1995 Oasis: Some Might Say

By this time in 1995 I'd long since lost all personal interest in what was sitting at number one. The weekly Sunday night chart run down and then Top Of The Pops on a Thursday were no longer rituals they once were. It no longer mattered to me and hadn’t since about 1983. That's not to say that my obsession with music was any less, because it wasn't. It had just shifted elsewhere. Yet as an avid reader of the NME each week, I was always aware of the rise and fall of any number of flavours of the month over the years in the world of both the critical and the commercial. They came and went much like the seasons and my interest was generally only piqued when their sun shone too brightly to be ignored.

It was by this process of osmosis I became aware of a certain amount of hype that was generating around a band from Manchester called Oasis before they'd even released a note. Live reviews in the weeklies and monthlies were ecstatic and wont to adopt a reverent tone that suggested the saviours of the music industry were on their way. This kind of talk I find irresistible and so with expectation built roof top high, the sense of crushing disappointment when I finally got to hear their debut 'Supersonic' was palpable; Status Quo droning away on a cassette tape left out in the sun? This wasn’t my idea of how a saviour should sound. Not even close. And so after sniffing loudly, I went back to my Bang Bang Machine singles, convinced that the papers were selling me a pup and that the rest of the populace would agree with the same dismissive ‘tch’.

But they didn't. The records sold and the hype grew with every release until suddenly the band was unavoidable. Oasis this, Oasis that, the fights, the girlfriends, the violence and (sometimes) the music - like an episode of The Monkees scripted by Irvine Welsh, their car crash, soap opera existence played out all across the media in headlines and column inches normally reserved for political scandals involving bribery and rent boys. And I couldn't understand why. They even managed to sever my marriage with the NME after one of their hacks marvelled that Oasis had managed to progress from 'Supersonic' to the string laden 'Whatever' in six months when it had taken The Beatles four years to go from 'Love Me Do' to 'Eleanor Rigby'. Last copy of the NME I ever bought that was - and why was anyone comparing this stuff with The Beatles in the first place? I simply did not know.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing though isn't it? Because if the 1995 edition me was ignorant of the (then) recent trail of number one singles, writing these entries has made the modern version painfully aware of exactly what the public were buying. And my current lack of enthusiasm at the taste they were showing is such that what once I was dismissing as seventies throwbacks now feels as refreshing as a hard sharp blast of clear cold air.‘Some Might Say' has a guts and swagger that's not been heard in a good long while; in short, it sounds like a proper song, and a song that was needed.

Why needed? Well, I can vouch for a definite disturbance in the force as the mid nineties came round, a shrugging off of the suffocating political correctness of the eighties and the arrival of the Ben Sherman clad, lager lager lager lager of the new lads who needed a soundtrack to be all laddish to. And Oasis provided it. The last guitar led entry to date was the poor man's grunge of 'Inside', a song that was never going to be the sound of hedonism and the hitherto inexplicable rise of Oasis was (I now believe) rooted in the serendipity of being the right band in the right place at the right time.

Had they appeared a few years earlier or a few years later then it wouldn't have worked. The zeitgeist would not have been so welcoming and their impact lessened. Birmingham's Birdland tried to whip up a strikingly similar electric storm of sound with a classic rock attitude in 1989 but met with crushing indifference and apathy (apart from me, I loved them). And, jumping ahead, for all their latter day critical ‘decline’, I can hear precious little difference between Oasis' 'Definitely Maybe' debut album and their 2008 finale 'Dig Out Your Soul; it's not so much the band had changed as the times had changed around them.*

For the song at hand, first impressions still hold good; there's nothing particularly different about 'Some Might Say' - a glam rock thrash that takes a bit of 'Rocking All Over The World', a bit of 'Nutbush City Limits' and brings them together in a sparkly metal hybrid Marc/Mick riff over a brash Holder/Glitter chorus with a subject vague enough to mean whatever you wanted it to mean. 'Some Might Say' embraces the primitive qualities of original rock and roll with both arms in a bear hug with the associated hint of danger that did for the nineties what punk did to the seventies, albeit with a darn sight less imagination and with none of the political smarts. But that’s not what their audience wanted anyway. For someone (like me) reared on Slade and Bowie, it all sounded rather ho hum, yet for all its old and borrowed (nothing new or blue here), it sounds like a jump start to the heart in the context of the Wets and the Whigfield’s, a pair of sharp elbows taking out the trash with the minimum of fuss but with a Tom Sawyer arrogance and attitude that made the most simple of tasks seem like the coolest thing in the world until everyone wanted a go.


* And sometimes even because of them; this writer can remember the almost unanimously mediocre reviews parent album ‘(What’s The Story) Morning Glory’ received on release, subsequently amended when the population took it to their hearts and to then see the exact opposite occur with their next album. Quite remarkable.