Regular readers of this column would expect nothing less of Weather Eye than that its author should be one of the first last Thursday to obtain a copy of the new Oasis album Be Here Now. And so it was. Analysis of the Gallaghers' previous oeuvre had revealed a deep and lyrical appreciation of matters meteorological and many indications that they draw much of their inspiration from the weather. The weekend, therefore, was spent in a detailed meteorological assessment of the new CD, comparing and contrasting the movements of the latest opus with existing work.
The last Oasis album (What's the Story) Morning Glory, disclosed a perceptive understanding of the impact of the weather on the human psyche and contained an obvious reference to the Seasonal Affective Disorder commonly known as SAD:
The days are long and the night will throw you away
Coz the sun don't shine;
Nobody ever mentions the weather can make or break your day.
But the meteorological metaphor was often less overt, and used with subtlety to reinforce important social commentary. In the same medley, for example, in the song Some Might Say, the brothers exploit an egalitarian motif using an oblique reference to the convective nature of the thunderstorm. Since thunderstorms commonly occur in isolated cumulonimbus clouds, it is not uncommon for the sun to break through brilliantly when an individual thunder cell has been advected downwind by the upper level airflow - or as Oasis puts it more succinctly:
Some might say that sunshine follows thunder;
Go and tell it to the man who cannot shine.
And, indeed, in Morning Glory, the pair even borrowed a line directly from the daily weather forecast:
Today's the day that all the world will see
Another sunny afternoon.
The latest Oasis album, however, is meteorologically disappointing, and will be a letdown to those who buy it purely for its weather content. There is, admittedly, a passing reference to weather modification in The Girl in the Dirty Shirt, whose beau appears to reassure her that
The clouds around you don't gather there for nothing;
I can chase them all away.
But there is an air of meteorological agnosticism about many of the lyrics. Stand by Me, for example, asserts that
The cold and wind and rain don't know
They only seem to come and go away
while the dearth of meteorological inspiration in the whole album is summed up in the chorus of Don't Go Away:
A cold and frosty morning there's not a lot to say
About the things caught in my mind.