“I don’t want [to] get too big,” said Noel Gallagher back in 1994, squinting into the crystal ball a couple of months before the release of Oasis’ debut album, Definitely Maybe. “I’d love to do Wembley Stadium, but where do you go after that?” At the time, the guitarist and songwriter was talking to a fanzine and getting ready to play the lame, 400-capacity East Wing venue in Brighton, England. So, not only was Noel looking forward to playing the UK’s most storied venue—which was more than 200 times bigger than the East Wing—he was basically already over the fantasy. “I didn’t think we’d get to this stage here for another two years, and in a way it’s fuckin’ pissed me off,” he continued, talking about the tumbling hype that had followed their first single, “Supersonic,” which debuted on the UK charts at No. 31 earlier that year. “We were going to be this maverick outcast band from Manchester […] we were going to shove it up them for two years and then we’d split up.”
Oasis did eventually sell out Wembley three times over at the end of 1997, but by then they were already mired in bloated obsolescence—and they did split up, but only after about 15 years of spinning their wheels. Noel knew his grandest rock’n’roll dreams could lead to trouble, even when they were still merely outsized ambitions in ’94. All of those dreams—the platinum plaques, the American crossover, the record-breaking festivals—came true in spectacular fashion over the course of the next three years, and then Oasis really did have no idea where to go. They were terrible at being the Biggest Band in the World, but, as this 20th anniversary reissue of their first album makes sparklingly clear, they were amazing at wanting to be the Biggest Band in the World.
Definitely Maybe was made by five losers from the dreary Manchester suburb of Burnage, a locale Noel has described as “a little shitty town where fuck-all happens—it’s one pub and a chippie and a bookie and that’s it.” They were second-generation Irish working-class roustabouts who used their government assistance money to buy smokes, drugs, and pints on the weekend before heading back to their dead-end jobs. As Alex Niven writes in his well-rounded new 33⅓ book on Definitely Maybe, the boys in Oasis were emblematic of the socio-economic demoralization brought on by England’s every-man-for-himself Conservative policies of the 1980s and early ’90s. As Noel once said, “Where I come from, people didn’t become rock stars. That happened to other people.”
But Oasis were also a signpost of hope for an emerging new version of England that was finally mobilizing after being beaten down by the Thatcher years. Against this backdrop, the Gallagher brothers and company emerged: all the anger and nihilism of a go-nowhere existence channeled through Noel’s blaring guitar tones and brash, drugged-up lyrics, along with Liam’s attack-dog snarl. Definitely Maybe is the sound of people who feel like they need to scream to be heard—and even then, the chances of anyone actually listening seems depressingly unlikely.
And yet, not wholly impossible. The album’s first lines are: “Live my life in the city, there’s no easy way out.” Pretty bleak. But that song is called “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” and it’s about the possibility of escape via substances, or standing on a stage in front of a dozen people (as Oasis did many times in the early years), or your own head. “In my mind my dreams are real,” sings Liam, and who can argue with that? Dreams play a big role on Definitely Maybe and its accompanying B-sides—all of which are collected in this three-disc re-release, along with many live performances and demos from the period—though they often read as both wistful and demanding, owing to the one-in-a-billion yin-yang chemistry between Noel’s words and Liam's delivery. On paper, Noel’s lyrics often read as bittersweet; then 27, he was beginning to look at his youth as a lost era. But placed in 22-year-old Liam’s mouth, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” transforms from a flight of fancy into something like an inevitability. Yes: This man sounds like Lennon and Lydon’s sneering son. Yes: He will stop at nothing until these wanting words become physical fact. Yes: Here is your rock’n’roll star, because there isn’t anything else for him to be.
The contentiousness between the brothers fueled Oasis’ best moments, and, early on at least, both seemed to understand the situation—even if they couldn’t stand each other. Referring to Noel in an interview from ’94, Liam said, in no uncertain terms: “That’s why we’ll be the best band in the world—because I fuckin’ hate that twat there.” Like vintage Oasis itself, Liam embodied just enough classic rock, just enough punk, and just enough “I’ll spit in your fucking eye” to make his unfiltered id stick. Usually, this type of rock persona is associated with more combustible or aggressive music, but Noel tempered the abrasiveness with a trace of melancholy or a fuzzed-up bubblegum melody, as on career highs like “Live Forever” and “Slide Away.” Then, now, and forever, Liam is the Definitely and Noel is the Maybe.
I couldn’t express any of this when I first saw Liam’s strobed face on MTV in the “Live Forever” video as a 13-year-old middle-class kid from Long Island, but I got my mom to drive me to Nobody Beats the Wiz to buy the CD all the same. At that time, I thought Axl Rose was an insane genius and Kurt Cobain—who died six days after the release of “Supersonic”—was an inscrutable weirdo. And, in America, Oasis were practically an underground band; they were amazingly cool, and I felt cooler for liking them. They were blatantly inspired by all of the canonical rock bands I knew, but they possessed the feeling of now. Their version of infinity guitars and attitude made me feel invincible, the same sensation I got a few years later while getting into hip-hop—another working-class-bred artform known to utilize the past, via sampling and re-spun rhymes, to accentuate the present. (“Never be afraid of the obvious,” Noel once said, “because it’s all been done before.”) Oasis started from the very bottom and, from that very first note, it was obvious where they were going next.
But just as Oasis’ undesirable upbringing incited them to lash out through feedback and distortion, you could argue that it stunted their continued artistic existence. Middle-class art-schooler Damon Albarn may have lost the popular vote during Blur’s notorious mid-’90s battle with Oasis, but with partial thanks to a relatively comfortable adolescence and education, he’s clearly won the war, remaining relevant and inquisitive to this day. Oasis’ woeful decline, meanwhile, makes a specific line from “Shakermaker” sound a bit heartbreaking in hindsight: “I’d like to be somebody else and not know where I’ve been.” Eventually, the Gallaghers turned into the same rich dicks they were trying to usurp on Definitely Maybe—a sad vengeance. But on the way up, they marked millions. Maybe that should be enough.
