‘They made me feel I could do something with my life': indie music legends pick their favourite Oasis songs

The Guardian

04-07-2025

There are a lot of similarities between us and Oasis: two brothers in the band, Creation Records, working-class kids, guitar band, etc. In the mid-90s, we couldn't get arrested and had to watch their meteoric rise, but I couldn't dislike the great music. Rock 'n' Roll Star was on a compilation tape on the ill-fated US tour when we broke up. We'd had a punch-up on stage at the House of Blues in Los Angeles and back in my hotel room we were hanging around with a bunch of druggies. I was thinking 'Where did it all go wrong?' when this song came on. I knew I'd remember that moment for the rest of my life. To me, Rock 'n' Roll Star is like Johnny Rotten singing with Slade. It's punk rock, but in 1994. I love the self-belief: Noel [Gallagher] wrote it before he was a rock'n'roll star but knew it was gonna happen. The difference between the Mary Chain and Oasis is that when we reformed we'd buried the hatchet a good few years before we got back together. I'm not sure if they have, but it used to amaze people how William [Reid] and I could be screaming with hatred at each other in the studio, then 10 minutes later it would be: 'Do you want a cup of tea?'
It may come as a surprise to people that I've chosen this song, but I think it's a great example of Oasis doing the thing they do so well. Even though the chorus hook is 'And I get so high I just can't feel it' – a classic Oasis line that only Noel could come up with and Liam could pull off – the melodic hook that makes it so definitive is the bit that follows: 'In and out my brain / Running through my vein / You're my sunshine, you're my rain.' A 'post-chorus chorus' is something that Noel does often and I've never heard in other people's songs. When they recorded The Hindu Times in Olympic Studios, I told Noel I it was really good and he kind of shrugged. The next thing, it was No 1. At about the same time I watched from the side of the stage as they played it at the Manchester Apollo. I couldn't work out if what I was seeing was a band totally at one with their audience or so elevated that they were on another plane. It was both, and I thought to myself, 'This is what rock'n'roll means.'
I'm not proud of this, but I broke the news of the Oasis split. I was on the same bill as them in Paris [in 2009] and being young and naive I took it on myself to tell my Twitter followers what had happened ['Oasis cancelled again with one minute to stage time! Liam smashed Noel's guitar, huuuge fight']. By the time we got to the hotel it was headline news all over the world. My brother and his friends had spent all their money to come over to see them and were devastated. It felt like the end of an era. When I'd started going out with my sisters, pretending I was 18, I'd heard Acquiesce in an indie club called the Attic [in Glasgow] and I've listened to it ever since. When I hear it now, I always picture a massive crowd singing the words back at the band: it captures that feeling of being at a concert and everyone feeling united.
Oasis started everything for me. Two brothers of Irish origin scrap like fuck: that was me and my brother. A few years later me and Chris [brother] ended up having a scrap in their dressing room at Wembley in front of Noel and Kate Moss and all these A-listers. It was as if life had gone full circle. The other side of Oasis that people miss is the quiet, sad, loner aspect to Noel's writing. It's in Talk Tonight, Going Nowhere, Underneath the Sky, Half the World Away … and Rockin' Chair is probably the best example. 'I'm older than I wish to be / This town holds no more for me' is Noel, in his bedroom, hating where he's living and fed up with his life. I totally get that and when Noel gets in that mood he's one of the best songwriters ever. The reunion feels like your mam and dad getting back together. People have moaned about dynamic pricing and such, but in very divisive times they're gonna make millions of people very happy.
Live Forever sounds so at odds with it's time: 1994. I find it incredible that someone could wrap a 'fuck you' inside a song so openly positive. In the wreckage left behind by Thatcher's Britain and the shadow of Kurt Cobain's pain, Noel wrote an insolent, unapologetic love letter of self-belief from a place of nothing to lose, against a generation of moaners who have everything and still find reasons to complain. The song is written to step over the corpses of the past, unearthing the flag of romance others have tried to bury. It's a lesson in (working) class. The kind of optimism they summon is believable because it's not polished or corporate. It's radical. They're not promising a future, they're daring you to want one.
Acquiesce features Liam and Noel singing, which is unusual, but for me this song almost reads like a Bhajan – a [Hindu] devotional song – or a Khajana, where the lyric will be sung and the audience will sing it back. 'I don't know what it is that makes me feel alive / I don't know how to wake the things that sleep inside / I only wanna see the light that shines behind your eyes' … that's deep and questioning. Then the chorus: 'Because we need each other / We believe in one another / And I know we're going to uncover / What's sleeping in our soul.' Even aged 13 I realised that what was being communicated was similar to the mystical and devotional poetry that I was surrounded by growing up [in Venezuela] with parents who were yogis. Oasis have been pigeonholed as working-class lads, but they sing about a deep spiritual longing, very similar to what was in those ancient books.
I said hello to Noel in passing when he was working as a roadie for Inspiral Carpets, but then when I heard Oasis's music it just blew me away. When I was young, we had a transistor radio that all the hits came out of: the Beatles, the Stones and so on. Years later I was standing in a garage near my mum's when Don't Look Back in Anger came on their little radio and stopped me dead in my tracks like when I was a kid. Noel sort of reversed the David Bowie song, Look Back in Anger, to say 'look forward'. I love that attitude.
My brother Simon – who passed away in 2021 – was a massive influence on me and I remember us seeing a picture of Liam in the 90s and thinking 'Who's that guy?' Soon afterwards, Oasis changed the landscape of Manchester. Suddenly every night there were lads on stage trying to be the next Oasis. When I stood on the balcony at the Hacienda for the launch of Definitely Maybe, I thought Liam caught my eye. In fact, he was looking up at [the Lemonheads'] Evan Dando, who was standing next to me, but I'd always come away from Oasis gigs feeling I could do something with my life. Supersonic is about that: 'I need to be myself / I can't be no one else …' The line 'I'm feeling supersonic / Give me gin and tonic' epitomises the swagger they had. When I was in London recording my debut album, Liam swaggered into the Met Bar. It was the first time we'd met, but we ended up in a room with 10 lads on a stag do playing guitars and singing songs. There was a panic at the time because Liam had gone 'missing', but all the time he was with me.
When my dad died, he left me his Les Paul guitar. Noel played one, too, and when I was 15 I got it out from under Mum's bed, took it to school and learned Roll With It. Oasis were my gateway into rock'n'roll, and lately the Kooks have covered She's Electric. The lyrics are like a conversation with a friend but through the medium of this beautiful, transportive song, sung with such meaning. We've supported Noel and Liam separately and I don't think I've been as nervous in my life. When something's that deeply embedded, you become the teenager again.
When I was at art school in Glasgow everything appealed to me about Oasis – working-class guys who'd got signed after a gig in King Tut's Wah Wah Hut – and once I heard Live Forever I was deeply in love with them. Then suddenly we were touring and spending a lot of time with them. On stage, Liam was very 'don't you fuck with me', but off stage he was a lovely guy. That thousand-yard stare on stage is a cover for doing one of the most vulnerable things a person can do: getting up there and singing. Digsy's Dinner is Oasis at their most unvarnished. It's aspirational: he's singing about being in a bad situation but 'What a life it could be / If you could come to mine for tea … We'll have lasagne'. The simple beauty of that speaks to me, and I love the way the melody explodes when it gets to 'These could be the best days of our lives'. It's an odd song and the runt of the Definitely Maybe litter for some people, but for me it's got everything.
Stand By Me is the first Oasis song I became obsessed with. It still gives me full body chills listening to it. All the pieces just seem to fit together perfectly and simply, but it takes so much skill to be able to do that. I never knew that the opening line, 'Made a meal and threw it up on Sunday', was about Noel giving himself food poisoning [after his mother told him to 'cook yourself a proper Sunday dinner' when he moved to London] but melodically the song changed my life. Their songs are so well done that they kinda sneak into your head. Even now when I'm writing songs I think: 'Oh, is that a touch of Oasis?' I find them impossible not to borrow from in some way.
My dad had an Oasis live CD in the car when I was 13 and from then on they were my favourite band: massive melodies and a real drive to the songs. Gurriers – a Dublin word for 'unruly young men' – fits with how rough and ready Oasis were at the time, like the story about them getting arrested on the ferry [to the Netherlands] for fighting. Definitely Maybe is full of attitude, but Slide Away has always made me emotional. The whole feeling is wanting to connect with someone, and if it's just us against the world we'll figure it out … but once you realise it's written in the context of a break up [Noel and first fiancee Louise Jones] it's gut-wrenching. There's a bit in the Oasis: Supersonic documentary about a woman and her brother who spent the weekend watching them at Knebworth and singing along together, then he died a few months later. That's always stuck with me: how so many of our relationships with friends or family are bound up by music.
Champagne Supernova was one of the first things I learned to play on guitar. It's a masterpiece in the way it's put together: a classic structure, then another part and then another, like a double bridge. Lyrically, it's reflective and then has that almost tongue-in-cheek 'Someday you will find me beneath a champagne supernova …' bit. It's just beautiful.
Oasis songs always sound as if they have been written in minutes but are like everything you've ever heard and loved before, mixed together. I've no idea what a Wonderwall is, but for me this song has soundtracked iconic arms-round-shoulders moments at the end of family weddings and school discos. It sums up that universal experience we have with music, and taught a generation (including myself) how to play guitar and that songs can be basic and instinctive and still feel huge and meaningful. Every guitarist will have a relationship to the opening chords of Wonderwall – whether they love it or hate it, they will know how to play it.
When I was 18 or 19, I was a cleaner at a rest home and would roam around with headphones on, soaking up the first three Oasis albums. When Adam [Slack, guitar] and I started playing we used to do Acquiesce, Rock 'n' Roll Star and Cigarettes & Alcohol, which we've played in the Struts many times. Roll With It is my quintessential go-to Oasis song. Lyrically and sonically it encapsulates what they're about. It starts off quietly then hits you with this Chieftain tank of a groove. This was the song in the infamous chart battle with Blur's Country House and kinda says 'You're either with us or against us'. They lost the battle [Roll With It reached No 2] but won the war in terms of subsequent popularity. To me, the way they chose Roll With It knowing they had Wonderwall or Don't Look Back in Anger in the locker is incredibly brave and brilliantly cocky.
In the 90s, New York was a melting pot of music and, however unlikely it may seem, Britpop felt like an intense wave that reached the city. Even in the hip-hop scene we were obsessed with Oasis. Two gorgeous brothers, quintessentially British, punching each other – and they made amazing pop music. What's not to love? To me they felt like a new version of the Beatles, Stones and Led Zeppelin albums my dad used to play, but filtered through the rich history of Manchester music such as the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays. Champagne Supernova just makes me feel good inside in ways I can't explain. I don't get high now, but back then we loved to sing 'Where were you when we were getting high?' as we were doing just that.
We went to France with Oasis when we were both starting off, which was pretty wild. They were at the centre of a media storm and made sure they lived up to it, although they were really nice guys. In 1994, Echobelly and Oasis were playing New York clubs and went to each other's gigs. I remember standing right at the front when Liam smiled at me, and Rock 'n' Roll Star just epitomises the energy of that moment, and those times. Who joins a band and doesn't want to be a rock'n'roll star?
Oasis make their long-awaited comeback at Cardiff's Principality Stadium on 4 and 5 July, then tour.