Getting High

by Paolo Hewitt

  Now, at the start of 1995, these new groups had assimilated their influences and tied them in with their own songwriting abilities. As if to add even more encouragement, news started breaking concerning The Beatles’ re-emergence.

  Later that year would see the release of three anthologies of out-takes and unreleased material, a TV special that would document their story, and, as if that wasn’t enough, some brand new Beatles’ recording would take place.

  There was a major new book on them as well, Ian MacDonald’s Revolution In The Head, which Noel read voraciously. Noel avoided fiction and concentrated on quality literature about his favourite obsessions. John Lydon’s biography Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs was another favourite. In fact if anything summed up the differences between MacDonald and Oasis, it would be the critic’s brutal dismissal of The Beatles’ song ’All Together Now’. He said the song was ‘trite enough to have been chanted for several seasons on English football terraces’.

  That sentence jolted Noel. What the fuck was he on about? That’s the ultimate accolade; 30,000 people singing your song on a cold Saturday afternoon. On the sacred terraces.

  Noel had imagined such an event all his life and at the start of the 1995-96 season he saw this ambition, like all his others, turn to fact when the Manchester City fans rewrote and sang ‘Wonderwall’.

  One very influential Manchester City fan who would have been present when this singing first occurred was Tony Meehan. He was once in charge of promotions at Manchester City and understood better than most the increasing link between music and British football.

  ‘The new rock ‘n’ roll’ was what some magazines had dubbed ‘the beautiful game’, pointing out that the likes of footballers Ryan Giggs and Eric Cantona commanded a following comparable to any pop group.

  It was Meehan who had organised for Noel, Liam and Guigsy to model the new Manchester City shirt in July for adverts. He also arranged for them, along with Johnny Marr and Phil Smith, to walk out on to the Maine Road pitch just before a league game against Blackburn. The crowd was delighted.

  Later on, he persuaded City to give the band their own box at the ground and he also invited them to a dinner where ex-City players such as Mike Summerbee were present.

  ‘That was funny,’ Guigsy remembers. ‘Summerbee was at the table and he said, “You know lads, I can’t do it anymore.” We thought he was saying that he was so fed up he was going to give up watching football. Somebody said, “Can’t do what anymore, Mike?” and he said, “Drink five bottles of wine and shag all night.”

  I Meehan was also one of the men who had started a vigorous and successful campaign to have Francis Lee, an ex-City player and legend, installed as chairman of the club. The fans were very disillusioned with Peter Swales, the current chairman of the club. On the day he appointed Brian Horton as new manager there were demonstrations outside the ground. Noel, Guigsy and Liam took part along with other hundreds of fans in venting their disgust by smashing windows and front doors. Swales would eventually stand down and Lee would take charge. But the club’s fortunes would further plummet under Lee’s chairmanship. In 1996, a week after Oasis’s Maine Road shows, the team were relegated to the First Division.

  During this period, when Oasis were resting, as Bonehead and Kate awaited the imminent arrival of their daughter Lucy (Noel was made Godfather), Meehan suggested that Noel should write a song for the club. Noel agreed and sat down to pen a tune.

  ‘But instead,’ Meehan recalls, ‘he wrote, “Acquiesce”.’ And that was far too good to give away.

  In January, Oasis attended the NME’s Brat Awards, a ceremony organised in direct contrast to the record-company-sponsored Brit Awards. The Brats were specifically set up to honour the bands that the Brits always ignored, and to promote the NME as the paper of the new.

  Oasis received the Best Live Band award. Liam said, ‘I’d like to thank you very much and it’s a good job Shed Seven didn’t win it.’

  Noel added, ‘I think that’s enough said.’

  Oasis were then called up again and given Best Single award for ‘Live Forever’. This was voted for by the readers. The writers went for Blur’s ‘Girls And Boys’.

  Liam said, ‘I’m glad Elastica didn’t win it.’

  Noel added, ‘I’d like to accept this on behalf of “Hung Up” by Paul Weller, “Rocks” by Primal Scream. I’d like to finish by saying, indie schmindie, jungle schmungle, techno schmecno, new wave, no chance.’

  They went back to their tables but soon returned to pick up the Best Album Of The Year award.

  Liam said, ‘I’m glad nobody else has won it.’

  Noel put in, ‘I’d like to thank Alan McGee, Marcus Russell, Brian Cannon, Chris Abbot, Johnny Hopkins, and I hope that Menswear win the best-dressed band award next year.’

  Alan McGee was then given an award for his services over the years. ‘Creation for the nation,’ Noel shouted.

  Afterwards Noel was interviewed for MTV by Donna from the group Elastica. He told her that any award they received because of kids voting for them would always be special. It would be a sentence that he would find himself repeating a lot.

  After the ceremony, in which a dance troupe had strutted their stuff to ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’, there was a fracas when Noel and Liam were asked to pose for photos with Blur. Noel agreed but Liam was having none of it. He threw insults at Blur by telling Damon his band were full of shit, and was then kissed on the cheek by Graham, Blur’s guitarist. Noel had a go at Liam for his truculence, called him ‘a pop star’.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ Liam muttered. The next week Noel and Damon graced the cover of the NME.

  Noel also took time to travel down to the Manor Studios in Oxford where Paul Weller was recording his album Stanley Road, the follow-up to the successful Wildwood.

  Weller asked Noel if he fancied playing acoustic rhythm guitar on a song they planned to cover, Dr. John’s ‘Walk On Gilded Splinters’. Sure, Noel said, love to do it.

  He put on a guitar, went into the studio and asked casually what key the song was in. Once told, he played along to the song which was blasting through his headphones.

  After he was finished, he came back into the control-room, where a smiling Weller said to him, ‘You don’t know that song, do you?’

  Noel had to agree. He’d never heard it before in his life.

  But what really struck Noel that night were the songs Weller had thus far recorded. These included ‘Porcelain Gods’, ‘Whirlpool’s End’ and ‘Wings Of Speed’.

  ‘I’d just written “Roll With It’, Noel reveals, ‘you know, “You gotta roll with it / You gotta take your time,” and hearing those songs by Paul, I thought I’ve got to do better. I really do.’

  Over the next three months he would write ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’, ‘Cast No Shadow’ and ‘Wonderwall’.

  For America, Marcus Russell had devised a separate strategy than that for other countries. America demanded a fresh approach. Marcus knew that the record companies there were unconvinced by British bands and to crack America took not only months of touring but also full support from the company.

  Marcus’s plan was to take Oasis not only into the major cities but into the backwaters as well. It was his way of showing the record company how serious they were about establishing themselves.

  ‘Then you go back to them,’ he explains, ‘and say, “Right we told you we were going to do that. Now we have, can we have more support on the next tour?” That way you build it.’

  In terms of records, singles were given to radio stations but weren’t put into the shops. In fact, the first Oasis single to be released in America would be their eighth single, ‘Wonderwall’.

  Pop singles act as nothing more than adverts for albums in the US. Marcus’s aim was to establish Oasis as a serious album band that had more than just one hit single in their possession.

  Meanwhile, there were still many more towns to play.

  On 28 January, the band�
�s second US tour began in Seattle. After the gig, Pearl Jam, who shared a similar liking for Neil Young, came backstage.

  ‘Their whole vibe,’ Marcus recalls, ‘was, “You guys are actually serious.” They could see what we were trying to achieve.’

  The next day on the flight to Canada, Bonehead’s tooth left him writhing in such agony that he needed surgery as soon as he landed. The gig itself, at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver, was broadcast live on the radio.

  The following night, in the Roseland Theatre, Portland, Liam’s voice went again and in frustration he smashed up the dressing room. But in San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore theatre, they played a stormer and then, in contrast to the Whiskey debacle last time they were over, they fired up the Palace in Los Angeles.

  Then it was back on the road to out-of-the-way towns such as Salt Lake City, Mesa in Arizona, Denver, Dallas, Austin, Houston, Memphis and Atlanta. The final show was on 18 February.

  On the 19th they flew back to Britain to attend the Brit Awards at Alexandra Palace the following night. Oasis were given an award for Best British Newcomer, while Blur picked up four awards.

  The band accepted the award from The Kink’s leader, Ray Davies, and Noel said, ‘There’s quite a lot of people we’d like to thank but we’ve paid you too much money to show off your egos. I’d like to thank Ray Davies for influencing me. I’d like to thank George Martin for producing the best band there ever was, The Beatles, and I’d like to thank all our parents. Live forever!’

  Then it was on to South Wales and the Loco Studios to record their new single, ‘Some Might Say’. It would be Tony McCarroll’s last recording session with Oasis. Discussions regarding his abilities had already taken place between Marcus and Owen Morris.

  ‘Because Tony’s big problem,’ Owen explains, ‘was that he only had two beats. He’d shuffle on some songs or stomp on others and it wound the band up chronically because they couldn’t do anything other than that. So we were like, “Let’s get him lessons.”’

  Which they did. They put him together with the ex-Bible drummer, Dave Larcombe, who gave him various exercises. His viewpoint was that Tony was potentially a great drummer but that he only used one of his arms properly. He told Tony to get a small practise kit and work on various routines devised to cure the problem.

  ‘And I met up with Tony the day before we were doing “Some Might Say”,’ Owen recalls, ‘and I said, “How are the lessons corning on, Tone?” We were setting up the drum sound and stuff before the rest of the band turned up. He was like, “I haven’t done any of them, I haven’t had time.” It was like, oh fuck, here we go.’

  The new single had already been demoed at Maison Rouge and, according to Owen, differed enormously from the version they finally emerged with. It later surfaced on a Japanese-only CD.

  ‘The demo has got a great groove on it, proper, slow Stonesy sort of groove, it’s a lot slower,’ Owen explains. ‘But what happens when Oasis get in the studio is that Noel is all hyped up and he starts playing double fast. And at the end of it, when me and Noel were listening back to the tape, we were like, this is too fast compared to the demo.

  ‘So we got the band back in and Noel was saying, “You fucking bastards, it’s all your fault.” But it was him who had started it quicker. We did three takes and picked the best one. But me and Noel were like, “We’ve proper cocked this up.”

  ‘The drums were all over the place, proper tragic bit of drumming on that track because it just loses it on the first chorus. So on the mix, we had to try and hide the drums which for a rocking track is very unfortunate, and we ended up with a mix that we were vaguely happy with.

  ‘On the other hand’ Acquiesce’ turned out really well, so the band were like, “Let’s put that out as a single instead.” But Noel was like, “No, the game plan is ‘Some Might Say’ comes out first, that’s the single. I decided on that eight months ago.”’

  Some Oasis members weren’t the only ones who were unsure about Noel’s decision. In fact, Alan McGee, according to Noel, didn’t like the A-side at all and argued strongly for,’ Acquiesce’. It wasn’t hard to see why.

  For many people, it is a superior song to ‘Some Might Say’, and gives the first-ever mention of the album that would catapult Oasis to worldwide stardom. As the jagged guitar chords announce themselves on the song’s intro, you can hear Noel in the background, singing, ‘What’s the story, morning glory?’

  He had picked up the title from a girl who had called him in America and announced herself with that very question. The phrase itself came from a musical entitled Bye Bye Birdie, which many American high schools stage every year. ‘What’s The Story, Morning Glory’, is one of the show’s centrepiece songs and accordingly it was swiftly adapted as saying by many schoolchildren.

  On hearing it, Noel’s antennae had shot up. He jotted the phrase down and started writing the music for it while on tour. As ever, he had no lyrics bar the chorus.

  Yet if he had counted on polishing it off at Loco, the edgy sessions for ‘Some Might Say’ had prevented him from doing so, building up as they did, into a major row with Liam.

  The argument occurred when the finished tape of the single was played back in a studio packed with friends.

  ‘On the demo,’ Owen explains, ‘we had this weird psychedelic bit, a backwards guitar bit that we thought was a bit naff. So me and Noel had finished doing all the overdubs and there was a lot of cocaine around, too much cocaine in fact, and we played it to the band and all these hanger-ons.

  ‘Liam just totally exploded in front of everybody. He was going, “You fucking dickhead, you don’t know what you’re doing. Where’s the guitar bit?”

  ‘Noel’s like, “Get him out of here or I’ll fucking kill him. I know what I’m doing, you fuck off.” Liam storms off and then everybody quickly leaves the control-room, leaving just me and Noel.

  ‘I’m now thinking to myself, Liam’s probably right, and Noel is sat there going, “He’s a fucking dickhead, a wanker, what the fuck does he know?” And I said, “Well, maybe he’s right.” And Noel starts going, “Don’t you come down on his side or you’re sacked.”

  ‘Three hours later, Noel’s calmed down and he comes into the control-room and says, “Maybe he’s right, you know.” So then he put the guitar part down but he played something different. He changed a couple of the notes so he then felt justified in saying to Liam, “I’ve got an even better one now.” And so everybody was happy. But it was a real coke-fuelled session, everyone really on edge.’ (A salient point in Liam’s case is that when he was smoking spliff he was far less inclined to furious outbursts than when he was ingesting large doses of cocaine.)

  The band then resumed their US tour, but in Noel’s mind Tony McCarroll’s die was cast. He would have to go, although there was no way they could sack him just yet.

  From 3 March to 25th they had American dates to fulfil, followed in April by a video-shoot for the single, and three more shows that would culminate with a massive show at the Sheffield Arena; Noel had been proved wrong as the gig had quickly sold out. After that, it was back into the studio to start work on their second album which Noel would call (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?.

  What’s more, the tabloids were now regularly featuring the band. The Sunday Mirror, under the headline, Oasis Drug Scandal, published a story on 19 February that began, ‘Top British pop group Oasis have caused a storm in their hometown by boasting about drug taking.’ They later quoted Alf Morris, a Labour MP, as saying, ‘What Oasis should be telling the Americans is how many people battle every year to win a university place.’

  The US tour started up in New Jersey and went to Washington, Virginia Beach, Philadelphia, New York (where they met and got on with tennis player John McEnroe), Providence, Boston, up then to Canada for two shows, back down to Cleveland, and then Detroit and Indianapolis, where Liam was hit on-stage by a pair of spectacles and the band threatened to down instruments. The night before he and Bonehead had
gone to see another UK band, Bush, and pogoed down at the front.

  The tour moved on to Chicago and then the Orbit Room in Grand Rapids where Liam walked off-stage after three numbers and Noel had to finish the set. The next night they played Prince’s club in Minneapolis and there met Nigel Dick, a British video director now living in the US. He would go on to shoot videos for ‘Wonderwall’ and ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’.

  The last gig in Milwaukee was perhaps one of the best of the tour, and then the exhausted band flew home. It had been a serious slog around America, but it had gone a long way to breaking them there.

  On their return Oasis travelled to Chatley Heath, Surrey, to shoot a two-day video. The video had been budgeted at around £40,000 and filming was due to begin on 29 March.

  They booked into a hotel but on the day of the shoot, Liam was nowhere to be seen. Finally, someone called him at the hotel. The idea is shit, he said, I’m not having it. Then he put the phone down. Liam, the purist.

  Marcus then rang him and informed the singer that it would cost the band a day’s worth of filming, some twenty grand, if he didn’t show. Give a shit, Liam said, I’ll pay it. The single doesn’t need a video anyway.

  The video was cancelled and in its place they cobbled together a film using different bits from their previous videos, including the American version of ‘Supersonic’.

  Now, they had three gigs left to play. Two warm-up dates, one in Southend and the other in Paris at the Bataclan, and then back to Sheffield for their biggest gig to date.

  At the Southend show, Noel broke the set up and, for the very first time in the UK, sat on a stool and played an acoustic set.

  In Paris, on 19 April, it was reported that Liam had an altercation with McCarroll. Not so, he says. ‘I was standing in this bar and this mad bird that he was seeing walked in and started fighting him. He was down on the ground so I started eating these cherries and spitting the stones on him as he was rolling around.’

  Meanwhile, Noel had other things on his mind, like polishing off a song floating around in his head, entitled, ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’.