation to the band to become fully inspired again. That’s
sadly ironic though for a song that sounds unfinished and with little new to
say, sounding like too many songs stuck together (it’s hard to imagine another
Oasis song ‘declaring ‘love one another’ so openly either). That said, this
piece of hippie philosophising does work in the way that the Stones’ flower
power stuff worked so well (for me at least their greatest period), offering an
edginess and fear that most ‘brotherly love’ songs don’t have. There’s a lovely
instrumental section, too, where the band drop the usual wall of noise for a
lovely melodic piano part that offers a fine contrast to the eerie march of the
threatening verses. Liam sounds oddly uncomfortable with this song though –
whether it’s the ‘Oasis by numbers’ feel of the music or the peace and love lyrics
troubling him I’m not sure but he sounds as if he’s only giving this track half
his attention. Andy Bell has a great harmony voice – the band should have let
him use it a bit more on his own songs and let him take lead maybe. In the
context of the album’s theme of fall and redemption it sounds as if this is a
song written at the heart of the troubles of the band (lines like ‘back to the
snow’ hinting at the drugs that slowed Oasis down somewhere around 1997) – if
true then that would make this second song’s close resemblance to [37]
‘Acquiesce’ and how the band ‘need each other’ striking. It’s tempting too to
see this as Andy Bell’s take on the dynamics in the band – arguably the band’s
most sensitive soul in the later years, he bemoans the pressures of fame and
success (‘the boys in the bubble they wanna be free’) and how he is powerless
to stop the raging hurt between the brothers (‘I’m not your keeper, I don’t
have a key!’) Hmm, actually this song is a lot more interesting than I’ve ever
given it credit for before studying it, I just wish a slightly more melodic
riff had been found for the main part of the song and that the ‘turn up the
sun’ chorus line had been added to a separate song (its theme of making things
brighter and bigger is at odds with a verse lyric about how much damage
pressure and fame can do). Traditionally Oasis albums always start with a bang:
this lumpy song is no match for [7] ‘Rock and Roll Star’ or even [95] ‘The
Hindu Times’ and gets the album off to a timid start.
Alas [116] ‘Mucky Fingers’ is no way to progress
either. A rather boring one chord stomp from Noel Gallagher, it’s the only song
from this album that he’s continue to play in concert suggesting he’s quite
fond of it. I’m not quite sure because, by Noel’s standards, the song is quite
juvenile with its faux Dylan harmonica, its lack of variety and a lyric that
while memorable and cleverly paced ultimately means nothing. Noel seems to be
venting his anger at someone nameless– unusual for Oasis who only record out of
anger when it’s a row between themselves, but this song sounds more like a dig
at the band’s fanbase than band members to me. Its opening line about how ‘you
think you deserve an explanation for the meanings of life’ but that the
narrator has no idea how to give it is remarkably similar to the Moody Blues’
kiss off ‘I’m Just A Singer In A Rock ‘n’ Roll Band’ (their last song before a
six year split). ‘You get your truth from the lies you were learnt’ – a line
pretty close to the odd album title – sounds sarcastic, especially the way Noel
sings it here, as if he’s laughing at fans (like me) who’ve poured over his
lyrics for meaning when it was all a ‘game’ or a ‘con’, while he refers to his
fans as ‘plastic believers’ (I’m surprised they don’t come with ‘rubber souls’
too). More generously he moves on to attack himself, claiming that he fooled
himself as much as them with his ‘emperor’s clothes’. The result is a track
that’s really uncomfortable, partly because of the relentless riff that simply
won’t move off its boogie woogie bass line but mainly because our idol appears
to be shouting at us. That said there are some good moments in this song: I
love the line about fans ‘finding God in a paperback’ (a very Cat Stevens line
that, about how spirituality should by definition be hard fought for and
difficult to find, not passed on from one finder to the next) and ‘get your
history from a Union Jack’, a spot on
line about all those idiots who see the past as a series of wars and empires,
not the struggles of real people who may speak different languages but have the
same drives, fears and experiences as everyone else (you do tend to see lots of
UK flags flying at Oasis gigs – possibly from the Britpop days – which never
fitted the idea of Oasis as a ‘world’ band singing for everyone regardless of
colour, creed or gender). There’s a good song in here, then, but its struggling
to get out across a terribly fragmented lyric and by letting his darker side
show against the very people who love him most its Noel who gets his ‘mucky
fingers burnt’ here. Though it is perhaps the most sneering song sung by a
sneering band it’s not Noel who gets to do this but Liam, which traditionally
means it’s one of its creator’s more personal songs - it may well be that the
lyrics bothered the younger brother (most of his songs on the first Beady Eye
album seem openly written to fans and are supportive and concerned for them for
the most part) but may simply be band politics or that Noel really did mean
this song personally.
[117a] ‘Lyla’, the album’s most famous song, is a
great single that rather loses out on this album by being a third stomping mid-paced
number in a row. Heard separately, though, it’s clearly the template Oasis
should have been going in their later life as they take their younger days’
energy and hope and instead give it to their audience, tracing the story of the
people still coming to gigs who use it as a temporary escape from all their
problems. The song flowers up verse by chorus by middle eight, gaining in
momentum with each segment despite being stuck to a chord pattern almost as
monotonous and relentless as the song before it, only this time the powerpop
chorus gives us all a release and allows us to escape feeling quite so trapped.
Lyrically this is a rare return to [27] ‘Wonderwall’, with Noel writing about
the strength of the title female character and how she has the power and
strength to protect the narrator. As much as the narrator pretends to be brash
and bold, it’s her whose the real tough one in the partnership (Noel has said
it was inspired partly by Sara; I wonder too if it was partly inspired by the
fans he’d just been ranting and raging at). The opening verse is a very poetic
variation on [98] ‘Stop Crying Your Heart Out’ as Lyla waits for the ‘stars to
fall’ and catches the ‘silver sunlight’ she gets from the band – surely a
metaphor for inspiration given its appearance in several earlier Noel lyrics.
She takes what the band create and uses it in her own life to inspire her to
better things which in turn inspire her creators, with Noel waiting ‘a thousand
years’ for all the people he’s influenced to bounce back to him (he may also be
thinking of repaying his own debt to so many past bands, Oasis being the most
knowledgeable of past musicians’ work out there). The lyrics get a bit muddy
after a sterling first verse and deliberately ambiguous, but if the music video
is anything to go by Lyla’s bravery comes from nothing more than standing up to
her peer group and refusing to follow their petty ideals (escaping to a club –
to see an unpopular group? - before having her dink spiked and rushing home
ill). The chorus of ‘Lyla’ is a thing of beauty, the pay off to a song of
repetition and drudgery, with cascading harmonies that show off how well Liam
and Noel’s voices go together and the ascending chord sequence is full of more
optimism than any Oasis song since [34] ‘Morning Glory’ itself in 1995. The
difference between then and now though is how humble some of these lyrics sound,
with optimism coming not from the band but the character: ‘The world around us
makes me feel so small’ is hardly something the narrator of [7] ‘Rock and Roll
Star’ or [9] ‘Live Forever’ would have sung and yet it fits perfectly into this
song, when life revolves not around the singer but the powerful woman holding
him up and keeping him going. The band turn in their finest performance on the
record too, especially Zak Starkey’s best drumming for the band, where everyone
seems to be chipping away at a solid block of sound and sculpting something
beautiful. Oasis even end the song with a fine piano part that seems to nick
the riff from ‘A Bell Will Ring’ to come (‘A bell will ring inside your head
and all will be brand new’) – whether intended or coincidence it’s a neat
mirror of the album’s sister song about inner strength and gives the album a
‘structured’ rock opera type feeling that would do The Who proud. Noel’s version
of the song – intended for the album and later released as a B-side – is if
anything even more stunning than the final track, building up power at an even
slower rate and clearly chiming with its creator who sings with all his heart
(good an interpreter as Liam is, he doesn’t ‘feel’ this song quite as vividly
it sounds to me). One of the highlights of the album and easily the best of the
late period Oasis singles, this track is up there with the very best they ever
made.
Liam’s [118] ‘Love Like A Bomb’, written with Gem’s
help, continues the love theme although whereas the last song was all about
strength and comfort through difficult times this short song is about the
excitement and energy of the first flush of love, your sense that something
wonderful is about to explode. The lyrics aren’t up to Liam’s other work,
basically extending that whole idea of something good about to explode into
life with some clumsy lines full of 1960s slang, but the melody-line is. Rushes
of powerful energy give way to sweet melodic moments a la [99] ‘Songbird’, with
a melody that seems to be ‘laughing in the sun’, darting this way and that
quite apart from the darkness most Oasis songs deal with. It’s actually quite a
1960s song, what with the tambourine and tinkling piano parts and the sheer joy
of the recording (with Noel perhaps notable by his absence) and could have
happily sat on any 1960s Beach Boys album (even though Brian Wilson is unlikely
to have ever used ‘bomb’ as a metaphor). More evidence of what an empathetic
and romantic soul Liam is under his facade, it’s a sweet song that’s another of
the highlights of the album and easily up to the standard set by his brother.
It’s actually quite a Beady Eye-ish song this, too, what with the acoustic
backing and light touches in composition and performance.
For most fans [119a] ‘The Importance Of Being Idle’
is generally regarded as the album’s greatest moment, but try as I might I
really don’t get this song at all. The song’s theme of being lazy and not
caring puts it rather too far for comfort into Kinks ‘rip off’ mode rather than
‘tribute’: basically it’s the tune to ‘Sunny Afternoon’ (the verses are virtually
the same chords and you can sing one song over the other by changing hardly
anything), the lyrics of ‘Sitting In The Mid-Day Sun’ (Ray Davies’ tale of a
Tramp with freedom stretching out before him, dismissed by everyone else for
being lazy) and the video for ‘Dead End Street’ (in which an undertaker has far
too much fun at work). My guess is that the lyrics, which praise laziness, are
immediately defensive about this for the fans who guess where this song comes
from: Noel has lost the burning drive and creativity of his youth and can now
only recycle songs. ‘I can’t get a life if my heart’s not in it!’ he cries as
his defence for being ‘lazy’, although really it’s a laziness well earnt after
such a full-on decade. Alas, though, like many songs about laziness there’s not
much going on here past the principal idea: there’s a hint that Noel’s narrator
is being pushed into something he doesn’t want to do but we never quite find
out what. Noel’s decision to sing falsetto is an odd one and the novelty of it
wears off long before the end of the song – he has a great voice when he sings
straight so why not use it; all we’ve had on this album from him so far is this
and the shouting on ‘Mucky Fingers’! No, what made this song a hit was the
powerful band performance, with another strong stand-up-straight performance
from Zak Starkey and the classy video which only featured the band in cameo (it’s
the one and only Oasis video Noel actually seems to have liked given his
hilarious commentary on the band’s ‘Time Flies’ set – his lines about being
gradually replaced in them to the point where he becomes merely a ‘gruff
Mancunian shaving’ in the background had me in stitches). As a song, though,
‘Idle’ simply doesn’t work, with only the urgency of the chorus standing out on
a song that without the drums would merely be a generic gutbucket millionaire
blues of the sort the old pre-fame Oasis used to laugh at. Ironically for a
song about the joys of being lazy, it desperately needs more work. Then again,
it became the band’s first number one single in quite a few years so what do I
know? I do urge, though, every Oasis fan who loves this song and has come to
read this paragraph especially to go out and buy a Kinks album though as that’s
where this song’s inventiveness really comes from and the ‘steal’ here is far
more blatant than any of Oasis’ supposed Beatle (or even Rutle) rip-offs.
Trust Liam to go in the opposite direction: [120] ‘The Meaning Of
Soul’ isn’t lazy at all but a snarling burst of adrenalin that packs
a great deal into its punkish two minutes. Far from the song suites he’s been
writing lately, this song is mean and lean, barely varying the chord structure
throughout. The lyrics are pure filler, sounding more like ‘rock’ than ‘soul’
and offering little insight into the hidden meanings of life either – its
merely a list of great attributes the swaggering narrator has. It’s as if Liam
wrote his other two songs for the album and came up with this title and thought
– oops my reputation for hard rock’s slipping! He’s clearly got his tongue in
his cheek as he boasts that ‘I’m ten out of ten, alright!’ before the song
returns to ‘Lyla’ by having the band and audience address each other, the two
combining and sharing the love they have in the room. Is this really the meaning
of soul? It sounds more like the meaning of [7] ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Star’ to me,
with Liam sharing with his audience what it means to look cool and feel good. There’s
enough happening musically to keep things interesting, though, with a sturdy
acoustic guitar riff that rocks as hard as any of the band’s electric songs,
some fine band harmonies, a superb harmonica solo (by Gem according to the
sleevenotes, for the one and only time) and some terrific overdubbed percussion
during the chorus that sounds like the whole band stomping their feet. Not up
to Liam’s two other songs on the album, perhaps, but still a pretty interesting
song and featuring a grand performance. I just wish there had been an extra
middle eight or something to keep the song going – although at 1:42 this song
doesn’t exactly outstay its welcome either.
[121] ‘Guess God Thinks I’m Abel’ is Liam’s third
song on the album and easily one of his best, right up there with [104]
‘Different Cloud’ and Beady Eye’s [160] ‘Wigwam’. Having studied his brother in
detail on ‘Cloud’, this is Liam exploring his relationship with Noel, what it’s
really like behind the camera gaze and publicity, full of real love/hate. It’s
song of bitter betrayal and yet of coming to terms with the fact that you’re
destiny lies with your enemy somewhere along the line and shows a real depth
and warmth fans weren’t expecting. Liam still tries to ‘love’ his brother
though (‘is that such a crime?’) asking for his help in searching for a
‘rainbow’ and telling Noel that the world is better when they face it together
(‘No one could break us…if they tried!’) The title – which the rest of the band
assumed was spelt ‘Guess God Thinks I’m Able’ until Liam dictated the spelling
for the album sleeve – is a glorious pun, suggesting on the one hand the upbeat
message that God must expect the narrator to cope with the challenges he’s sent
or he wouldn’t have put him through it and on the other the betrayal and murder
of Adam and Eve’s sons in the Bible. Cain, the elder brother, is a farmer who
murders his younger brother Abel in a jealous rage after God chose to accept
Abel’s sacrifice and not Cain’s. You don’t have to dive in too far to see the
symbolism of two brothers jealous of each other, but the rest of the imagery
here is striking too: are the ‘sacrifices’ Noel’s jealousy over Liam’s
songwriting? Is it Liam getting the applause for singing Noel’s songs? (We did
speculate earlier that Noel was having something of a writer’s block at the
time – it can’t have been easy watching Liam churning out so many good songs
whatever he said in the press). Cain and Abel were rivals too who couldn’t live
without each other – one growing crops and the other looking after the sheep
that ate them, while the fertiliser from the sheep helped the crops grow – give
them a guitar each and they too could have been Oasis, hinting that nothing has
really changed down the years. I love this song, which takes all the usual
Oasis tricks of quiet desperate verses exploding into a sunnier chorus but
turns it onto the band themselves. Everything is done with so much more care
than the rest of the album too, from the quiet moody acoustic opening to Liam’s
glorious sneering vocal, a unique blend of attack and olive branch. But its the
lyrics that make this song, trying to show how complex the relationship with
his brother really is (the lines about falling out with a lover aren’t fooling
anyone given the title) and saying ‘you could...’ before every line, giving
Noel the next move. Along the way he pictures the pair as friends staying up
all night listening to music, a ‘railroad’ (because their paths together ‘go on
and on’) and nastily hinting that the pair could yet be enemies (‘I guess there’s still time’).
After all, while band breakups are two a penny, when a band in brothers break
up it ripples across a whole family: it’s not as if their paths will never
cross again, they do every Christmas (and if they don’t it’s the elephant in
the room). Without causing a family rift, it’s hard not to speak to your
brother; not speaking to a bass guitarist you barely knew, that’s OK, but
someone you’ve known your whole life (in Liam’s case) clearly makes the split
difficult. By and large, though, and in keeping with the redemption theme of
the album, Liam wants to let bygones be bygones, offering out a hand of
friendship. The ending, though, suggests conciliation is only a pipe dream: the
track, so light and cautiously breezy up till now, slows down under the weight
of a sudden injection of the Oasis wall of noise and gorgeous feedback, while
Liam drops his gentler passive side and gets aggressive, ordering ‘Come along,
let’s make it tonight!’ The squeal of feedback at the end is deliciously
unpleasant, as the two brothers get ‘out of tune’ with each other. In
retrospect this should have been the way the Oasis story ended as it’s the
perfect finale…
If ‘Abel’ is a Beady Eye song a few years early,
then [122] ‘Part
Of The Queue’ hints at the kind of descriptive story-song with
surreal tinges that Noel will be writing with his ‘High Flying Birds’. It’s
better than any of the six ‘new’ songs on that album (the other four being
Oasis outtakes re-recorded) without hitting the heights of ‘Lyla’ or its close
musical cousin [142] ‘Falling Down’ from the next album. Noel’s clearly been
listening to lots of Ray Davies again because this song is a dead ringer for
the ‘other’ Kinks theme – the idea of a ‘star’ facing up to the fact that he’s
no longer anything special and becoming a ‘face in the crowd’. Whereas Ray went
to his destiny quietly, across the space of many many Kinks albums, Noel’s not
going without a fight and the generally acoustic song soon becomes a sea of
stinging electric guitar, echoey vocals and urgent piano riffs as he tries to
‘prove’ to the world that he’s still a star. Noel’s back to badgering his
creator for help again (see [51] ‘D’Yer Know What I Mean?’ and all its
copycats), crying that ‘Heaven won’t help me!’ before walking around a city he
used to know so well and realising that ‘I lost my way’ (presumably it’s a trip
back home to Manchester). The middle eight (‘There’ll be no tomorrow – more’s
the pity’) sounds like this is Noel’s response to the band’s possible break-up
and having to come to terms with the fact that the great Oasis adventure might
be over. A scary closing round of ‘keep on trying...trying on’ suggests that
he, too, is trying to offer the olive branch in the hope of getting the band
over these obstacles , but the sheer terror of the surroundings suggests that
he thinks it’s a lost cause already. Noel’s best vocal on the album by some
margin, it’s a shame it’s ducked so low in the mix compared to all the effects
and it’s a shame too that the song simply ends so suddenly, resolving to a very
Beatlesy unexpected major chord at the end of a song that sounds like it has no
resolution at all. Is this symbolic of the band patching up their differences?
(Was it added on after the rest of the recording?) Or was it simply a
coincidence? Either way, it makes for an odd and unconvincing end, not so much
[7] ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Star’ as small and humble, however much Noel wants to prance
and preen.
A perfect song for the ‘middle’ number of our book, [123]
‘Keep The
Dream Alive’ is the other album highlight, a simply glorious pop
song from Andy Bell that’s everything Oasis are at their best: reflective but
triumphant, battling but determined and with a killer pop chorus that’s as
memorable as anything the Gallagher brothers wrote. Lyrically this is clearly
another song about the band’s impending split and sounds very like a Beady Eye
song again ([158] ‘Kill For A Dream’ is a dead ringer for it and may well be a
sequel). No one seems to have told that to Liam, though, who when asked what it
meant declared in interviews ‘I’m just the singer, an interpreter...the dream’s
always been alive for me’. Surely that was just bluster because Liam excels
himself here, that great angry strident vocal now teeming with guilt and regret
as he desperately tries to make something happen that could never be (compare
with his change in voice on [57] ‘Fade In-Out’ – Liam clearly knows this
emotion, he’s sung it before). Liam couldn’t have asked for a better song that
both celebrates Oasis’ past and fears it’s future – equally Andy couldn’t have
wished for a better interpretation of his finest song to date on this song
that’s a true anthem for anyone whose ever tried to do something extraordinary
and important, only to have it ignored and ridiculed. A classy guitar solo from
Gem (rare for this record) suggests that the song chimes in with his feelings
too – in fact this is a strong band performance all round and sounds like the
band playing everything live for once, without any overdubs. The lyrics on this
song are extraordinary too: ‘Every night I hear you scream, but you don’t say
what you mean’ is the perfect song for a bandmate caught between the bitter
rivalry between the Gallagher brothers and the line ‘Every night I think I know…in
the morning where did it go?’ will ring a bell with anyone whose ever tried to
write words, music, paint a picture or any other ever-shifting mercurial
artform you can only get a glimpse of before the inspiration vanishes forever.
The chorus, too, is incredible: ‘I’m no stranger to this place where real life
and dreams collide’ is real poetry, something that everyone can relate to and
so well formed – why the hell aren’t schools adding song lyrics to their
English curriculum, I’ve always maintained their brevity makes them the hardest
and most impressive art form; Shakespeare never wrote a line anything like that
good! It’s Oasis’ story in a nutshell too, where belief and optimism hit
realities and obstacles head on. Nobody had more dreams than Oasis and nobody
achieved more of them – and yet no one else had as many of those dreams turn
bad either. It makes sense, though, that here at the very bitter end Oasis
return to where they started (even via a new member), singing that they still
dream of better tomorrows and that they will do everything they can to keep
this dream ‘alive’. The song ends ominously with the narrator ‘waiting at the
crossroads’, wondering whether his future is still with Oasis or elsewhere, but
we know that he desperately wants to carry on and so do we, ending with a round
of ‘Hey Jude’ style ‘na na nas’ to give the fans one last singalong if nothing
else...Simply superb and proof that Andy was the perfect addition to Oasis.
[124] ‘A Bell Will Ring’ is Gem’s contribution to the
band and despite the fact that he only joined late it’s by far the most Oasisy
sounding track on the album. It’s a gloriously upbeat message of hope and being
a winner and must, surely, be a fourth straight song in a row about the band’s
troubles. Seemingly written when the band got together it starts ‘A little
space, a little time...see what love can do’ and is basically a hymn to the
powers of music to overcome everything, even rows between brothers (the ‘bell
that rings’ is surely that unspoken piece of inspiration that comes from really
great playing from musicians on top of their game, reminding them of what they
should be doing and cutting through all the rubbish that builds up between the
band). The narrator is speaking to someone else, telling them that as they
helped him through hard times (‘You pulled me through my empty nights, lying
sleepless on your floor’) so he’s going to re-pay the compliment and back them
up to the hilt. Surely its Gem’s own message of faith to Oasis, the band he
always said inspired him long before he joined them and gave him faith that he
too could become a professional musician (even if technically Gem was making
music long before the Gallaghers were). A thankyou, with the very Oasisy
certainty that things will all work out in the end, it’s a lovely breath of
fresh air and hope on this often troubled album and Gem’s guitar work in
particular shines like anything after so many rock-free songs. Again, it’s very
Beady Eye and that’s no bad thing, although the song is frustratingly short and
like so many others on this album really needs another middle eight or
something to make it truly first class.
The album then ends with the healing power of [125a]
‘Let There
Be Love’, a song Noel had been trying to finish since writing it
early in the ‘Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants’ sessions in 1999. However he
wasn’t at ‘peace’ with himself enough to write it then – only now that more
water has gone under the bridge and he’s adopted to life as an older, wiser
star. What he wrote then is pretty much what Liam sings here: wordy, not very
meaningful lyrics common to most Oasis songs of the period together with a
slow, stately piano riff that doesn’t sound a million miles away from John
Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. Liam tries hard but the song’s not really in his style,
calling on him to be soft and sweet. It’s also a re-write of a Who song, ‘Love
Reign O’er Me’, full of Meher Baba imagery about how all the water in the world
(including that of tears) is a metaphor for love, the great unknown that can
make you drown or offer you a re-birth. Faced with a choice Liam, on Noel’s
behalf, chooses love – unfortunately lines about kicking holes in the clouds
and a hole in the world’s ‘seams’ are over-written and airy-fairy by Oasis
standards. The only time since [37] Acquiesce’ both brothers sing alternating
sections, instead its Noel’s new part written in 2005 and sung by him that
makes this song sparkle. Clearly relating to the band’s problems (and perhaps
in reply to ‘Abel’), Noel sings a gorgeous second verse of comfort, urging a
depressed character to get back into the fight of life because ‘the world is
waiting for you’. Adding that he’ll always ‘be by your side’ and ‘filling up the
sky’ with dreams, it’s a lovely redemptive moment, very similar to the
Liam-Noel vocal passages on [98] ‘Stop Crying Your Heart Out’. This song
doesn’t work quite as well as that masterpiece though sadly, perhaps because
the song runs out of inspiration and rather shamefacedly simply goes back to
Liam’s opening passage for a straight repeat, with none of Noel’s more upbeat
optimism seemingly having an impact on him. The chorus also needs a few more
words in it than simply ‘Let There Be Love’ repeated four straight times over
too, but still – for a good thirty seconds or so (the bit where Noel takes over
and this song goes from minor key worry to major key certainty) this is another
superb and moving addition to an album full of little bits and pieces like that.
Sadly the moment of reconciliation didn’t last long
before Oasis called it a day in 2008, just two gigs from the end of their final
tour (although similarly sensitive songs from both Noel and Beady Eye make a
future reconciliation hopeful, maybe, even if their twitter feeds and press
bitching doesn’t). In a way, never mind – after reaching the highs of this
album and proving that Oasis could still match the stands of their old work at
least occasionally, there really wasn’t anywhere else to go, the band sounding
older and wiser on parts of this record than ever before as they openly discuss
the state of the band and what it means to be a rock and roll star a decade
after they ruled the world. Even though not everything here is great and two
songs (‘Mucky Fingers’ and ‘Idle’) are easily among the worst they’ve ever
done, there is a real sense of moving forward and covering new ground on this
album, where brotherly love and hope for the future are the key themes. After
this it really was all over bar the shouting, of which there’s an awful lot on
final Oasis album ‘Dig Out Your Soul’ where only Noel’s [142] ‘Falling Down’
comes anywhere close to the peaks of this album. When the band get this album
right, as on ‘Abel’ and ‘Dream’ especially, they really were so much more than
simply a relic from the 1990s – they’d gone back to being the leading rock and
roll band in the world, showing the way to all the ‘newcomers’ who’d got stuck
the same way they had circa 1997, finding new ways to update old sounds, some of
the time at least. Though this album desperately needs another couple of great
songs to match ‘Giant’ or ‘Chemistry’ the power of the second half is amongst
the best twenty minutes in the Oasis canon. Brave and bold, forthright and
apologetic, real and heartfelt, but still with the power of old, Oasis’ legacy
deserves nothing less and though inconsistent this album remains an under-rated
classic to be cherished by fans for shedding more light on the band than any
album since their debut.
Other Oasis articles from this site you might be interested in reading:
'(What's The Story?) Morning Glory' (1995) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/oasis-whats-story-morning-glory-1996.html
'Be Here Now' (1997) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2013/11/oasis-be-here-now-1997-album-review.html
The Best Unreleased Oasis Recordings 1992-2013 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/oasis-best-unreleased-recordings-1992.html
Surviving TV Clips 1994-2009: http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/oasis-surviving-tv-clips-1994-2009.html
Compilation/Live/Solo Albums: 1994-2010 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/oasis-compilationliveb-sides-albums.html
Non-Album Songs Part One: 1993-1998
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/oasis-non-album-recordings-part-one.html
Non-Album Songs Part Two: 2000-2015
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.nl/2016/08/oasis-non-album-songs-part-two-2000-2015.html
