by Paolo Hewitt
‘It’s complete shite,’ he stresses, ‘it’s what the media want it to be. It makes it more interesting. I’m in a band with me own brother and we talk to each other like dogs, but that’s the way you are, because you’re brothers. I don’t talk to anyone else like that.’
The songs Oasis recorded over these three months included ‘Alive’, ‘Cloudburst’, ‘Do Yer Wanna Be A Spaceman’, ‘Strange Thing’, ‘Bring It On Down’, ‘Whatever’, ‘Married With Children’, ‘Fade Away’, ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Star’ and ‘Columbia’.
All of the songs bar ‘Strange Thing’, are now available and very little has been changed on the finished recorded versions. The original recording of ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Star’ boasts a slightly different intro and is played at a slower pace than that on the Definitely Maybe album. Liam has yet to come up with his unique phrasing. He sings ‘sunshine’ in a completely straightforward manner, although it’s clear that his voice is starting to find its now unique sound.
On ‘Bring It On Down’ Guigsy’s bass is to the forefront on the intro, sounding like John Entwistle’s playing on The Who’s ‘Pinball Wizard’. Liam’s vocal is also treated in a much heavier fashion, filtered through for a megaphone effect.
‘Columbia’ has a different intro altogether and ends with a disembodied voice, sampled from the radio and deliberately slowed down, intoning things like, ‘Take away the melody from your song... like an ever-flowing stream.’ It’s then replaced by what sounds like a Hare Krishna chant.
It was this song that would later cause some controversy. According to Griffiths, Noel had the chord structure for ‘Columbia’, an early example of his ability to bridge the gap between rock guitars and a dance music element. But he had no melody or lyrics. One night, Chris Griffiths sang a melody over it which began with the words, ‘There we were / Now here we are / All this confusion/ Nothing’s the same to me.’
‘That was the thing that started it off,’ Griffiths recalls. ‘And it was Liam who wrote the chorus, “I can’t tell you the way I feel / Because the way I feel is oh so new to me,” and it’s like, Liam wrote that.
‘Then I came up with some shite words for the third verse and Noel went fuck off and wrote something well better.’
A collaboration then, yet when the song was released, Noel Gallagher was the only name credited. Similarly, the fact that the eight-track demo of ‘Alive’ ended up on the B-side of the band’s second single, ‘Shakermaker’, was also a contentious point.
‘That kind of pissed us off a little bit, the fact that three months of our work was getting put out and Creation Records are making loads of money out of it. But see, we’re not arsed. If we had wanted to sue Oasis we would have already done it. We don’t want to come across as the dickheads of the music business jumping on the Oasis bandwagon, because as far as I’m concerned I’m in a boss group myself.
‘I’m just amazed I was a part of it because the thing is we were always talking about us both being successful and, you know, let’s all buy a studio on an island and go there. It’s the shite you talk when you’re all off your heads.’
It was during this period, late March 1993 to June 1993, that Oasis played twice in Liverpool. Once at Le Bateau and once at the Krazy House. At the first gig Smaller, Digsy’s band, played support and about twenty people showed up.
‘But nearly everyone there,’ Griffiths recalls, ‘was in bands from Liverpool, and me and our kid are going, “They’re boss, aren’t they?” And they’re all laughing, going, “They’re fucking Mancs.” We’ve never ever been into that Liverpool versus Manchester thing. It’s all shite, that.’
When Oasis had finished, Liam was spotted by some bouncers smoking a spliff. The bouncers went to throw him out. Liam, as ever, kicked off and Tony had to intervene to keep him in the club.
‘Luckily enough, I knew the manager but I nearly ended up getting a fucking hiding.’
In April, the band played their Krazy House gig and then in May they appeared at the Boardwalk again, their sixth appearance there. Later on that month, Sister Lovers told them they had a gig booked at a place in Glasgow, King Tut’s, supporting a Creation band called 18 Wheeler.
‘We’ll have that one,’ Oasis said.
It was a girl that sent Alan McGee scurrying over to King Tut’s club in Glasgow on the night of 31 May 1993. A girl. He wasn’t acting on a tip-off about an explosive new group and he certainly didn’t have business on his mind. Alan McGee went to King Tut’s hoping to get laid.
McGee was in the middle of one of his regular break-ups with his then girlfriend Linda. The night before he had told his sister, Susan, about the bust-up and she had responded by saying, ‘Come down to King Tut’s, I’ll be with a couple of mates, one of them is dead nice and she hasnae got a boyfriend.’
McGee had been unsure about going to King Tut’s that night. He was hungover from the previous night’s excesses, but he felt obliged to pop in as one of his bands, 18 Wheeler, were playing. When the chance of meeting a girl suddenly occurred, his mind was made up for him.
‘I was such a cantankerous git in those days,’ McGee says with a laugh, ‘so I bowled in pissed, hoping basically to pull one of my sister’s mates. Sure enough, the girl didn’t show up.’
McGee actually arrived two hours earlier than he should have done. He naturally thought that all the bands on the bill would be playing during pub hours. He didn’t realise that King Tut’s had been granted a late licence. If he had known that, he would have arrived two hours later and missed the first act.
When McGee walked in his attention was instantly grabbed by a tall, young Mancunian wearing an Adidas top and sporting an eye-catching haircut.
‘And I remember turning round in this pub and the minute I saw him I thought, he looks like Paul Weller, the kid looks like a fucking star. And that was Liam.’
At first, McGee thought Liam was part of the Manchester gang who were present. They had travelled up with Oasis and were making a lot of noise and acting in a threatening manner.
They had been put in this aggressive mood by the harassed owner of the club. He thought he was putting on three bands that night. Instead he had got four.
‘Who are you?’ he asked the gang of about fourteen Mancunians who had tumbled out of two hire vans bearing guitars and equipment.
‘We’re Oasis, mate,’ Liam told him, ‘and we’re playing here tonight.’
‘But I haven’t booked you.’
‘Tough shit, we’re here, that’s it.’
And then it was pointed out that although the promoter had bouncers on the door, this firm outnumbered them four to one and as they had just travelled for hours in a van they had paid for, they would be very, very annoyed if the band didn’t play. Capiche?
The promoter took one look at the band and their mates and acquiesced. Oasis set up their equipment.
Meanwhile, McGee climbed the stairs of the pub to get a better view of the first band on. He was amazed when he saw Liam walk on-stage. He assumed he was part of the Manchester fan contingent. Probably one of their drug dealers.
Oasis went into ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Star’, ‘Bring It On Down’, ‘Up In The Sky’, and finished with ‘I Am The Walrus’. Fifteen minutes worth of work, if that.
Liam, who McGee described that night as ‘absolutely charismatic and confrontational’, held the mike in his hand as there was no mike stand. And because the stage was so small, Guigsy for the first and last time, played just behind and to the left-hand side of Noel who always stands centre right.
McGee watched the gig with an excitement he hadn’t experienced in years. He absolutely swears ‘that I knew I was going to sign them within two songs.’
But he didn’t go backstage waving his cheque book in the air. He waited patiently for them to appear in the bar. When they emerged, he went up to Noel and introduced himself. Noel did a little double-take. He remembered McGee from his days of raving at Spectrum in London’s Charing Cross. And, of course, he knew all abo
ut Creation Records. But this character standing in front of him looked nothing like the McGee from four years ago.
‘Noel said to me, “The last time I saw you, you had tons of hair and sunglasses on”, which was right because I thought I was Malcolm McLaren up until 1989. And then I said, “I want to sign you”, and he goes “Do you want to hear a tape?” And I went, “No, you’re real. I’ll sign you.”’
Even so, Noel still gave McGee a demo tape. The cover of the cassette was a picture of a swirling Union Jack going down a plug. It had been designed, from an idea by Noel Gallagher by Tony French, a friend.
‘But he forgot to put the plug-hole in the middle of the flag,’ Noel recalls, ‘so we had to explain it to everyone.’
On the back of the tape was a number to call and a note to ask for Paul, Noel’s older brother.
McGee promised to get in touch. Noel said goodbye, went back and told the rest of the band about the offer. He said that McGee seemed quite out of it so the news was taken by all with a pinch of salt, and then they travelled back to Manchester.
The next day, Noel was still unsure about McGee’s offer. He couldn’t work out if the guy was taking the piss or was for real.
The only person he could think to get advice from was the Inspirals’ old manager, Anthony Bodgiano, whom everyone in town had nicknamed Scamiano.
‘What’s McGee like?’ Noel asked him. ‘I mean, if he makes an offer is he serious or is he just off his head?’
Bodgiano replied, ‘If he says he wants to do it, he’s probably serious.’ Then he started enquiring about the vacant managerial slot within the Oasis team. Noel told him he’d get back to him on that matter.
Noel then phoned Creation and made an appointment to see McGee the following Thursday. The fact that McGee had agreed to see him was positive, even if Noel was still in the dark about the Creation boss’s real feelings.
What he didn’t know was that as Oasis had travelled home that night, McGee had staggered back to his Glasgow hotel, the Lorne on Sauciehall Street, and immediately got on the phone to every significant Creation employee to tell them he had just discovered the band of the decade.
One person he called was Johnny Hopkins, the Creation press officer. ‘We were used to McGee’s mad phonecalls,’ he explains, ‘but this time was different. You could tell he had seen something really special.’
Another call was placed to Tim Abbot, the marketing manager.
Abbot had come from a marketing background. He had set up his own marketing consultancy in the 1980s and worked on accounts with the likes of Levi’s and Pernod. In 1988 he necked his first Ecstasy pill. In 1989 his business went down the drain. So he and a friend went travelling round Thailand and the Philippines.
On his return to Britain, Abbot started a club in the Midlands called the Better Way, which put on bands. One night McGee came up to see the Manic Street Preachers, Saint Etienne and East Village play there.
He brought with him his friend Bobby Gillespie and introduced himself to Abbot. They chatted during the soundcheck. The upshot was that at the end of the night they were all to be found at Abbot’s house, E’d up and playing records until dawn.
Abbot’s collection reflected his youth. There was plenty of Northern Soul, masses of other related black music with classic rock albums mixed in. McGee was impressed. He liked a man with a big record collection.
When he met Abbot again, six months later in Birmingham, McGee offered him some part-time work. Within a year, Tim Abbot was managing director of Creation Records, and his brother Chris was employed by the label as well.
‘I got this phonecall from Alan absolutely arseholed in Glasgow,’ Abbot fondly recalls. ‘It was in the middle of the night and he was going, “I’ve just seen this fucking amazing band, it will turn the company round. This is the band I’ve always been looking for. It’s The Sex Pistols crossed with The Small Faces. They’re like mad Manes, and trust Creation to sign a band from Manchester”, which at the time was the most unfashionable city, A&R wise.’
On 3 June 1993, Noel, Liam and Bonehead travelled down to London and made their way by taxi to 8 Westgate Street, Hackney, home of Creation Records. Press officer Johnny Hopkins remembers looking up and seeing three-fifths of Oasis for the first time.
‘You were just drawn to them,’ he recalls, ‘they just had this massive presence which you couldn’t ignore. Most other people who come in just blend in, but they were magnetic.’
While waiting to see McGee, Noel quickly studied all the pictures that the Creation boss had pinned to the office walls.
He saw artists that he liked, The Faces, Paul Weller. But there were others, such as Big Star, even Lynyrd Skynyrd whom he didn’t have a clue about. Not that Noel would ever let a fact like that stand in his way.
Noel went down to McGee’s office and the two started talking about musical likes. Noel kicked off by telling him that he was a huge fan of Big Star.
‘And he told me all about the bands that I liked and because he was so into music, I was saying to him, “You’re the first person since Bobby Gillespie that’s totally tuned into my musical taste.”’ McGee now gives the laugh of someone who knows he’s been totally had.
‘Up until about six months ago I thought I’d found the ultimate musical soul brother.’
Noel and Liam then went and met the other employees. Downstairs, in what Abbot refers to as the ‘bunker’, there was a room whose walls had been plastered with pictures of various celebrities.
‘It was like an A-to-Z of our minds,’ Abbot explains. ‘Everybody from Tommy Cooper next to George Best, Rod Stewart next to Kate Moss, Wilson Pickett next to Brian Wilson, all blue-tac’d to the walls. The carpet was sodden with booze, stank of fucking booze and it was a fucking shithole, grade A.’
It was here that the Abbots and the Gallaghers hit it off. Chris spoke mainly to Liam (indeed, they would holiday together later on in Portugal), while Tim, Alan and Noel chatted and chatted, Bonehead occasionally joining in.
For their part, Alan and Tim didn’t try to sell Creation to Oasis. Instead they spoke about clubs, music, football (Abbot is a United supporter), all the things that motivated them.
At some point, it was pointed out to Noel that he should think hard about getting a manager. Bodgiano was an option but so too was Johnny Marr’s manager, Marcus Russell. Noel had passed on an Oasis tape to Marr’s brother, Ian.
‘You have to understand,’ Marr says, ‘that I get loads of tapes so when my brother gave me that Oasis tape, I didn’t play it for at least two weeks. My brother kept badgering me about it. Finally, I played it and it was great. I just thought it was brilliant. Anyway, not long after I was driving through town with my brother and he went, “Look, there’s that guy from Oasis”, and it was Noel walking down the street.
‘So we pulled over and went and had a drink with him. Then I went to see them in Manchester University with Marcus.’
Marcus Russell had been astonished by Oasis’s performance that night.
‘Well, I thought they were fucking wonderful,’ he enthuses, ‘I mean, I thought they were a breath of fresh air. Honestly. But I didn’t think there and then, I’m going to manage these, because I didn’t know them.
‘I got introduced by Andrew Berry to Noel’s girlfriend during the gig and she said, “Oh, you’re Marcus”, and told me that the band didn’t know that I was coming to see them. I told her, “It’s no big deal, I’m just in town but I thought the music was a breath of fresh air because it reminded me of all the things that I’ve loved in the last twenty years.”’
Oasis’s set that night included ‘Digsy’s Dinner’, ‘Fade Away’, ‘Up In The Sky’, ‘I Am The Walrus’, and the public premiere of ‘Live Forever’.
On the way back from the gig, which took place in a small student union bar called the Hop and Grape (Marr and Marcus didn’t stay to see Dodgy because of the attention Marr was starting to get from the crowd), Marr asked Marcus what he thought of the band.
<
br /> ‘I thought they were really good,’ Marcus replied, playing it safe. There was a silence. Then Marr turned to his manager again.
‘You’re going to manage them, aren’t you?’
Marcus asked, ‘Why do you say that?’
Marr replied, ‘Because normally you immediately dismiss everything.’
‘And that,’ Marcus says, ‘is when I first started thinking seriously about it.’
Meanwhile, as their future manager drove back to London, Oasis had a problem on their hands concerning their equipment. Guigsy’s car wasn’t starting, and that meant they had to load his gear on to Bonehead’s van. A huge speaker cabinet was left standing out on the street.
Someone would have to wheel it back to the Boardwalk, Noel pointed out. It’s far too big to get into a cab and by the way, boys, it certainly ain’t going to be me.
They groaned. When it came to packing all the gear away, Noel always played foreman.
Guigsy recalls, ‘We’d be breaking all the gear down and he’d be there winding up leads or something going, “You want to do it like this”, but he’d never get on it. Then he’d go, “Guigsy, can you give us the keys to the van, I’ll go and open it up.”
‘And he’d be dead industrious ’cos he would grab something light and you’d think, well, he’s a professional with the Inspirals, isn’t he?
‘Then he’d get in the van with all these leads and say, “I’ll stay here and you pass everything up to me.” And you’d be going up and down the stairs with all the amps and instruments. It took us months to cotton on.’
Who then to deal with this huge cabinet standing idly outside the Hop and Grape? Ten minutes later, passers-by were intrigued to see Liam and Guigsy in the middle of the road, pushing a huge cabinet.
‘You couldn’t put it on the pavement,’ Guigsy recalls, “’cos the wheels were those little round plastic ones and all the little paving stones would make it jump too much and you’d fuck up all the connections. So we had to push it on the road, like a pair of fucking dustbin men and we nearly got run over by two buses.’