Oasis's sixth album is out at the end of the month. John Harris wonders whether it can really be the promised return to form

Sunday May 15, 2005
The Observer

In the spring of 1994, Noel Gallagher surveyed his surrounding musical environment and dispensed his band's creative manifesto. 'For me, music at the moment is dead,' he said. 'It's poncy and serious and everyone's got to make some sort of statement. But we're a rock'n'roll band... everyone's dead into analysing, but don't analyse our band. It's always, "That's a good song, that is. What does it mean?" Who gives a fuck what it means?'

Article continues
From a decade's remove, the idea of a young British musician pledging allegiance to rock'n'roll may look completely unremarkable. Back then, however, such totems as cocaine, Jack Daniel's and screaming guitar solos were usually left to the terminally unfashionable merchants of hard rock and heavy metal. Oasis snatched them back and, in the process, rebranded rock as the music of the British everykid. Out went leather trousers; in came upmarket sportswear. From hereon in, guitar players could reasonably be expected to be vociferous football fans.

To hear this cultural realignment caught on tape, you only had to listen to the almost comically rock'n'roll 'Cigarettes & Alcohol': nicotine, beer, recreational drugs and a very British rejection of the workaday grind ('Is it worth the aggravation/To find yourself a job when there's nothing worth working for?') suddenly pumped full of a thrilling sense of excitement.

At the time, I was a 24-year-old staffer at the NME. I remember the first time I saw Oasis, an evening in March 1994 at the 100 Club in London, when they fixed the audience with their customary look of near-contempt and played with a head-spinning confidence and power. Among my superiors, there was euphoric delight. Give or take the odd outbreak of rock-hack infighting, there was also an abiding sense of liberation. As Noel advised, we at least partly abandoned the paradigm by which music was endlessly unpacked and scrutinised, and attempted, while standing at the back, admittedly, to live in the moment.

Encouraged by Noel and Liam's claims not only to have revived rock'n'roll, but also somehow to have inherited the mantle of the Beatles, we also expected something in the way of musical development. It's often forgotten now, but their first two singles, 'Supersonic' and 'Shakermaker', oozed not only cranked-up chutzpah, but a compelling quality summed up by one writer as 'guttersnipe surrealism'. It disappeared from Oasis's music not long after their first burst of success; from then on, they tended to cleave to the kind of musical orthodoxy that tipped over into lazy pastiche.

The band's ongoing failure to push the creative envelope can still disappoint. Early notices for their forthcoming album, Don't Believe the Truth, have brimmed with the enthusiasm that these days seems to greet any record that might sell more than 100,000, though the odd voice has sounded a note of exasperation. 'Oasis are unwilling or unable to leave a seemingly infinite Beatles-verse where the mid-Sixties jangling goes on forever,' writes Paul Moody of Uncut magazine, another ex-NME writer who was among Oasis's most enthusiastic champions. He goes on to compare listening to Don't Believe the Truth to 'eavesdropping on a well-heeled Britpop survivors' group'.

Given their commercial clout, Oasis can easily swat such criticisms aside - they are playing a run of huge outdoor concerts this summer. But there will be pathos, too, as the Gallagher brothers rely on their increasingly distant past: if their set list from last week's one-off gig at the Astoria in London is anything to go by, they will lean heavily on 1994's Definitely Maybe and the following year's (What's the Story) Morning Glory. The magic they work on the crowd is crystallised by songs such as 'Live Forever', 'Rock'n'Roll Star', 'Champagne Supernova' and 'Wonderwall'; for all that they may want to move on, it is this part of their oeuvre on which they depend.

Such a trap brings to mind the passage in Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man, based on an evening at the Royal Albert Hall, in which she evokes the image of Dire Straits' Mark Knopfler playing that band's 1985 hit 'Money for Nothing' 'for the God knows how many-eth time, though he hates to do it, though it's killing him inside'.

Viewed in the simplest terms, Oasis's progress can be divided into two acts. First, there are their early manoeuvres, culminating in their two-night stand at Knebworth Park, where they played to a combined audience of 250,000. Next comes the rattling of their invincibility and their subsequent fall: the release of the fantastically anti-climactic Be Here Now in 1997, and their subsequent progress through line-up changes, marital strife and the underwhelming Standing on the Shoulder of Giants (2000) and Heathen Chemistry (2002).

Tim Abbot was a confidant of the band's until 1996. The fact that he was a marketing specialist who became managing director of Creation Records might imply a mind largely attuned to commerce, but his place in the band's court was down to his musical nous. 'Definitely Maybe was the great statement of intent,' he says. 'What's the Story was, "This is more accessible, and it's got the smoochy ballads on it - something for everybody." And the cocaine-fuelled Be Here Now was a bit too stodgy. But it was the next album that let everybody down. They could have been forgiven for album three, but four and five just didn't progress.

'When we went out, any big session would always end up with the Beatles and a singalong,' he says. 'Whatever you put on the stereo, it would be, "Come on - get the White Album on." It was, "We know this; we're comfortable with it." They're still in a creative comfort zone and it works for them. They've never wanted to be outside it. You could wonder if they'd turn into hungry artists again. But from a financial security point of view, that's not going to happen.'

As Oasis stubbornly remained within their initial artistic parameters, they also appeared to back off from the prospect of pursuing huge international success. 'They're still your biggest local band,' says Abbot. 'But they didn't become the world's biggest band and I always thought they could. They could have been the natural successor to U2. But between What's the Story and Be Here Now, they messed up in America. They had it all and they ended up giving America the V-sign. Noel wanted it - but there again, did he want it? Somewhere, there was a fear of success.

'The other thing is that working-class standpoints and lifestyles do not work outside the UK. Rolling Stone judges people by the music - and once they'd giggled at the two wacky brothers, they came back with a critique. And somewhere along the line, Oasis's music just carried on being rock-pop. There was no intellectual development, no conceptualisation.'

Ex-Creation president Alan McGee, whose role in the pop-cultural history of the 1990s is forever fixed as 'the man who discovered Oasis', first clapped eyes on the Gallaghers in a Glasgow club in 1993. His take on their progress is both a little more benign and also revelatory; in his telling, the creative stumble that occurred in 1997 was at least partly traceable to Noel Gallagher's first pool of compositions finally running dry.

'I think Noel stockpiled songs,' he says. 'When I first met him, he had around 50. He bullshitted that he was writing them as he went along, but in 1991, they were playing "All Around the World" [released in 1998]; he always had these songs. And half way through the third album, when you got to things like "Magic Pie" and "It's Getting Better (Man!!)", he was writing on the run.

'Be Here Now had terrible production,' says McGee. 'There was far too much cocaine around. But there were quite a lot of good songs left over from that first period. Then they ran out. And apart from "Go Let it Out", I think Standing on the Shoulder is pretty poor. But Noel was dealing with a lot of personal stuff.'

This is an allusion to Noel's failing marriage to Meg Mathews whom he divorced in 2001. In tandem with Liam's tempestuous relationship with Patsy Kensit, the Noel-Meg circus formed a crucial aspect of the press coverage that made Oasis a household name, but it also had corrosive impact on that fragile quality known as 'credibility'. When she and Noel were invited to Tony Blair's reception at Downing Street, the idea that Oasis had lost their defining northern grit seemed unarguable.

These days at least some of the Gallaghers' cool seems to have been restored. Better still, their reliance on Noel's songs has been offset by assistance from three other sources: Liam, in whose compositions McGee hears 'a youthfulness; a lightness of touch', along with guitarist Gem Archer and bassist Andy Bell, alumni of the pool of musicians that once surrounded Creation. Exactly what this says about Noel's creative health is a moot point, but initial impressions of Don't Believe the Truth suggest that the latter two's contributions are crucial.

For all the question marks hanging over their vitality and relevance, at least one of their old associates will credit Oasis with a leap that most rock'n'roll bands fail to accomplish. 'They've grown up,' says Alan McGee. 'It's certainly hard for bands who started off as the definition of youth culture to do that. Oasis are in this really weird middle ground: they're too young to be the Stones and they're too old to be part of that whole Libertines thing. And for them to sound grown-up is quite brave. I can't imagine an 18-year-old kid getting off on this record, but I can imagine a 38-year-old man getting off on it. And they're the kind of people who buy records now.

'This is a grown-up record,' he repeats. 'It might not be cool to make an album like that, but guess what? They'll sell a million.'

· Don't Believe the Truth is released on 30 May. John Harris's The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock is published by Faber.