by Paolo Hewitt
‘It was fucking ace,’ roadie Jason Rhodes recalls, ‘as we were packing up the gear, this stripper came on-stage and started her act.’
The band returned to Britain for a gig in the East Wing of the Brighton centre and two days later, 20 June, ‘Shakermaker’, c/w ‘D’Yer Wanna Be A Spaceman’, the demo version of’ Alive’ and ‘Bring It On Down’ (live) was released.
Two days later, their Naked City appearance was screened, and both NME and Melody Maker made the song their respective Singles Of The Week.
Paul Mathur wrote that ‘Shakermaker’ was one of the hundred greatest songs ever written, and Mark Sutherland, after hearing the song, wrote ‘you know you are dealing with greatness’.
Meanwhile, as ‘Shakermaker’ flew out of the shops, and picked up fifteen plays on Radio One that week, the band travelled down to the Glastonbury festival. On the Saturday night, after watching Paul Weller upstage Elvis Costello, that night’s headlining act, in a backstage bar-tent Noel briefly met the ex-Jam frontman for the first time.
Weller told him that he liked ‘Supersonic’, and Noel stood there, shyly nodding, unable to talk, either through being awestruck or totally out of it. It was hard to tell which.
The next day, Oasis strolled on to the NME stage and by the end of the set had the girls sitting on their boyfriends’ shoulders and most of the crowd wildly applauding as they tore into ‘I Am The Walrus’.
Channel Four later screened three of their songs, ‘Fade Away’, ‘Digsy’s Dinner’, and ‘Live Forever’. That the NME tape had reached the public could be gauged when Noel hit the opening riff to ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’, and the crowd screamed in delight. Then he stopped, looked at them as if to say ‘Gotcha’, and launched into ‘Live Forever’.
They came off-stage to be greeted by a grinning, happy Marcus. ‘Shakermaker’ was in at number eleven in the charts.
‘Way-hey’ they cried and then proceeded to get even more blitzed, partying, in fact, with some of The Stone Roses.
Two days later, Oasis sat down to watch themselves on Carlton TV’s now-defunct show, The Beat, hosted by Gary Crowley. This was the first time Liam and Noel had ever been interviewed together on TV and they proved to be a good double-act.
Crowley begins with a question about their signing to Creation. ‘You didn’t have to send out a demo tape, did you?’
‘Nah,’ Liam replies, ‘we got signed by fate, y’know.’
‘But they dropped us after the first single,’ Noel jokes, ‘and then Creation signed us.’ The boys break up with laughter, Liam flicking his fingers in salute.
‘Well, what was the story with Creation, ’cos Alan McGee saw you...’
‘Well,’ Noel starts, ‘in the beginning, Gary, there was a big bang from the sun and from there came these gases and from there...’
The brothers then talk a little about Creation, ‘the right label for us’, and then Liam says, ‘It’s one of them things, innit? You walk down the road, you trip over, you break a leg and you’re gutted. We go and play a gig and get signed. One of them things, innit?’
It’s such quotes that endears so many people to Liam. Indeed, throughout the interview, much to Noel’s amusement, Liam takes over, answering every question.
In one of his replies, Liam states, ‘There’s a lot of nice girls coming to our gigs and it’s [he checks himself and adopts a posh accent] bloody nice to see it. But I suppose there is a lot of lads coming, thinking we’re this mad hooligan band and we’re not. I ain’t no hooligan [at which point Noel starts laughing], I’m just me. They’re probably corning to see all this way-hey, way-hey, but we’re not.’ Liam pauses. ‘Did you understand me?’
‘I like the bit,’ Noel says, ‘where you say you’re not a hooligan ’cos I’ve read things where you’ve said, “I like fighting, me.”’
Liam responds, ‘Yeah, I’m up for it but I don’t go out of my way. Someone comes up then I’m up for it. You have to be. It’s a tough tough world out there.’
‘What’s it like being brothers in a band?’ Crowley asks.
Both Noel and Liam fall silent. Then Noel exclaims, ‘He’s speechless, look at that,’ and bursts out laughing.
‘I think it’s all right, me,’ Liam says. ‘I think it’s very, very funny.’
They probably had smiles on their hangovers when 29 June arrived and Oasis woke up to grab the opportunity that every young British musician desires: to perform on Top Of The Pops.
Bruno Brookes introduced them under a TV caption that read, New UK Talent From Manchester, and Oasis swapped places. Tony McCarroll was placed right at the front of the stage. Guigsy and Bonehead stood behind him and then, on a higher level, the Gallagher brothers. It was reminiscent of The Jam’s final appearance on the show when Weller put everyone forward and hid himself at the back.
As a backdrop, the sinking Union Jack image from the demo tape was used. Liam wore glasses, a brown cord jacket. Noel sported shades and the jacket he would wear on the cover of the debut album, and the band, serious expressions one and all, mimed to the song. And that was it. All those years of watching and dreaming what it was like to be on the nation’s biggest pop show, and you found out that you spend hours hanging around in a dressing-room and then you get just over three minutes to mime to your song.
And this sold records? Usually, but number eleven was as high as ‘Shakermaker’ would go.
Oasis now entered the Maison Rouge Studios in Fulham to record, much to the band’s pleasure, ‘Whatever’.
Owen Morris produced, and this was the first time he had really worked with the band as a unit, the first time he had met Bonehead and Guigsy. He looks back on the experience as ‘one of the best weeks of my life’.
He recalls, ‘Top nights with Bonehead, shaving his head and having wine-drinking competitions with him, all of us really pissed. Noel was the one I hung out with the most ’cos he was doing all the work, really. He was doing a lot of drugs then.
‘Noel Gallagher, E’d off his tits, popping pills the whole time and the rest of the band just getting drunk. I had a week with them and it was just proper full-on chaos and “Whatever” was the soundtrack to it.’
The chaos Owen refers to wasn’t confined to the studio, but spilled over to the Columbia Hotel where the band were staying. This is the hotel that most visiting bands use and is designed for that purpose. The staff’s tolerance of misbehaviour is somewhat higher than most other hotels. Bollocks. Oasis took them to the limit and then pushed them right over.
They were handed a lifetime ban after a raucous night which began with fights, smashed chairs and tables, broken windows, and ended with somebody throwing a rock through the back window of the Managing Director’s posh car.
Oasis packed their bags but give a shit, really. There was always somewhere else.
At Maison Rouge the band spent about four days perfecting ‘Whatever’, the time mainly being consumed by recording the song’s live string arrangement.
They also recorded Marcus, the Abbots, Brian Cannon, Jason and others, applauding and whistling. This was packed at the song’s conclusion, a mini football crowd having a major celebration.
In the remaining time, they put down complete versions of ‘Listen Up’, ‘Fade Away’, and Noel demoed a new song entitled ‘Some Might Say’.
The band were doubly excited because now not only did they have an album ready to go and a new single to follow at Christmas, but they were, at last, about to fly to America at the same time as the yearly music seminar held in New York.
America. They had watched it unfurl on their TV screens all their lives. Cop shows like T.J. Hooker and Police Woman and Kojak, but not that one with the two women detectives, Cagney and whatever, nah, that was boring.
Anyway, now they would see it for themselves.
‘I remember,’ Marcus says, ‘sitting them down and saying, America is going to be hard work, it’s nothing like Britain. This is like fucking around compared to America.
&nbs
p; ‘And they were going, “We’re fucking mad for it, we’re going to have it large.”’
Before they departed, Noel, much to Liam’s disgust, walked on-stage at a London college to deliver a version of 1960s garage group The Seeds’ song ‘Pushing Too Hard’, with Ian McNabb, formerly of The Icicle Works but now being backed by Neil Young’s band, Crazy Horse. That was the bait that lured Noel.
Now a committed Young fan, Noel said, ‘It was insane. I was on the dole a year ago and now I’m playing with Crazy Horse.’ After the show, Noel reportedly ran through ‘Supersonic’ for the Crazy Horse gang. How mad was this?
Liam, ever the purist, wondered why the fuck his brother would want to play with a bunch of tired old rockers.
‘We couldn’t really hear what Noel was up to when we were up there ’cos it was so loud,’ McNabb told Cliff Jones in Guitar magazine, ‘but I’ve just listened to the DATs of the gig and I was gobsmacked. Noel was playing like Peter fucking Green.’
Noel smiles at the comment. ‘I didn’t even know the fucking chords before I got up there.’
It is in this same article that Noel reveals that Johnny Marr has given him a guitar that Pete Townshend once owned, and that it drives him crazy when journalists ask Liam about Oasis’s music ‘because he hasn’t got a clue where it comes from’.
With Liam in mind, Noel defines his and his brother’s relationship as ‘A classic case of hating the one you love. He wishes he was me ’cos I can write the songs, and I wish I was as brassy and cocky as him and I’m not. There you have it.’
Then, in a flippant quote that Liam won’t forget for a long time, Noel says, ‘I live in my own world and in that world the only thing that really matters is music. If the Devil popped up tomorrow and said it’s a straight choice between music and relationship – be it mum, girlfriend or even Liam – I’d sign on the dotted line.’
When Liam read that, blood shot to his head. Dickhead, don’t ever insult Mam like that again. It was a kind of blasphemy.
On their first night in New York, Sony took the band out for a meal. It was here that an executive told Liam that he was lucky to be signing to his label. Liam gave him the look. Lucky? Us? Listen, mate...
The next night, Liam had a similar to-do with an influential MTV executive who poured scorn on British bands who came over thinking that they could crack America, only to fall at the first hurdle. Liam could see his point, but Oasis were different. The MTV guy disagreed and, of course, Liam flipped at him.
‘He said to the guy,’ Marcus recalls, ‘look, we’ve only been here for five minutes, give us a break. See, in that period America was very cynical about British guitar music. They’d seen one failure after another and I think the last poor fuckers to get it were Suede.
‘I was very conscious of that, and had long meetings with the company about how to swerve the cynicism, break it down slowly. The whole strategy was quite painstaking. How to approach the media and the radio because we can’t do it the same way as everyone else, blah, blah, blah.
‘And then in the small hours of the morning at the Paramount Hotel this MTV guy is saying to Liam, “You’ve got no fucking chance,” and this guy just kept on and on, about how they’ve got their own music, Pearl Jam, Nirvana and in the end Liam lost his rag. He said to him, “Me and you, outside.”
‘It was the talk of the industry the next day and the reason it was the talk of the industry was because some guy had enough guts to stand up to an MTV executive and say, “Fuck you, you’re wrong and I’m not kissing your butt.”
‘The next day I was approached,’ Marcus remembers with a smile, ‘by a couple of sad-fuck promotion people who said, “I think you should have dinner with this guy to smooth it over.”
‘I said, “I’d rather have pins stuck in my fucking eyes.” I said, “I’m proud of this guy and I’m not embarrassed by it.” I said, “I would have been fucking cheering from the touchlines if I was there.” That’s where Liam’s quote about Kurt Cobain being a sad cunt came from.’
Marcus pauses. ‘And that’s why the guy’s wife burst into tears. She was a friend of Kurt Cobain’s.’
Oasis played the Wetlands Hall in Brooklyn, New York. In this way, they circumvented Manhattan, the heart of the seminar. It was a paying gig, a fact Noel insisted on. No fat-cats getting in for free around here, mate. Sonya from Echobelly was in the audience, so were a few of the other British musicians.
Then it was a party and the next day, 21 July, it was on to Central Park to shoot a video for the next single, ‘Live Forever’. This was directed by an American, Carlos Grossy, for British transmission. Later on, they would reshoot the video in London with a British director, Nick Egan, for American transmission.
Egan also reshot ‘Shakermaker’, when the band returned to the States. In both videos his ideas would be based on cult films by the director, Nicolas Roeg: The Man Who Fell To Earth for ‘Shakermaker’ and Performance for ‘Live Forever’.
Grossy’s video showed Liam sat on a chair suspended to a wall and then, in a symbolic foretaste of what was to come, the band buried an unsuspecting, uncomplaining Tony McCarroll.
Part of the shoot also entailed filming the band performing in Central Park. The band set up with their tiny amps and, in between takes, jammed on a few songs.
But Liam’s mike was left off as there was nothing to put it through.
So what? Fuck the video. Let’s do a free gig. It’ll be boss.
No said Noel, and pointed out that they would have to hire equipment in and at ten-thirty at night, even if this is New York, it’s out of the question.
Why?
Again, the temper, again the insults, again Liam stalking off, this time into a darkened and dangerous Central Park, calling Noel a sad pop star, telling people about, ‘That fucking Elvis over there.’
The band returned to Britain and Marcus immediately called Liam and Noel into a meeting. Their relationship had now reached such levels of bad temper that it was affecting everyone. They would have to get it back on an even keel or the band would implode.
The brothers agreed to ease off each other and went back to homes in Manchester and London. It wouldn’t be the first time that America would severely test Noel and Liam Gallagher.
Britain was a different matter.
In the ten days leading up to 31 July, the date of the band’s next big show, the T In The Park Festival in Hamilton, near Glasgow, the band shot a video at the Borderline club for ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’.
Again, they used Mark Szaszy. They came early and set up their gear. Szaszy filmed them playing. In between takes, they fucked around with new ideas for other songs of theirs, ‘Fade Away’, for example. This was Noel’s homage to punk, a 100-mile-an-hour, heads-down rocker. Noel now changed the tempo, slowed the song right down, and as he did so the song’s potential shone through.
Then he started running through a new chord sequence he had written and the band jammed on it. It sounded very Neil Young but there was undoubtedly something there. A year later people would know it as ‘Hey Now’.
Owen Morris walked in with his mix of ‘Whatever’. They played it through the speakers and everyone agreed that it was top. The drinks came out, and so did the pills and the powders.
After filming close-ups of the band, a specially-invited audience was then let into the venue. Meanwhile, the band were backstage being filmed with a host of models.
‘That must have been top,’ someone said to Liam.
‘Fuck off mate, one of the stupid bitches dropped beer all over my shirt.’
Oasis came back to the stage and played to the crowd who reacted in the manner the band was now becoming accustomed to: with total enthusiasm.
The shoot finished and the band, now off their heads, went their various ways, made their various plays.
On 31 July, British summertime, it rained. Oasis were in Glasgow ready to travel to the T In The Park Festival. But there was a hiccup. The band’s coach driver had pulled up at a g
arage and mistakenly filled his tank with diesel, not petrol. The band had to wait hours for the AA to arrive.
The gig served to cement even further their live reputation. The Celtic bond between band and audience defied even the rain.
On 9 August, more chaos, more headlines. Would it ever be possible for them to play a show smoothly? It didn’t look likely.
Oasis are on-stage at Newcastle’s Riverside and Noel has just gone into his solo on ‘Bring It On Down’. He’s already aware of a guy down the front who keeps mouthing the words ‘Dennis Tueart’ at him, this being the Geordie footballer who was a local hero but then played Judas and crossed over to Manchester City’s 1974 football squad. His transfer was still obviously bothering this man.
Oasis haven’t yet employed security guards to watch out for them. Why should they? Band and audience are the same, aren’t we?
The crowd are pressed against the stage, except for this guy. Suddenly, he’s on-stage and he’s burying his fist into one of Noel’s famous eyebrows. Pain shoots through Noel’s head, blood gushes out, splattering the stage.
Next thing Noel know he’s pummelling this guy with his fists, and Liam, of course, is next to him and wading in as well. Panic in the hall of Riverside.
The guy escapes and the Gallagher brothers back off to the dressing room.
Liam returns to say they won’t be back.
The band then quickly head for the van as the angry crowd start spilling out on to the streets, annoyed at being denied their gig. So are the band, who cram into the van with Maggie. The van slowly wends its way through the people; the band, wisely, are out of sight, their heads just beneath the windows.
At the Irish Centre in Leeds the next night they sit in the dressing-room and listen to the Radio One broadcast of that show. Marcus meanwhile is on the phone. He wants bodyguards, and quick. The Leeds show is fine but the truth remains that while everyone had been gleefully building the bubble they had forgotten one thing: ‘It’s a tough, tough world out there.’
