Oasis is just the latest in a long line of bands and performers to split from a successful producer. There will be tears before bedtime

MORE BAD news this week for fans of Oasis, who recently sacked their drummer, Alan White. Two months into recording a sixth album, the band have split from the producers Death in Vegas.
There’s no word on who walked out on whom, but Oasis have returned from the Cornwall studio where they were working with the avant-garde electronic group and now plan to complete the album with Noel Gallagher at the helm.

According to an interview in NME, a batch of tracks have been recorded and whittled down to the best ten. They have even got titles — Gallagher reeled off all ten, mentioning how great the songs were and even claimed that the album was still on schedule.

It’s much more likely, however, that Oasis are in disarray, the songs are shaping up to be turkeys and the upbeat report was a smokescreen.

When artists part company with their producers — usually after blazing rows and much stamping of pampered feet — it invariably means disappointment for fans. Pop history is littered with bad albums released after bands decided they could do a better job themselves. Normally, it’s a power struggle between artist and producer that causes the problem, although frictions within a group and crazy producers have also been to blame.

Pop’s most famous falling out was between Phil Spector and the Beatles over Let It Be. The bickering Beatles went into the studio to record what Paul McCartney had hoped would be a raw rock’n’roll record that would reunite the band. Instead, sessions went so badly that they were abandoned. Later, while the Beatles were working on their real swansong, Abbey Road, the Let It Be tapes were handed to Spector — allegedly by John Lennon to annoy McCartney — who went overboard with his pompous, orchestral “wall of sound”.

The result was something that McCartney despised for more than three decades and, last year, as the ultimate artist revenge on a producer, he released Let It Be . . . Naked, the same album minus Spector’s input, or as McCartney politely put it, “before Spector puked all over it”. Spector, of course, was never the easiest producer to work with. Only two years ago he fell out with the British band Starsailor after recording just two songs for their second album, Silence is Easy. Interestingly, Spector’s songs were the highlights of a disappointing album — sometimes even crazy producers know best.

When arguments arise from a clash of egos, it’s usually the artist who loses. When Lee “Scratch” Perry began working with Bob Marley, the singer was smart enough to take instruction, even changing his vocal style at the producer’s request. But after the Perry-guided albums Soul Rebels and African Herbsman made Marley a superstar, the pair’s battles became legendary. Marley rerecorded some songs to try to make a point (he didn’t) and for years after his death the two families continued the feud.

Artists tend to adore their producers when they first bring them success, but jealousy can creep in quickly. The young Michael Jackson was taken under the wing of Quincy Jones, who made him a solo success with Off the Wall, then the world’s biggest pop star when he produced Thriller. In public Jackson was grateful, but behind the scenes he tried, unsuccessfully, to stop Jones winning a Best Producer Grammy. Jackson didn’t want Jones to take too much credit for Thriller’s success, but even he couldn’t sway the Grammy givers.

Occasionally, the artist does know best. Madonna dismissed her DJ Jellybean Benitez after her breakthrough hit Holiday. She wanted Nile Rodgers instead, and the pairing made her the most famous pop female on the planet. Usually, however, artists have to crawl back to their producers. The Strokes did it last year, after deciding they could do better than Gordon Raphael, the producer of their hit debut album, Is This It. For their follow-up, they brought in the Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, but after spending huge sums, realised Raphael was the man for the job.

Seal made the same mistake with Trevor Horn, who produced his first two albums and made him a global star. His career never recovered, and when he made up with Horn last year there was too little left to salvage. Seal’s fate didn’t stop Belle & Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch removing most of Horn’s production from their so-called collaboration, Dear Catastrophe Waitress. Which is why some reviews noted that you could hardly hear Horn on there. It wasn’t the pop hit fans had hoped for.

Most feuds are much more public. When Steve Albini fell out with Kurt Cobain while producing Nirvana’s In Utero, their war of words took place in the press. The band’s label, Geffen, asked for the album to be made more pop; Cobain agreed, and Albini told the papers the singer was a pussy and pop puppet.

But the best slanging match has to be between Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. Pet Sounds may be a classic now, but at the time the other Beach Boys considered it too odd and blamed Wilson, their producer, for it not topping the charts. Famously, Mike Love warned Wilson “not to f*** with the formula”, but as Wilson was the band’s leader, the others could hardly sack him.

There’s little to be said for the old-fashioned way of resolving an artist/producer argument. Having punched each other’s lights out, this week the Von Bondies’ singer Jason Stollsteimer met his ex-producer turned sworn enemy, the White Stripes’ Jack White, in court. The result was a $500 fine, but probably hundreds of thousands in lawyers’ fees.

Someone should have told them, when you’ve got a good thing going, leave your egos at the studio door.