Rushing, crashing guitars, melody-driven Beatles-influenced songs and a voice, in Liam Gallagher, that for many epitomised the snarling, feather-spitting arrogance of rock music: 30 years after its release, what does Definitely Maybe, the debut album from Oasis, signify now?
Is it, as Melody Maker enthused, “a record full of songs to live to, made by a gang of reckless northern reprobates who you can easily dream of joining”? Is it, as a 2006 poll organised by NME and the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles named it, the best album of all time (nudging The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band into second place)?
Or is the album, as the band’s songwriter Noel Gallagher said, full of “cheap-shot melodies”? (“Never be afraid of the obvious, because it’s all been done before,” he added.) If a talent for writing songs that remained glued to primary influences was all too apparent, so too was monumental ambition – “think penthouse, not pavement”, Gallagher said at the time of the album’s original release.
Context is all: the second-generation Irish working-class Gallagher brothers were living in the Manchester suburb of Burnage – “one pub and a chippie and a bookie and that’s it,” Noel recalled – fecklessly spending their dole money at the weekends and dreaming about being the biggest rock’n’roll band in the world.
Leaving aside Noel’s dedication to amalgamating The Beatles’ back catalogue with classic UK pop – T Rex, Slade et al – psychedelia and the Sex Pistols, some of the songs pack a punch even now.
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The passing decades may have made some of the music too familiar to be as potent as it once was, but, listening to Rock’n’Roll Star, Shakermaker, Live Forever, Cigarettes & Alcohol, Supersonic and Slide Away, it’s easy enough to flip back to 1994 and realise that something momentous was happening. For people of a certain age, Definitely Maybe was a rebirth, a thrilling, swaggering example of how rock music could redefine itself even if immersed in cliches.
Time hasn’t been kind to everything, of course. Over the years, with the fading exhilaration of the era, reassessment has delivered a different verdict. As with every subsequent release by Oasis – in addition to every album, solo or otherwise, issued by Noel and Liam – there are songs that no amount of Sex-Beatles ferocity/melody and rasping vocals can save. Whatever about the band re-forming to tour Ireland and Britain 2025, mediocrity hangs over Bring It on Down, Digsy’s Dinner and Married with Children.
Skip over those, however, and you have a batch of songs that excelled at grasping the moment, not just a moment.
