This was where Oasis blew it. Never again would they have the momentum to put a serious dent in the US market; never again would they be touring off an album as good as What’s The Story . . . Their third, 1997’s Be Here Now, was hugely half-assed and drug-bedeviled, its weak compositions tottering under a Glenn Branca orchestra of multi-tracked cocaine guitars (30 of them, according to Noel, on the song “My Big Mouth”). Here indeed was the creative white-out, the swamping excess foretold on What’s The Story . . .: “Someday you will find me/Caught beneath the landslide/In a champagne supernova in the sky.” Putting it slightly differently, a writer from Melody Maker described Noel as “riffing like a pack of ants on an old banana.”
Ten years later, Oasis have a more-than-comfortable share in the US market; on their 2005 tour they sold out Madison Square Garden and the Hollywood Bowl, and the surprise late-blooming excellence of the single “Lyla” got them into the Billboard Top 20. But the Oasis moment — the point at which the band’s mega-rhetoric coincided with the occult appetites of an enormous public — never happened over here. And no wonder, really; listening now to the songs that made their name, on the recent compilation Stop the Clocks (Epic), one hears not a well-oiled stadium shaker but a fiercely paradoxical little band, knocked together quite cynically out of the postmodern rubble (the empty phrasings, the borrowed riffs) but almost exploding with raw belief.
This, we now see, was the miracle dyad of the brothers Gallagher: in writing for Liam, the beautiful hooligan, crafty Noel was writing for his soul. And the lyrics he gave Liam have become magical with time, full of a spirit for which the word “positivity” seems far too prim: “I live my life for the stars that shine” (“Rock’n’roll Star”). A friend of mine once explained the apparently nonsensical couplet “Slowly walking down the hall/Faster than a cannonball,” from “Champagne Supernova,” as a piercing druggy image of mental acceleration and physical collapse. Whatever it means, there’s no question that the line that follows it is one of the most perfect arrangements of vowel sounds in the English language: “Where were you while we were getting high?” Oasis: masters of vacancy, full of heart.