THE MASTERPLAN (Creation)

They're putting out a B-sides album and they're not ashamed.

Most bands disguise their unease at releasing something as pedestrian and loveless as a B-sides album by giving it a flippant title, often involving the threadbare pun Killer Bs. Others shoehorn in a couple of rarities to alleviate their gulit at what still amounts to mugging loyalists. Oasis, who are not most bands, haved named their B-sides album The Masterplan, after one of Wonderwall's flips. The title says it all: arrogant, presumptious, grandiose, definitive, deliberate. There isn't an outtake or previously unavailable Jo Whiley session track to be found here, just 14 non-A-sides 1994-'97. People already have this album. It doesn't matter.

From the title down, The Masterplan feels like an event because, simply, Oasis are an event band. In common only with the Spice Girls, they have taken care never to denounce the British tabloids, and thus remained in the public eye constantly since Definitely Maybe in 1994. Noel Gallagher is the man who had an eight-foot-wide stained glass sign made to help fans and paparazzi identify his £1,000,000 St John's Wood pied-a-terre.

You can call Oasis a lot of things, but "enigmatic" isn't one of them. Noel even fantasises about releasing tapes of his showbiz pals talking bollocks round at Supernova Heights - a building whose monstrous-looking renovated interiors have already been splashed across Vogue magazine. If Oasis move, it's an event. If Noel and his good lady wife spend £5,000 having their teeth fixed at "an expensive clinic in Kensington" (December 3, 1997), it's a big picture. If Liam swears at a Cathay Pacific stewardess (February 23, 1998), Reuters work late.

This all makes for good sport, and it hoicks Oasis away from the back of our minds, even when they're on holiday (Oasis on holiday exclusive). If there's a drawback to the banner-headline ubiquity, it's that the music nowadays comes second to the soap opera. This was a distinct advantage around the release of Be Here Now, the least magnificent Oasis album by a long chalk, but by then the band were so big, so much fun, so unassailable, it simply didn't matter. Never mind the quality, look at the funny men swearing at each other.

Oasis are currently between albums, resting their spent bones, unhunching their globe-bearing shoulders, maybe even starting families if the wishful Internet rumours are true (one Web site, The Meg Rocks Club, invites names for the probably-as-yet-unconceived first born: Lennon if it's a boy, Becks for a girl, etc). The waiting world is unlikely to hear new Oasis material until the next century (a single in late 1999 if the world is lucky). Cue: a stopgap, we're still here album, originally assembled for release in North America and other territories where these B-sides were not freely available, but now released planetwide to prevent import mark-up villainy. Or to prevent Creation from laying off yet more staff, depending on your level of cynicism.

It begins round the back of Some Might Say, the band's first number 1, with Acquiesce, a word only Will Self uses in mixed company but nonetheless a great title for an Oasis song (and it's a great Oasis song) because it means comply without protest. In April 1995, resistance to Oasis was futile, just a calendar year into their recording career and already sitting on a gold album, assorted statuettes and a sacked drummer. With its rabble-rousing mantra ("We beleive"), Acquiesce captures a time when Gallagher arrogance bred self-belief not self-parody. Underneath The Sky (from Don't Look Back In Anger), its introduction nicked from Blondie's Call Me, is a more plaintive effort, rich in harmony and tickled by keyboards, with Liam - ever the trump card - singing the meaningless as if it were meaningful ("All he needs is his life in a suitcase/It belongs to a friend of a friend").

Noel mounts the stool for the second of Some Might Say's B-sides, Talk Tonight. He always did do a mean acoustic love song - what a shame he always did one in the middle of the gig - and this orchestrally-assisted strummer is as intricate as the cartoon Oasis are clodhopping. The Masterplan contains one other sit-down Noel number, Half The World Away, whose sensitive lyric ("I would like to leave this city/This old town don't smell too pretty"), breezy gait and minimal arrangement have been utilised as the theme to Caroline Aherne's sitcom The Royle Family, that little piece of Manchester the writers of Coronation Street have never visited. They were made for each other.

Fade Away, a straight-ahead Pistolian thrasher from the other side of Cigarettes & Alcohol is followed by another headbanger, The Swamp Song, an unimportant but enthusiastically harmonica'ed instrumental in Can The Can mould that sounds more fun to play than to hear. Not true of I Am the Walrus (recorded in June '94 at Glasgow's Cathouse) which as a recurring live favourite turned Oasis's much-mocked debt to The Beatles into gold, bringing the deliberately obtuse protest nursery rhyme to a new audience (the line "Boy you've been a naughty girl, you let your knickers down" is reborn in Liam's mouth, and the way he sneers "gaaarden" robs the song of previous whimsy, perhaps even unlocking the anger Lennon was feeling when he wrote it in the aftermath of Brian Epstein's death and The Rolling Stones' 1967 drugs bust)> And the guitar solo is mental.

Listen Up (the third of a complete set of Cigarette & Alcohol Bs) is identical in introduction and pace to the much-loved Live Forever and as such fairly uninteresting until the dramatic chord change while Liam sings "one fine day, gonna leave you all behind". It's always the simple things that rescue Oasis songs from mediocrity, and this one needs rescuing.

Out of character, Rockin' Chair (from Roll With It) fades in. It's good enough to be an A-side, if too mellow and insecure for the summer of 1995. (It's Good) To Be Free lacks finesse, and despite a playful morse code/Captain Paugwash coda, hasn't weathered quite as well as Wharever, from whence it came.

Headshrinker, robbing The Rolling Stones for a bit of variety, bristles with brute energy ("I got no name/And I feel no shame"), eschewing the blueprint lollop for a faster sprint, feedback everywhere and with unusual urgency in Liam's performance. Quite how, in the space of two years, the unforgettable fire of Headshrinker turned into the reheated soup of Stay Young is a mystery (possibly something to do with overwork and the aggro of househunting in the capital). Stay Young, from last year's D'You Know What I Mean?, represents the "pub rock bollocks" Noel flippantly promised before the third coming. "We're unstoppable 'cos we know just what we are," has a sinsister ring of truth to it.

The most recent song here is Going Nowhere (aptly-titled, as it's from the lackluster Stand By Me), whose lyric looks down its overused nose wsithout irony at pre-fame squalor - "I could do with a motor car, maybe a Jaguar, maybe a plane/Here I am, going nowhere on a train" - which won't do at all.

Fortunately, this otherwise fine, upstanding collection ends fittingly with the fabulous title-track itself. Another A-side that never was but could've been, all dressed up and string-arranged with nowhere to go, it's the musical equivalent of men raving about how much they love Sgt Pepper in the pub. Illuminated with the kind of aura you're born with (sorry, Embrace), it's Oasis at their most natural and brazen, celebratory ("Say it loud and sing it proud"), big-hearted and bountiful.

This album's existence may well be the result of an anaemic, boardroom masterplan, but it serves to remind us why Oasis are on our front pages. They have enough of the right stuff to keep a bit back for B-sides, and, despite the constant pressures of touring, travelling and stewardess-upsetting, they've come up with these crackers.

Their heroes stopped touring completely before their B-sides got any good.

4 stars out of 5.

• Q Album & Single Reviews - index

c 1998 Andrew Turner

aturner@interalpha.co.uk

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