Last year, whenever you heard Liam Gallagher set the poser. "Is it worth the agg-ragh-vayh-ssch-iuhnn?", your heart and mind would straight away answer with a beaming affirmative. Of course it was worth it - any excess of attitude and sloppy behavior was instantly forgotten with a handy guitar strum and one of those immaculate pop hits of theirs.

And if Liam never gave any impression that Oasis were lapping this up -- steaming royally through a textbook rock 'n' roll debut - then you could always look to his brother's face for proof of the blazing fun of it all. Noel knew that this success wasn't a given thing, that the band's vision and the alchemy of the music and the personnel was near a miraculous event. Big Bro's smile made you appreciate the story even more.

That's also what makes this Southend show so fine. Everybody here loves Noel because he writes many inspiring songs and plainly loves his job. The other members may exude the charisma of a Bill Wyman convention, but the guitarist brother is willing them on, trying to force a new, advanced noise, uniting the teenies, the old musos, and the Easter-tripping mod boys with his happy schtick.

Liam still has his fans, alright, but you never get much of a stage rapport from the guy. He moans when somebody pitches a sneaker onto the stage. He's briefly happy announcing the Man City result. And he dedicates 'Slide Away' to the ladies in the house. "I love girls," he says, typically perfunctory of feeling.

This deadpan style bothers you because this is an exceptional night. Oasis may term this seaside special a mere warm up to the king-size Sheffield gig but it's still their first UK show of '95, proof that their fanbase (a cool 100,000 on their data bank alone) is still gagging to let the ceremony roll on.

The punters get to hear almost everything they know (except the string-driven 'Whatever') played with decent aplomb and it's startling to hear how these tunes and weirdly pronounced words have been committed to heart. At the close of 'Shakermaker', everybody cranks their arms in their air and takes the song to a new, groovy terminus, provoking rare seconds of unguarded surprise on stage.

Meanwhile, that guitar sound just wells up in relation to the size of the venue. It's such a beguiling noise; like The Ramones's frequency-bombing grind, these basic chords seem to pick up the masses of sympathetic harmonies and vibrations around the hall as until your body is throbbing along to the party - literally getting the buzz, big time.

But to recap: is it still worth the aggravation? Almost definitely, yeah. Oasis have a dozen priceless songs, and you'll never reduce them to less than that/ What bothers you more is the question just how far the Oasis ideal can develop now; how far they'll widen the musical agenda, how durable their high standards can be. People are extra critical when musicians evoke the name of The Beatles -- you're expected to blast ahead on a majestic career curve, ever-changing, always taking your audience to fresh, thrilling places. Noel signalled his bid proper when he wrote 'Whatever'; a one-off release to capture the sentiments of the season and to test his own creative savvy. With it he completely trashed underachiever bands like the Stone Roses, who merely went from their 'Revolver' to 'Let it Be' with only a flew scraps of tunes to show for the trouble.

But Noel's work-rate also leaves you disappointed with 'Some Might Say'. It's the kind of song you'd aim to write if rock 'n' roll became a classroom subject. You take a figure of speech, a common phrase, and twist it around to get a fresh meaning from it. Elvis Costello has written hundreds of songs this way and many of them weren't so good.

That's why you prefer 'Acquiesce'; the two Gallaghers battling over the vocals, much friction along with the harmony, the singers not even facing the same way as one sings "we need each other". On record, it's clearly a way forward but not tonight, sadly, it gets buried under slack, routine playing.

You wonder if the band really has the ability to move at Noel's pace. Big brother seems at his most relaxed these days when he's stretching out with Paul Weller -- his playing on the latter's 'Walk On Guilded Splinters' is the best you've heard. And the now traditional solo spot in the gig where Noel gets vulnerable with his acoustic in increasing vital -- 'Talk Tonight' is messy in all the right ways, the lonely side of 'Cigarettes and Alcohol' equation.

You respect Noel for wanting to keep the band busy, to lash out those epochal EP's every few months, to never dry up. But you also pick up signals from Southend that suggest his ambitions need some recovery time to find songs that will rival Blur and, imminently, Black Grape, to keep the old gang together if they can, to ensue that they stay untouchably great.

Basically, they're gonna have to make it happen. All over again.

NME 29 April, 1995
author: Stuart Bailie