‘Definitely Maybe (30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition)’: My Dynamic Affection

adjective

1. 1.(of a process or system) characterized by constant change, activity, or progress

It’s never talked about in 2024, but Oasis were actually a far bigger deal than Nirvana.

In the UK I mean, of course. I am from the UK and writing this in the UK from the perspective of someone who lived in the UK in the 90s. If I were Spanish, I might be writing the praises of the million selling debut album by Laura Pausini, by far the biggest selling record of 1994 in that country. If I were Japanese, I might be talking about how neither Nirvana nor Oasis can hold a candle to Mr. Children (ミスターチルドレン), whose 3.4 million selling ‘Atomic Heart’ album obviously hit that sweet spot between tentacle porn and genocide denial that the country cherishes so much. But, I’m writing in English, so you’d probably just imagine I’d cede to the American version of history, as we are so often wont to do.

And, in Britain, we’re generally all too willing to go with the US version of events. Politically, always, but also here far more specifically. But in this country, the success, ubiquity and perhaps even the influence of Oasis far outstrips those Aberdeen, Washington dossers. The pendulum might have shifted in the last twenty years as the general view of the Manchester band began circling the toilet , but for a good decade near every band in this country who ever picked up a guitar could link their inspiration and their success directly back to Oasis*. The band’s records sold more than Nirvana’s by factors rather than just mere numbers. And, while Kurt Cobain’s band were a big enough deal for every dedicated music fan in the UK to probably possess a record by (and definitely possess an opinion on) Nirvana, Oasis were genuinely a bigger deal in the UK than any group since The Beatles**. For a period of a few years in the mid 90s in the UK, Oasis weren’t just the biggest band, but they were also the whole country’s largest cultural touchstone, and the Gallaghers were probably our biggest celebrities. The Arctic Monkeys’ debut might have eventually broke ‘Definitely Maybe’s record for fastest selling debut album***, and one of those Adele albums would eventually push Oasis down to to merely the shameful third best selling studio album of all time in the UK, but neither of these admittedly mega sized acts would ever touch the sort of cultural ubiquity that Oasis had. I once went to see the Radio 1 Roadshow with my Dad in 1996 (can’t remember exactly where) that was headlined by Don’t Look Back In Anger. Not Oasis, I hasten to add. The actual song Don’t Look Back In Anger. They just played the video of the song on the video screens. Even the existence of Oasis was considerably more popular than actual acts like Billy Bragg and Dubstar (1996 was weird), who only played on the undercard.

(*perhaps artistically inspired to try themselves; perhaps encouraged by the realisation that, shit, anyone can do this!; perhaps simply just the desire to show that you could at least be better than this bollocks!

**The Beatles might be mentioned a few times in this post. My extended research has lead me to theorise that the Gallagher brothers were lowkey quite big fans of their work.

***Erm… and it was actually beaten by Hear’Say before them, but that really doesn’t fit this narrative that I’m spinning, so let’s just ignore that. Especially because it’s entirely reasonable to assume that the person reading this has no fucking idea who Hear’Say are. Yes, that’s how you spell their name. Listen, the year after Definitely Maybe’ was released the record was beaten by Elastica’s debut, so my point about these statistics not reflecting longterm significance is definitely proven)

Of course, to go along with the imperialist consensus that Nirvana were the bigger deal by far definitely suits the UK’s image better. Nirvana were an impossibly great and impossibly important band. They are also, most importantly, a very cool band to have been a big deal. Even today, if you go out wearing that famous smiley face Nirvana hoodie, people will drop their glasses down to their nose, slowly nod their head in approval, and raise their glass of Courvoisier in appreciation. You’re a hip and groovy dude. Unless you’re a young woman of course, in which case you’ll be immediately pegged as a phoney poser unless you can name three of their songs. No, Smells Like Teen Spirit doesn’t count! Everyone knows that! What’s that? You’re the young mother of of one of Dave Grohl’s illegitimate children? OK, that counts as one guess, but you’ve still got to name two more!

But Oasis? Oasis are not cool. They are also, by a pretty wide critical consensus, not good. Enough words have been written on the disastrous third album now that there’s really nothing more that I could add, except to die fighting on the hill to challenge any attempted reappraisal. It’s not ‘underrated’. It’s not ‘only a bad album in comparison to the first two’. It fucking stinks and we shouldn’t waste time trying to deny that. We’ve all agreed on this. Saying that ‘Be Here Now’ is decent is some flat Earth shit. But what’s rarely considered is that they released another FOUR crap albums after that! How many of those hundreds of thousands of fans that the band has shamelessly rinsed for every last penny they have will have taken out a Wonga loan in frenzied expectations of seeing The Hindu Times (‘Heathen Chemistry’ – 2002) or The Importance of Being Idle (‘Don’t Believe the Truth’ – 2005) live? And they were both chart topping singles!! The band have been widely regarded as rubbish and irrelevant for far longer than they were the biggest and greatest band in the country.

Quick! Oasis split up in 2009, and their last gigs were touring their final 2008 album which was caaaaaaalled…?? Called what?? What was the record called??

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Time out. ‘Dig Out Your Soul‘. Don’t worry though, people gave as much of a shit about it in 2008/9 as you do now. Their last non-festival gig in the UK was at the 1500 capacity Roundhouse in London.

And, yes, Hindu Times kinda fucks, but that’s not the point I’m making right now. The Importance of Being Idle is so bad that it makes me want to hurt myself, so for the benefit of the narrative please focus on that turd..

And growing up – from a teenage alcoholic maturing into an adult alcoholic, but nonetheless as a person with two ears and a brain – I knew they were rubbish. In the 90s, sure, I was massively into the band as everyone else my age was. As everyone else in my country was. Uniquely, I started to fall out of love with them in around 1997. But even before than infamous audio bedshitting of a third album was released in August of that year I had grown obsessed with albums by Prodigy (June), Spiritualized (June), Nick Cave (March) and Radiohead (May) that had opened my eyes a lot more to what could actually be done with music. What could actually be done with music by white men, yes, I realise that. I was 13, give me a break, liberals. This musical awakening revealed to me how pedestrian and unambitious those Oasis albums were. Shit, man, this like music my Gran likes! I’m going through puberty now! That is not cool! Maybe time to go back to those first three Manics albums and start becoming convinced that I’ll die a virgin because my spirit is too pure and unique to ever truly be understood… Also, smack my bitch up! No, it’s fine, it’s a sample and I’m pretty sure it’s ironic or something.

Yeah, so what I’m saying is that – actually – I stopped liking Oasis before everyone else did.

That eleventy-twen million selling second album ‘(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?’ was the first to be properly re-assessed by teenage hormonal me. And I still stand by that assessment: it’s a very decent rock album. A healthy 6 or 7/10. The only remarkable thing about the record is its insane success. There are some great songs – even if it’s debatable whether some are great enough to still survive their incessant overexposure – but at least a good half of the record is Cast No Shadow, Hey Now, Hello level, none more mid, inoffensive indie rock by numbers; She’s Electric is atrocious; and I will die on the hill* that Don’t Look Back In Anger is a grossly overinflated soft rock dirge that just happened to have its moment in the sun and never pissed off. Like The One and Only. Only Chesney Hawkes is a half decent singer and Noel Gallagher makes me want to Agent Orange my own eardrums As an adult, you can remember the astonishing impact so many of the songs on the record made culturally, yet still appreciate how artistically it was a tired attempt to recapture the magic of that debut record.

(*I’m dying on a lot of hills in this post. Or possibly dying on the same hill multiple times. I’ll get back to you.)

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah, ‘Definitely Maybe’ though, isn’t it? That debut record is unimpeachable. Whenever people would snarkily put down Oasis as dreadful, Dadrock band whose success only showed how far removed commercial performance is from artistic legitimacy, I’d curl the side of my lips it to a knowing grin, raise a polite finger of objection, stroke my beard and respond:

Ah, yes, all true. But have you heard ‘Definitely Maybe’ though…?

‘Definitely Maybe’ is one of the most astonishing and most consequential debut albums of all time. It swaggered past the rest of the UK music scene in the early 90s and casually tossed a sledgehammer through the lot of them without even bothering to look as the weapon left its hand. BritPop was long up and running by the time of its 29th August 1994 release, but BritPop was reserved and erudite at that point, this was the loudest, most aggressive, most metal indie album that anyone had ever heard. It was both a call to arms and a fully throated scream that everyone in the world can go fuck themselves. There is a definite dividing line in British music pre and post ‘Definitely Maybe’. Pre, bands with guitars like The Auteurs, Suede, blur and Pulp were attempting to conceptualise a British alternative to the slew of post-grunge dirges that were dominating the airwaves of rock and indie radio like disposed skag baggies clogging the drains. Post, guitar bands sounded like this. Or attempted to, but for one important reason I’ll get to later, they never could. Pre, rare occurrences like Primal Scream getting as high as number 7 in the charts with Rocks earlier in 1994 was treated as a major crossover success for less mainstream and more ‘alternative/indie’ acts. Post, the sky became the limit. Oasis were a bunch of ordinary, working class* lads, sons of single mother dinner ladies who became the biggest rock band in the world.

And, of course, the album itself is fucking amazing. I remember it. I remember every fucking word, mate. Listen to it often? Erm… Probably not heard it back to front in about 20 years. But I don’t need to listen to it! It’s scrawled across my very soul! And I’m pretty sure that I hear songs like Live Forever and Cigarettes and Alcohol pretty much every day anyway.

(*and we’ll get to that later!)

So the thirtieth anniversary reissue of the debut album presented a great opportunity in a number of ways. I could listen to the album properly and closely again, and explain to all my readers (occasionally in the dozens. Occasionally) why this masterpiece was so much better than whatever shitty thing that they like. And also, because I started listing my albums of the year in 2007 – waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay after Oasis had frittered away any relevance or artistic validity – I haven’t really ever written about them before. I called ‘Dig Out Your Soul’ “half decent” in my list of albums that didn’t quite make the Best of 2008 list, which is probably as passionate as you’re able to get about that record. In my lockdown trawl of My Life In Albums I did give their debut a shout out for 1994, while conceding that “Oasis are likely thought of now as a laughable Dad rock band”. So I planned this post a long time before the 30th anniversary release on the 30th August this year, and before the band’s reunion shows were announced three days before that release meaning that any Oasis content would be SEO click city!! If I got that post out on time I would be milking them impressions!

Well, here it is more than a month later. I’m a busy/lazy man.

So, settle down, strap in, grab a drink as I talk you through one of the greatest debut records of all time:

And…

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Hmmm…

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…eesh…

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Wow, there is way more shite on this album than I remember…

Seriously, what the fuck is this album? It still sounds astonishing thirty years on. Your response in 2024 is very similar to your response in 1994: there’s nothing else quite like this. And that includes Oasis, starting from 1995’s ‘What’s the Story (Morning Glory)’. It absolutely remains one of the biggest dick swing of a record any band has ever managed to release as a debut album. It usually takes a good decade of chronic cocaine consumption and at least three cases of sexual misconduct being thrown out of court to feel this confident, this cocky, this unde-cocking-featable. It’s not just the sound of five young Mancunians grabbing the brass ring, it’s them simply using said ring to instead monkey swing into a gold plated swimming pool full of champagne, hundred dollar bills, and tits. Loads and loads of lovely tits. Because, quite simply, they just knew they deserved said tits.

Artistically though? Oh, no, this is fucking horrendous in parts. It’s just so… loud. But not in some challenging or euphoric noise rock/shoegaze way, just in the fact that the volume of the three or four chords that are chugged through on each song is turned up so high. And those chords really do chug: The record is pretty astonishing in the lack of any dynamics in structure or pace. The opening track Rock ‘N’ Roll Star is not just expertly fitting in how it outlines the band’s intentions to just act like they’re the biggest rock band in the world long before* that became the case, but also in its sound. The guitars go “Chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-CHU-GAH-chugga-chugga”, the rhythm section goes “Boom, TANG, ba-doom-doom, TANG”, and then that’s pretty much it for the whole record.

And the audacity of some of these songs! A massive part of that aforementioned BSDMFIOKITY** Energy, that effortless and cocksure arrogance, is the way in which this band scatters their debut album with songs that are absolute piss takes. Have you ever listened to Shakermaker? No, I mean, actually fucking listened to it? We all acknowledge its existence, we all*** can sing the garbage lyrics****, we’re all aware that it’s just the song from that Coke advert, and – unfortunately for the band – Coke kinda knew that as well. But listen to that shit! Can you honestly think of a bigger scam of what constitutes ‘songwriting’ ever released by a band on a major label? It’s an empty crisp packet of creativity, and the band were like “Yeah, that’s valid. Second ever single released? Top one”. There’s utter shite like Digsy’s Dinner, which is a rhyming dictionary horrorshow that even the most brazen pricks wouldn’t dare even admit to its existence on a b-side, yet here the dribbling ditty is on their debut album. On the same record as Shakermaker!! You’ve already had a pisstake song on this album, lads! And the album ends with Married With Children, which in other circumstances I’d allow as the traditional final track pisstake – your Well It’s True That We Love One Another; your Her Majesty; your I Was a Teenage Hand Model; your Arto; your Worms; your My World – but, lads, you’ve gone to that pisstake well far too many times! You’re just covered in piss by this point! You need to stop taking the piss!

(*Actually not that long before…

**Big Swinging Dick Mad For It Our Kid Innit Though Yeah. Sorry, if you’re also from Manchester you’ll know this phrase already, as you likely use it as often as me, but I have to explain these things for the soft Southerners

***all us middle aged people from the UK. Unmarried. Childless. Some sort of toy figure collection that we keep in the original packaging. Some sort of gastroenteric issue. All of us

****”I’ve been driving in my car with my friend Mister Soft/Mister Clean and Mister Ben are living in my loft/Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah, shake along with me”. Even if those were placeholder lyrics I’d cease work on the song immediately and burn down the house in which they were composed)

But then this curious and atrocious magic that the band managed to summon is further confused by the song with by far the dumbest, laziest, most pisstake, most “Can we go now? I fancy a pint” lyrics also happens to be one of the greatest rock songs the UK had managed to produce in the previous decade and a half.

I know a girl called Elsa, she’s into Alka-Seltzer
She sniffs it through a cane on a supersonic train
And she makes me laugh
I got her autograph
She done it with a doctor on a helicopter
She’s sniffin’ in her tissue, sellin’ the Big Issue

Fucking atrocious. But songs like Supersonic aren’t meant to be considered on paper, they’re not even meant to be thought about. This is rock music that bypasses the inconvenient obstacles like your brain and careers straight towards your heart and soul. It’s music whose effects defy explanation, it was always meant to be felt, not considered. The song was recorded in one day in December 1993 for £100. Technically a demo, but the band simply released the same recording as their debut single on 11th April 1994, and included that same demo on their debut album four months later. Because, yeah, they couldn’t be arsed changing it, but also because Supersonic captures the same lightning in a bottle that this pisstake of a debut album somehow manages to repeatedly capture.

Because, fuck me, this record gots TUNES, boyeeeee! Supersonic may have been a lightning bolt to the British music industry, but probably doesn’t even rank amongst the album’s best songs. Columbia – which literally up until this very point I could have sworn was a single – doubles, triples down on the chugging, dirgey, metronomic pace of the record and manages to push through the other side and emerge as a near swamp rock gem that you could imagine Kyuss releasing. Live Forever is… Come on, I get it that the haterz are all out to get Oasis, jealous of their flow, wanna get their bag etc, but Live Forever is just an undeniably perfect little rock song. If anyone wrote a song as perfect as this, they’d also be as big as Oasis. But they didn’t. Because they can’t. It’s why the influence of Oasis is usually disregarded: they influenced so much awful music. Because Oasis recklessly and dangerously gave the impression that anyone could do this. But, guess what? If you’re not writing songs as good as Live Forever then it doesn’t matter how shiny your stupid little circular sunglasses are.

But the real reason that Oasis were and are inimitable is best personified roughly three minutes and forty eight seconds into the epic album closer* Slide Away. Potentially the band’s greatest ever song, and certainly their most achingly beautiful, it goes “Chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-CHU-GAH-chugga-chugga” and the rhythm section goes “Boom, TANG, ba-doom-doom, TANG”. For six and a half minutes. On paper, it’s impossibly dull and bloated near jam session that we’d all rightly be offended at having to pay £15.99 at Virgin Megastore for the honour of being subjected to back in 1994. But we’ve already covered how Oasis at their best never did work on paper. Somehow, Slide Away is an impossibly yearning torch song, a glassy eyed pean to the very preciousness of our existing moments that ranks amongst the alltime great epic rock album closers**, And chief amongst the reasons for that is at the totemic centre of Slide Away, the beating heart of all the band’s greatest songs and their one trump card that no band could ever hope to replicate. At approximately three minutes and forty eight seconds, while the chorus gets its fourth or fifth go around – by which time the listeners’ hearts will surely be running out of aches to ache?? Lol, nope, get recked – Liam Gallagher manages to squeeze your soul into butter with a simple noise:

Now that you’re mine
I’ll find a way
Of chasing the sun

Awwwww!
Let me be the one that shines with you
In the morning when you don’t know what to do

(*except, it’s not the fucking album closer because Married With cocking Children comes next!

**except, it’s not the fucking album closer because Married With cocking Children comes next!)

Liam Gallagher is Oasis. The spectacularly photogenic yet impossibly dimwitted frontperson is the volcano voiced himbo that forged the intimate relationship between Oasis and roughly every single human being in the United Kingdom in the mid 90s.

Did he write the songs? At the time: never. Later on? Occasionally, and they were hilariously (though sometimes adorably) terrible. But Ozzy Osbourne is Black Sabbath, even if his actual artistic contributions were minimal. It’s a scientific fact that 99% of Queen songs are fucking dreadful, but Freddie Mercury was a talented enough frontman to sell whatever slop those boring blokes behind him were serving up. I know the nonce with the big nose wrote all of The Who’s songs, but let’s not pretend there’d even be 1% of as big a deal were it not for Roger Daltrey’s theatrics. The only thing Elvis ever wrote was his own name on a branding iron that he could mark 14 year old Priscilla Beaulieu for life with. Nik Kershaw wrote The One And Only.

And anyway, what ‘writing’ are we talking about here? See those Slide Away lyrics? AI would do far better. AI in 1994, I mean, punch a few keys on your IBM Simon and you’d be laughing.

Liam is one of rock’s – one of music’s – greatest ever frontmen. He manages to manipulate vocal chords that not only harness the power of Cthulu’s far more contentious older brother – who is struggling with both unresolved anger issues and a 40 a day B&H habit – but can also somehow incongruously tug at the feel strings when the song depends on it. He is more attitude than person. The bone of his skull is 2 inches thicker than us mere mortals, and in whatever room is left there are half a dozen brain cells each calling each other’s Mum a slag and swinging haymakers, forever drunk on the woozy troposphere that naturally occurs within the tight environs of Liam’s skull. I don’t know the science, but that causes rock and roll perfection! Apparently Mick Jagger’s skull contains nothing more than a few hundred brain cells secretly shagging the sisters of each other. Brain cells don’t have genders! It’s an absolute freakshow in that skull of his! But it works! I get how America is funding Israel’s genocide so that they can impose fear on the Middle East so that their hegemony is never again exposed as it was on October 7th, but seriously, just stick 1994 Liam on a loudspeaker, your imperialism will never be questioned again! This is what confidence and invulnerability sounds like. Sunsheeeeeeeeeee-YIIIIIIIIIIIIINE!!!!

What’s that? You don’t think this Oasis song is much cop? Hmmm. Listen to that singer though. Seems pretty sure of himself. I guess you must be wrong. Yes sir, shake along with me, indeed.

And the cruellest trick that Liam ever pulled was to do all this while making it sound like anyone could if they gave it a shot. They absolutely could not. So thanks for that.

Going back to this album as a fat, old man, the John Lennon influence clearly went deeper with Liam than ill-advised sartorial choices and even less advised child naming. But, as a great band once said, we’re all just standing on the shoulder of giants. Because all of these giants somehow collectively only have one shoulder. Liam took Lennon’s impassioned if unrefined voice and somehow made it less sophisticated, enveloped all the passions with a curiously magically laissez-faire sense of threat and violence, gave one million times less of a fuck, yet somehow became an insurgent working class torch bearer.

Ah, yes! I told you that we’d get to class! Because everything is about class, and there is no war but class war.

I don’t like disagreeing with Simon Price at all. Of all the many, many, many* thoughts I’ve ever scattergunned at the Manic Street Preachers from this blog, a good 94% of them were likely consciously or subconsciously cribbed directly from him. Following the Oasis reunion announcement – because he is is way better at this than me and doesn’t wait fucking months to comment on current affairs – Simon Price wrote a piece in the Guardian (natch) calling Oasis “the most damaging pop-cultural force in recent British history“.

(*many, many, many, many)

One of the major issues is… I very much agree with Mr Price. on a lot of his points. Yes, Oasis are shit. Yes, their actual artistic influence on British music was so miniscule that it might be better described as a regression. Yes, of course both Gallaghers are thicker than the crust that forms around pig shit when it gets lead poisoning. Half a dozen light headed brain cells having a barney, remember? And, oh God, please don’t ask the Gallaghers their opinions on anything: – they have the boorish, pig ignorant views of a couple of old men who haven’t experienced any art since the 1960s. Because that’s what they are. Noel was once asked to name his twelve favourite songs. He still managed to name three greatest hits albums and topped the list with essentially The Best of the Beatles. The guy’s Alan Partridge. I’m just saying that magical lightning in a bottle happened to captured at one point in the mid 90s – roughly beginning with the release of Supersonic in April 1994 and ending with the inane Noel fronted Don’t Look Back In Anger reaching number 1 in February 1996 and signalling that we’d all ceded control of this behemoth to the superstructure and all sensible tastes no longer applied – and this album still exudes a irresistable, cocksure and irrational fire that manages to gloss over its many, many, many* artistic failings. It’s near impossible to remove the album’s quality from the context of the ridiculously huge act they’d become near enough immediately afterwards, but ‘Definitely Maybe’ is a brattish**, punkish, heavy metal BritPop moment in time that manages to somehow be at the end of the day at once incredibly inspiring and also (and I can’t believe I’m saying this) altogether charming.

(*many, many, many, many

**bumpin’ that)

But Price’s main point is that Oasis presented an extraordinarily uneducated and dangerously lumpen version of the working class. That they were a group of people that the commentators and newspapers at the time (and to this day) were happy and relieved to present as the uncouth and gross spokespeople for the entire British working class. They were essentially used as living proof of why the poor couldn’t have nice things. They were Viv Nicholson. They were Michael Carroll, although thankfully at least the words did not yet exist for them to also be labelled “The Kings of Chavs” (honestly, I wish someone would just nuke this fucking country sometimes). In the 90s, the implication of most mainstream media pieces on Oasis (well, just the Gallagher brothers, really: I doubt there were many Richard Littlejohn thinkpieces debating the cultural footprint of Paul McGuigan) was that they were basically a walking argument against wealth distribution. More social housing within ten miles of your second home?? And have the Gallagher brothers live nearby!? No thank you! Increased wealth tax?? To pay for Noel Gallagher’s children to get better education when they clearly aren’t going to be able to read?? Scoff! More support for legal aid so that the less wealthy members of society have access to justice?? So that Liam Gallagher can dodge jail time after drinking too much lager and urinating in a policeman’s helmet or something?? No thank you! Lock these ruffians up, I say! Price mentions Pulp and (obviously) The Manics as example of musical acts that came from equally underprivileged backgrounds, yet are amongst the most literate and thoughtful acts in music’s last 40 years.

This is all true. But it is not an indictment of the band. The band weren’t playing up to any stereotypes or acting any parts. They really were/are that simple minded. They never put themselves over as a voice of the working class, as they were far too dim and neoliberally brainwashed to have any sort of class consciousness. They were a gift to the ruling classes, yes, as they at once gave the working class to dream and inspire towards for so that there would be no desire for social reform – Oasis made it! Just pull up your boot straps, or whatever! – and also existed as an example to the other upper classes that the current hierarchy makes sense, and that ruffians like these still deserve to be kept down in the lower decks. But that is a sad indictment of both the British class system and the ruling class’s priorities, not the band themselves. Blaming Oasis for this is like blaming Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion for making Ben Shapiro angry.

The sad fact is that even in the mid-90s it was rare to see working class people be so successful. And 30 years later, with every entertainment industry being Nepobombed and to even have have ‘organic’, ‘selfmade’ success via social media your Daddy (the CEO of Nestle) first has to pay a few hundred thousand to buy you the following to get noticed. I mean, there was the Arctic Monkeys a decade later, but as Simon himself has noted, they fucking hate the working class. Sure, the Gallaghers’ anti-education and casual homophobia was a sad reflection of the wider working class culture in the 90s (mate, I was at secondary school at the time, and the Gallaghers would be among the most progressive students there), but as an act they still showed that it was possible for people like us to reach the top. Obviously, we’d do it differently than these intellectual potatoes, but we could still get there!

And while their debut album contains an obscene amount of lyrical nonsense (“Lasaaaaaaaagnaaaaaaaaaaa!”), it’s also perhaps the only time in their career that the band seemed to both acknowledge their class and attempt to speak to it. Perhaps because their class, like Manchester, was something the band left as soon as they could and never wanted to return to. But Bring It On Down is a snarled and agitating anthem to throwing off society’s chains and might be the greatest Oasis lyric ever in a true tallest midget contest:

You’re the outcast
You’re the underclass
But you don’t care
Because you’re living fast
You’re the uninvited guest who stays till the end
I know you’ve got a problem that the Devil sends
You think they’re talking ’bout you, but you don’t know who
I’ll be scraping their lives from the sole of my shoe tonight

The even more famous and more cherished hit single – and one that might even get a laughably incongruous airing by the 52 year old millionaire in front of a hundred thousand people next summer – Cigarettes and Alcohol is a legitimate classic lyric of working class ennui. When Liam asks “Is it worth the aggravation/To find yourself a job when there’s nothing worth working for?” a whole generation of people like me felt that! And the demand that “You could wait for a lifetime/To spend your days in the sunshine/You might as well do the white lines… You gotta make it happen” was, I’m sorry, inspirational!

Lyrically, I mean. Musically, the song’s just fucking Get It On, isn’t it?

The one time Price’s piece veers into cringe is when he argues how, actually, he’s far more working class than the Gallaghers, because his family didn’t have a car and was forced to move house a lot. Compared to “leafy Burnage and the house Liam and Noel grew up in”. Yeah. Burnage is a lovely place. Wish we had more social housing like that. And the fact that we don’t means… fuck the Gallaghers…?

But then I wasn’t aware of the fact that Noel (get this) called (you’ll like this) fucking (wait for it!) Ed fucking Miliband a Communist, and I couldn’t write a line as good as “Noel plays his guitar as if he’s scared it will break”, so Simon wins in the end.

Literally ever complaint you’ve ever heard about Oasis is more or less true. Unless you’ve somehow heard someone complain that they’re far too progressive, or experimental for experimental’s sake, or that they’ve gone woke.

They’re dull. They make rock music as endlessly looping low velocity, low energy performance art. They’re a whole nation’s weird uncles that we don’t like sitting next to at Christmas. The way they managed to regress musically and lyrically over their near 25 year career would lead many doctors to diagnose them as developmentally disabled. They are, at the end of the day, rubbish. But ‘Definitely Maybe’ somehow contains all of that rubbishness, but still barges into your soul and wipes its nose on the inside of your ribcage.

And this is all the band ever were. They never wanted to be more than this, and they never attempted to be. The Gallaghers’ endless (and tedious) Beatles obsession – plus their success putting them on the same commercial pedestal – lead a lot of people to compare them to the Beatles and assume they’d have a similar artistic trajectory. But on their debut, aside from Liam’s obvious Lennon adjacency, they really don’t sound much like The Beatles at all. That T-Rex ‘inspiration’ is actually more characteristic of the band’s sound. Musically, they were a little Marc Bolan, they were a little Slade, they were essentially a 90s glamrock band with a lot of killer stomping tunes and with the glamour and androgyny removed. So, erm… Status Quo? We shouldn’t have expected anything more than repeated failed attempts to recapture the magic.

After this album, the records would become more pedestrian, less exciting, less full of potential, more litanies of wasted potential. Looking back, the lyrics on ‘Definitely Maybe’ are hilariously bad, but with a shrugging arrogance that smirked that the band knew they were fucking bad, but they were going to get you to your feet anyway. Feeling supersonic? Give me gin and tonic. Done. After this record, Noel actually attempted to write good lyrics, and just gave us literal decades of empty platitudes performed at funeral pace. And then he started singing more. And a part of the world died. Maybe if the chorus of Be Here Now* went “I wanna be here now/Eating my Kung Pao” the album would have had more of a lasting legacy.

(*the one highlight of that disastrous third album, and actually one of the closest moments Oasis have got to recapturing the proper swagger of their debut)

And, though the albums would always stink, Oasis could always release a banging single every now and then. They would also release singles like Who Feels Love or Little by Little, but the good stuff was good! They’re a good to great singles band, I’m sure everyone who’s paid £24’065 for a ticket to see them next summer is going to have a jolly good time, but we should just stop expecting them to be more than what they are.

I’ve lived in Manchester for a combined 30 years and I’ve never heard anyone say “Mad for it”.