The Masterplan poses one of the great “what if?” scenarios in rock history. What if Noel Gallagher had saved all the A-side-worthy B-sides he was cranking out between 1994 and 1997 for a proper Oasis album? What if they had released that batch of songs as their third full-length instead of the overblown and underwhelming Be Here Now? What if, instead of sounding Britpop’s death knell, Oasis’ third album kept the party going into the new millennium, thereby negating the need for dejected fans to take solace in Travis and Coldplay? Who knows, maybe Oasis still would’ve traveled up their own arse en route to “All Around the World” anyway, but at least that indulgence would’ve felt a little more earned.
Be Here Now didn’t exactly derail Oasis’ career—we should all be so lucky to flop at 8 million copies sold—but the album effectively fast-tracked the band’s transition from zeitgeist-shaping force to heritage act. (The stats don’t lie—15 years into their career, Oasis were still pulling two-thirds of the setlist from the Definitely Maybe/Morning Glory era.) So when B-sides compilation The Masterplan arrived a year after Be Here Now’s big boom and bust, it effectively dumped salt onto a still-fresh wound. And to this day, it stands as a taunting totem to what Oasis’ third album could’ve been. “The Masterplan should have been Be Here Now, and Be Here Now should have been a bunch of B-sides,” Noel admitted in a 2019 interview. “Somebody should have been fucking bright enough to stand up and say: ‘You can't fucking put these out as B-sides, you’re fucking mental’… The one major regret I have in my professional life is I wasn’t aware enough.”
As such, UK fans could be forgiven for thinking The Masterplan was just a cash grab, a hastily assembled collection of B-sides that were already widely available on CD singles, some barely a year old. But in North America, The Masterplan was a crucial act of fan service. In the ’90s, the stateside singles market had been all but snuffed out by a music industry that had conditioned consumers to pay $23.99 for a full album to get the one or two songs they liked. By contrast, fans in the UK were receiving a steady stream of singles every few months, accompanied by B-sides that formed an entire parallel shadow discography to the popular favorites. But The Masterplan had no designs on being a comprehensive collection of Oasis castaways. Rather, it’s a smartly curated, thoughtfully sequenced set that can stand proudly on the shoulders of the band’s unimpeachable first two albums. (The fact that this reissue/remaster contains no additional tracks or alterations suggests an undying respect for its original form.)
The Masterplan instantly validates its existence by promoting the band’s most beloved B-side into the momentous album opener it deserved to be. Originally appearing on the stopgap “Some Might Say” single released between Definitely Maybe and Morning Glory, “Acquiesce” is the ultimate Oasis song: a sibling rivalry in musical form, a dramatic title-fight showdown between Liam’s swagger and Noel’s sweetness that sees the brothers trading verses and choruses instead of insults and fisticuffs. After Noel had ceded all lead vocals to Liam on Definitely Maybe, “Acquiesce” was the first real sign that the elder Gallagher wasn’t just the silent tunesmith communicating via his brother’s megaphone wail: He was an equally vital voice within the songs as well.
Given that Noel was the one entrusted with writing all the B-sides, often when no other bandmates were around, it’s no surprise that The Masterplan features a higher ratio of Noel-sung tunes than any other Oasis album. And since Noel knew he could never out-snarl his brother, he carved out a lane as the humble counterpoint to Liam’s cocksure charisma. His Masterplan turns are by the far most tender tunes here, and in the greater Oasis discography for that matter: “Half the World Away” (reportedly Paul Weller’s favorite Oasis choon) and “Going Nowhere” exude a Bacharach-esque elegance that’s defiantly at odds with this band’s lager-lout reputation, while the string-swept solemnity of “The Masterplan” manages to expand Oasis’ musical and emotional vocabulary without tipping the scales into Be Here Now-level bombast.
There are several other fine B-sides in this vein that were excluded from The Masterplan, probably because, at a certain point, an Oasis record with too many ballads and acoustic serenades wouldn’t really feel like a proper Oasis record anymore. The Masterplan’s sensitive turns are balanced by corkers like “Headshrinker,” which sounds like Oasis pummeling the Faces’ “Stay With Me” until it resembles Raw Power. That said, they could’ve easily swapped the bloozy “Swamp Song”—an elongated version of Morning Glory’s mid-album interstitial—and their droning distension of the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus” for snappier selections, like the joyous brassy “Round Are Way” or the early rave-up “Alive,” the closest this band ever got to shoegaze. But if The Masterplan’s murky midsection reminds us that aimless jamming was never this band’s strongest suit, the album is ultimately a testament to Noel’s fine-tuning skills. Just as T. Rex could rewrite “Bang a Gong” as “Telegram Sam,” and the Kinks could clone “You Really Got Me” into “All Day and All of the Night,” Noel was a master at refreshing his winning formulas: Surely, there’s a parallel universe where “Talk Tonight” is a karaoke anthem on par with “Wonderwall” (right down to the similar “you saved me” sentiment), and if you’re sick of hearing “Supersonic” for the millionth time, soundalike sibling “Listen Up” is there for you the next time you want to do it with a doctor on a helicopter.
But even when the songs sound the same, their perspectives tend to shift: If Definitely Maybe’s iconic opening track, “Rock and Roll Star,” was like Oasis’ version of The Secret—a self-fulfilling prophecy of imminent success—then “Fade Away” is its equally energized but spiritually dejected flipside, a vision of an alternate timeline where the Gallaghers’ arena-conquering aspirations gave way to day jobs. “While we’re living, the dreams we had as children fade away,” Liam cautioned, back at a time when Oasis’ destiny had yet to be written. But if that song was born of a hardscrabble past they’d never have to revisit, by 1998, it spoke to a different kind of lost idealism. At the time of The Masterplan’s release, all of Oasis’ dreams were made—even after the critical drubbing they took for Be Here Now, they were still the biggest band in Britain. As the subsequent decade of diminishing returns would show, even if Oasis’ rock-star dreams never faded, the hunger and passion that fuelled those fantasies—and, by extension, these songs—certainly did.
