Archie Cotterell
Oasis in 1997
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This review of Oasis by Archie Cotterell originally appeared in the April / May 1997 edition of The London Magazine, alongside short fiction by Anton Chekhov.
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From its earliest days, when Elvis Presley picked up the rhythms of the black American South, through the drug-busted Rolling Stones, the cross-dressing David Bowie, the sneering, swearing Sex Pistols to the howling guitars of the Nirvana, rock music has generated its vibrancy and much of its popularity from its anti-authoritarian stance. Oasis, named after the club in which The Beatles first played, are of this lineage.
A traditional guitar and drum based rock band, Oasis eschew the current trends towards dance and electronic music in favour of a sound overtly reminiscent of their avowed heroes, The Beatles. Led by the quarrelsome Gallagher brothers, Liam and Noel, the group has achieved enormous success in little over two years. This success is based upon their anthemic music, melodies which cut across boundaries of age and social grouping, songs whose egocentric, empowered lyrics are filled with Beatles-ish drug allusions and childhood collusions. For example, in ‘Live Forever’ Liam sings
‘Maybe I just want to fly
I want to live I don’t want to die
Maybe I just want to breathe
Maybe I just don’t believe
Maybe you’re the same as me
We see things they’ll never see
You and I are gonna live forever.’
But there is something more than the quality of their music. The phenomenon of Oasis has expanded beyond its musical justification. This is perhaps explained by the band’s attitude, a mixture of arrogance and boorishness guaranteed to alienate the most broad-minded parent.
Their apogee (thus far) of parental alienation was reached at the Brit Awards in February 1996, the annually televised self-congratulatory event at which pop music rewards its heroes. Oasis won awards in every category which required the Gallagher brothers to make a number of acceptance speeches. In unexpected counterpoint to the traditional dewy-eyed messages of thanks, the increasingly loaded brothers managed to insult everyone, from the presenters of the awards to the audience, in language not normally associated with prime time television. This culminated in Liam attempting to force one of the glittering statuettes up his backside. Outrage ensued. Their drunken antics were criticised by the moral majority for being neither big nor funny nor clever. But to do so was to miss the point.
That they have been aided by a culture which celebrates men behaving badly and football as an art form is without doubt.
From the perspective of the Nineties, if they had simply taken drugs, dressed as women or sworn anarchistically on television, the same critics who criticised them for their mindless yobbery would have condemned them for their lack of originality, pointing out that The Stones, Bowie and The Sex Pistols had pioneered those forms of ‘unacceptable’ behaviour. The achievement of Oasis that night was in the finest traditions of rock ‘n roll: they found a new way of antagonising the parental generation, a generation who prided themselves on their liberality, emanating as they did from the progressive Sixties.
And yet; in spite of the controversial headlines they have been embraced by the Prime Minister-in-waiting much as Harold Wilson once embraced The Beatles. Tony Blair has encouraged interviews and front cover photographs of Noel Gallagher in the New Labour magazine. This has an interest beyond the tired axiom that a politician will do anything for votes. It suggests that Tony Blair is aware that the loutish behaviour is an image, simply a way of distinguishing the band from the heavily marketed, clean-living, good-looking ‘boy bands’ such as Take That or Boyzone. The success of Oasis is that they have selected an image – the iconic rock ‘n roll outcast – from the available range and, in spite of our all-knowing, Post Modern age, willed it into reality.
That they have been aided by a culture which celebrates men behaving badly and football as an art form is without doubt. This is reflected in their predominantly male fanbase which has mushroomed from a working class constituency to embrace students, stockbrokers, sportsmen and shopkeepers. They have their female fans – Liam Gallagher is a pin-up to many – but they tend to be girls of a certain spirit, more likely to spend Saturday afternoon at Old Trafford than in the boutiques and shopping malls of Manchester.
But, rather than merely being swept along by the current trends, Oasis are creating them. Their worship and recreation of The Beatles sound has spawned a host of similar sounding, similarly influenced bands generically described in the music press – in homage to Noel Gallagher – as ‘Noel-Rock’; there is even a band called No Way Sis who are Oasis lookalikes performing Oasis songs. The Beatles themselves have partially reformed, releasing anthologies and unpublished material. Clearly Oasis have hit a nerve amongst swathes of the music-buying public who feel excluded by current fashions for electronic music, by hip-hop and house, jungle and techno, and who are subliminally reaching out for a music they understand, the guitar and drum based rock music of their youth. For them the sweeping grandeur of Oasis’ music resonates high above the look and the attitude which devours the rebellious teenager.
The conditions under which it has been possible for Oasis to unashamedly pilfer from the past have been created by the compact disc revolution. As the record companies have sought to maximize the potential of their back catalogues by re-releasing elderly albums on CD, so young bands have been exposed to, and influenced by, the heroes of yesteryear.
All art evolves by drawing upon and reworking the images of the past. In any discipline movements develop through a process of each generation either extending or rebelling against its predecessor. Rock n’ Roll is no different. As such it has evolved, albeit in a concertinaed form, as a post-dated parallel of other art histories. For example: in painting the Quattrocento interest in realism and perspective ultimately evolved into the glories of the High Renaissance; the Classical motifs were extended by the Baroque age before being stretched almost to parody by Rococco. The neo-Classical style followed, excising the confectionary of Rococco, itself being superceded by the Romantic age. Romanticism gave way to Impressionism and an increasing multiplicity of style, until Cubism heralded the onset of the modern world, fracturing the linear history of art and creating an environment of hitherto unforeseen diversity. Rock music is painting’s mirror image.
Unlike most rock stars they never complain about the pressure of repeating their successes.
The blues of the deep South were appropriated by young white men, like Elvis, who became the original rock ‘n rollers; the various strains were sifted and melded by the succeeding generation who created their own High Renaissance in the mid-Sixties, the holy trinity of Michaelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael being represented by The Beatles, Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones. Their sound extended into late-Sixties psychedelia and ‘flower-power’ which in turn was stretched almost to parody by the platform shoes and glitter of Glam Rock. This, like Rococco, was blown away by the advent of punk, whose three minute, three chord songs re-introduced a brutal, Classical simplicity. New Romanticism, with its frock coats and Louis XIV trappings succeeded punk, but already rock’s linear history was fragmenting. With the ‘New Wave’ banner accomodating a catholicity of musical fashion, the stage was set for the modern era, in which a bewildering array of rock, pop and dance templates concurrently exist.
Which begs the question, why Oasis? Why have they achieved such phenomenal success when they are only one colour in the modern mosaic? The answer is ‘attitude’. Cynics will claim this is a euphemism for media manipulation, citing other artists – such as Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons – whose pre-eminence is supposedly founded upon a heightened awareness of the rules of the hype game. Whilst this has some validity it is only half the answer.
The difference between Oasis and other bands is that they have a primal quality that defies definition; that is both of the band and independent of it. It relates to the feuding brothers, whose sibling chemistry means they can fight in a way Lennon and McCartney never could. It is to do with their soaring sound, their classic pop songs, such as ‘Wonderwall’, ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ and ‘Champagne Supernova’, songs which dominate the airwaves, clubs, bars and restaurants. It is their dour Northern humour – something London bands with their art college cerebrality rarely reprise. It is, above all, their star quality, epitomised by the fact that Liam Gallagher not only can but does go out with Patsy Kensit, a girl whose history of rock star boyfriends renders her something between a Post Modern Joke and a Madonna substitute.
But perhaps the key is that, unlike most rock stars they never complain about the pressure of repeating their successes. They give no quarter and expect no mercy. Oasis show no weakness; they never let up. A fascinated public watches and wonders whether perhaps, in spite of their virtually unprecedented success, their loutishiness and arrogance, it really might be possible, just might be, that they really don’t give a damn.
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Archie Cotterell is an English former cricketer and novelist.
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