DEFINITELY MAYBE (Creation)

We reassess Oasis' debut LP

The First Noel...

Alongside a colour picture of the band in New York

[View here]

picture by Tom Sheehan

A lot of blame has been attached to Oasis. They're responsible for the dreary conservatism of much late Nineties indie rock. They've been the soundtrack to the lairiness and laddification of modern pop culture, the dumbed-down era of FHM, Chris Evans, and so on. Unlike their hero, John Lennon, they are amoral and apolitical (or Blair supporters - same thing), merely peddling a false, hedonistic high fuelled by coke and alcohol. The best they can muster by way of a rock’n’roll slogan is the pathetic "Mad for it". They are the upshot of a reactionary, collectively subconscious desire on the part of the record-buying public for a "New Beatles".

Confused by the eclecticism, modernism and multiculturalism of the Nineties, people craved for a common talking point, an old-fashioned Big White Rock Obvious, and Oasis came along at the right time to fit the bill. However, the difference between The Beatles and Oasis is that The Beatles were innovators and experimentalists, whereas Oasis are musical Tories. Which is why each of their subsequent albums is increasingly disappointing, merely more (or less) of the same.

Much of this may be true. I've argued it myself. Yet none of it takes away from the fact that Oasis', debut album, Definitely Maybe, now available on mid-price CD, is an undiminished, brilliant album. It still kicks like a mule, still splashes like a whale, still shines and snarls. It's a genuinely transformative album - and even if the transformations it helped wreak were largely for the worse, that doesn't make it any less exhilarating.

Not that it necessarily felt that way back in 1994. Sure, Alan McGee was touting the band held discovered by chance at King Tut’s Wah-Wah Club in Glasgow as potentially the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world. But held already said that about Creation's Ride, and would go on to say it about Creation's 3 Colours Red. He would say that. No, back in 1994, the best Oasis could hope for was to keep The Stone Roses' seat warm as we all waited with bated breath for them to finish their duffer of a second album. It didn't feel like a brand new day back then. Kurt Cobain had just shot himself, Richey Manic wasn't looking too well, and Britain was enduring the arse-end of the Major administration and wondering when the hell this recession would end.

Not only did Oasis have a fight to get our attention, they also seemed bent on fighting each other. Liam and Noel Gallagher kept journalists entertained by almost coming to blows in interviews. No way, reckoned many, would these delinquents still be together in six months’ time. They were practically breaking up in front of us.

Yet somehow a momentum was growing. A new, confident Brit-sensibility was dawning, from which Blair and Blur would also benefit. And Definitely Maybe captures that dawning moment perfectly.

The opener, "Rock'n'Roll Star", sounded like a cocky conceit from the upstart Mancunians but, of course, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Many of the songs on Definitely Maybe were written when Noel was dreaming his hours away behind a desk at British Gas, and this is fuelled with all the hope and frustration of the rock aspirant. "I live my life on the stars that shine/People say it is just a waste of time.../I’ll take my car and drive real far/You're not concerned about the way we are/In my mind my dreams are real..." Rock music hadn't managed to hit this sleek, untrammelled, extrovert fourth gear since the Pistols. Oasis certainly weren't My Bloody Valentine but they weren't stuck in-the-greasepit clods, either. They'd found a musical Third Way, and they were going places with it.

What's more, like the Happy Mondays before them, they were talking to a casual street majority out there which rock music, with its penchant for bookish eccentrics, glam freaks and introverts, often managed to alienate. The Happy Mondays had picked up on this big disenfranchised audience back in 1989; now Oasis were taking up the slack. As "Bring It On Down" puts it, "You're the outcast - you're the underclass/But you don't care because you're living fast." This was a new, uncertain energy we were going to have to deal with.

Noel’s songs provided the chassis, but he would have got nowhere without the chromium gleam of Liam’s voice - insolent and fag-rough yet lingeringly compelling, somewhere between Lennon and Lydon. It's what rescues "Shakermaker", an example of Noel’s (sub)conscious pastiche of pop history, in this case "I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing". And while Liam offstage might have seemed like some incorrigible Manc delinquent who'd have been stealing hubcaps if he hadn't landed in rock’n’roll, he was a singer of great sensitivity, perfectly capturing the creeping ivy, upwardly mobile romanticism of "Live Forever", shifting without any awkwardness from scathing verse to falsetto chorus. Working-class lad voices in rock had in the recent past had to settle for a deliberate gracelessness, be it Shaun Ryder's blunt holler, lan Brown’s surly mumble, Johnny Rotten's contorted cockney-ese or even Billy Bragg's Arthur Mullardisms. Liam’s voice was a rarity, a thing of Scally beauty.

Another great thing about Definitely Maybe is that rarely does the pace let up. "Up In The Sky" rolls with it, while tossing in great bonus moments of panache, like that wonderful middle eight bursting out of the blue. "Columbia", with its opening, whalesong guitars and chugging, stonewashed riff, doesn't let up, either. It's like that 25-minute plateau you reach after a couple of beers, only Oasis had reached it naturally. Lyrically, Noel may not exactly be articulating much but dangling over the edge of rock language, dipping his feet in the onrushing flow. "I can't tell you the way I feel/Because the way I feel is oh so new to me/This is confusion, am I confusing you?" It's not saying much yet it's all that needs to be said about rock’n’roll euphoria.

"Supersonic" kicks back to cruise confident mode, as if, in Beatles terms, Oasis had already gotten from A Hard Day's Night to Magical Mystery Tour, with Noel penning a jumble of druggy half-nonsense. "I know a girl called Elsa/She's into Alka Seltzer/She sniffs it through a cane on a supersonic train". But Oasis weren't just raiding The Beatles. "Cigarettes And Alcohol", with its unholy, off-licence whiff, pilfers from T-Rex’s "21st Century Boy", with Liam's menacing vocal taking up where "Anarchy In The UK" left off, proposing some sort of revolt into hedonism. "Is it worth the aggravation/To find yourself a job when there Is nothing worth working for?/It is a crazy situation/But all I need is cigarettes and alcohol. "

"Digsy’s Dinner" is a bit of a let down, anticipating the Grumbleweeds-y tones of "She's Electric", but "Slide Away" continues the romantic climb begun by "Live Forever". It's influenced by The Verve, but Oasis returned the compliment, in that The Verve’s career revived and flourished hugely in the slipstream of Oasis' success. It would have been a good note on which to end the album but it actually concludes with the anticlimactic, small bitter of "Married With Children". "I hate the books you read and all your friends/Your music's shite, it keeps me up all night."

Definitely Maybe hurtled to the top of the albums charts with frightening speed, becoming the fastest-selling album of all time, and Oasis never looked back as the madness began. But there was the future to contend with. As a proposition, Oasis inevitably turned as stale and sour as yesterday's French bread and milk. What's The Story...sold hugely yet it was only half the album that Definitely Maybe was, Noel and Liam said and did some silly, indefensible things, and by the time of Be Here Now it was clear that, musically, the game was up even if the tabloids (and, more recently, the law courts) hadn't finished with Oasis. It's hard to imagine where they'll go from being here now. But back in 1994 with Definitely Maybe, Oasis captured the glorious, headlong, delirious sound of travelling hopefully.

Pity they had to arrive…

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c 1998 Andrew Turner

aturner@interalpha.co.uk

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