It was one of the best kept secrets in the music industry. Over a year ago, I first started to hear rumblings that Noel and Liam Gallagher would be getting their band back together for a long-awaited reunion tour. Then, on Tuesday morning at 8 a.m. UK time, the news officially broke: Oasis will reunite for a world tour dubbed Oasis Live ‘25 beginning with an initial 14 shows across the UK and Ireland next summer. Plans are also reportedly underway to add additional shows outside Europe later next year.
Not since the shock release of new music from David Bowie in 2013, after nearly a decade of creative silence, has a major artist kept such massive news a secret. Keenly orchestrated, the timing could not have been more perfect.
It’s 30 years this week since Oasis’ debut album Definitely Maybe hit record store shelves, and 15 years since the bust-up between brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher in a Paris dressing room led to Noel quitting the band he’d steered to world domination and record sales in excess of 41 million in the U.S. alone.
Often compared disparagingly to The Beatles by the music press, Oasis were always more the heirs to the Sex Pistols in sound and attitude—with a dash of T. Rex and Slade added for good measure. And the band’s ground-shaking debut album is proof positive.
But it almost wasn’t to be, as Noel Gallagher, Liam Gallagher and band’s other original members tell the Daily Beast in a series of interviews conducted before the big reunion announcement.
“We recorded our first album twice,” Noel Gallagher explains, first at Monnow Valley Studio in Wales and then Sawmills Studio in Cornwall. “It got to a point that I was completely frustrated.” When he first played it for the head of the band’s label, Creation Records, he “thought it sounded great, but as soon as it came on, it was just dreadful.”
That mix was actually from the second batch of recordings the band had made, at Sawmills Studio in Cornwall, with their live engineer and longtime friend Mark Coyle at the helm. The master tapes were eventually salvaged by ace producer Owen Morris—inventing a mix process that came to be known as brickwall, or in layman’s terms, a mix louder and more in your face than anything else on the radio at the time—in turn making Definitely Maybe, which featured instant classics like “Live Forever,” “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” “Shakermaker,” “Supersonic” and “Slide Away,” the fastest selling debut album of all-time in the band’s home country.
“I have fond memories, because that’s when we started out, when you don’t know which way it’s going to go, even though you think you're the balls,” Liam Gallagher recalls. “You don’t know how people are going to take you. And then it takes off! So those are fond memories.”
“What strikes you, still, when you play Definitely Maybe, is how effortless and immediate it feels,” Hamish MacBain writes in the liner notes to a new, expanded edition of the album, out this Friday. “It sounds to this day like the perfect plug-in-and-play, one take, band-in-a-garage album. Like Liam Gallagher, Noel Gallagher, Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs, Paul McGuigan and Tony McCarroll showed up one afternoon, turned everything up as far as it could go, pressed record and then left for the pub an hour later: the perfect debut album in the can.”
As anyone who’s delved into the Oasis story knows, however, that was hardly the case, and as part of the new edition of Definitely Maybe, fans can now hear the indie jingle-jangle of what almost was. Today, the album stands as a lesson in perseverance and artistic self-assuredness, even as it represents one of the last great moments from a bygone era in the music business.
And so, the aborted Monnow Valley Studio recordings, originally produced by Dave Batchelor and newly mixed by Noel Gallagher and Callum Marinho, are a fascinating look into a world in which Oasis would likely have been a cult indie band, and not much more.
“I wouldn’t say there was any problem with the way we recorded it, but then, when we were playing everything back, Dave said, ‘We’ve lost something here,’” says original Oasis drummer Tony MacCarroll. “It was real crisp and clean, and not the dirty sound we had in Oasis. We were used to eyeballing each other in a small rehearsal room, and in that first serious recording session, we were all in separate rooms. I was surrounded by 20, 30 mics. It was quite nerve-wracking, because there wasn’t the eye-contact we were used to.”
“We weren’t familiar with the recording process,” adds rhythm guitarist Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs. “We’d do a take and then go into the control room, and say, ‘That is not how it sounds in the room. That does not sound like us.’ It was so restrained. We couldn’t understand why it wasn’t sounding like us. We thought, ‘He pressed record, why doesn’t it sound like us?’ It was really fucking frustrating.”
While some of the songs—“Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” “Shakermaker,” “Cigarettes & Alcohol”—lack the harder edge of the versions we’ve all come to know and love, the Monnow Valley version of the song that became Oasis’ early calling card, “Live Forever,” is a highlight. Complete with acoustic guitar and piano, it’s a more driving take on Noel Gallagher’s first great song.
“I remember when Noel brought that song to rehearsal and played it for us, just him and an acoustic guitar,” Arthurs remembers. “I said, ‘No way you wrote that!’ I was convinced it was some lost 60s B-side.”
“I was a songwriter before I joined Oasis,” Noel Gallagher told the Daily Beast in 2015. “Oasis didn't invent that sound. I invented that fucking sound. That just comes from my soul. It’s the most difficult thing in the world to write a memorable chorus. It doesn’t happen by luck. You have either fucking got it or you haven’t.”
Still, he reflects now, “You’re only in that position once. You’ve had your whole life to get to that point, and the only expectation people have is that you’re going to have a good time and maybe make a single. But by the time I’d written ‘Live Forever’ and ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’ and ‘Supersonic,’ I did feel a bit unstoppable.”
“For those of us that have been following the story closely, it’s an amazing moment,” James Corcoran of the long-running Oasis Podcast tells the Daily Beast of the reunion bombshell. “Suddenly this thing that has been endlessly discussed and debated for years, it’s finally happening.”
And, of course, fans new and old may just get a bit of chaos. As Liam Gallagher says, at the outset of the Supersonic documentary, which chronicles the band’s rise, "Oasis was like a Ferrari. Great to look at. Great to drive. And it’ll fucking spin out of control every now and again."
Not that long ago, of course, any rapprochement seemed implausible, given the intermittent, if brutal jabs the Gallagher brothers had regularly traded in the press over the years. After breaking out big from the BritPop pack in 1994, Oasis had a tumultuous run, with each of the Gallaghers slagging off the other in the press on a fairly regular basis. Liam was a no show on on several occasions, and Noel walked out as early as during their 1995 U.S. tour, and then at least half a dozen more times, before finally quitting what seemed like for good just before the band was set to take the stage in Paris in August 2009 after an altercation that involved a favorite guitar being smashed and, allegedly, thrown fruit.
In the 15 years since, the pair have regularly traded barbs in public, while reportedly not speaking until a recent phone call put the reunion in motion. In between, though, Liam would occasionally send his brother what appeared to be a half apology, more often he referred to Noel as a potato, and worse, in interviews and on his (often hilarious) Twitter feed, while Noel insisted in 2009 that he “simply could not go on working with Liam a day longer” and, later, that any reunion would be pointless because his brother was afraid to take any chances creatively.
But then, last year, it came to light that Noel Gallagher was going through a messy, $26 million divorce from his wife of nearly 12 years, Sara MacDonald, and Liam Gallagher dug deep into the current nostalgia for Oasis, playing the band’s debut album, Definitely Maybe, in full on a tour that has scored glowing reviews and filled arena’s and packed festivals across the UK since June.
Last week, the official Oasis YouTube account shared a reflective interview with Noel Gallagher, in which he uncharacteristically praised his brother. Then, on X (formerly Twitter) this past weekend, Liam Gallagher teased fans, as reunion rumors finally hit a fever pitch, culminating with his, his brother’s and the official Oasis social media accounts simultaneously posting a tease about this morning’s shock announcement.
The moment fans of the band thought would never arrive was actually here. As for why they decided to finally pull the trigger, it was reported on Tuesday that the brothers stand to rake in more than $500 million on the reunion tour.
By the time they finished that first set of sessions for Definitely Maybe, Oasis had only performed about 15 live shows to date, Noel Gallagher says. Desperately in need of more experience, and fast, the band hit the road.
“That was the best part,” Liam Gallagher recalls. “That was our goal, to get a record deal, not get into a silly 9 to 5 job like all the other dickheads out there. It’s our chance to fucking make it happen and sort it out, you know what I mean? Get into the studio, like, show what you’re made of, instead of just being a little shitty band in a pub, you know what I mean? Nothing else mattered. I was not going to fuck that up.”
By the time they got to Sawmills to record the album again, they had a lot more live performance under their belts. “We’d also gotten much better equipment. We’d hit upon ‘the Oasis sound.’ And that made a huge difference, too,” recalls Noel Gallagher. “I listened to our first album for the first time in years recently and thought, ‘Fucking hell, that’s still great.’”
As the outtakes from those sessions—and, of course, the finished album itself—prove, in a world where rock and roll heroes were increasingly hard to find (Kurt Cobain took his life not long after the Sawmills sessions), Oasis were now ready to pick up the mantle of their heroes.
But, of course, it was so much more than the music that led to the band exploding onto the scene in 1994.
Liam and Noel Gallagher
Kevin Cummins“There was something about Oasis, and their proposition and directness and belligerence, that was more fun than any other band,” says Mark Cooper, who directed a BBC documentary about the band at the height of their fame.
“It was something along the lines of Never Mind the Bollocks, but here comes the Sex Beatles,” adds BBC DJ Gary Crowley. “That really kind of hit home with me. They had that sort of swagger that the Pistols had. But also, they had in Noel this very talented songwriter. You could hear other bits and pieces in there, but Noel’s got this kind of intuitive, instinctive, amazing ability to write great pop songs. That was there right from the off. That's what set them apart as far as I was concerned. Plus, the press was just surrounding them. It was the whole thing, really. Then it snowballed quickly.”
And now they’re back, with a new generation of fans, who have discovered the band through documentaries, concert films and, of course, playlists and the internet, that can experience firsthand arguably the last great band of the Golden Age of rock and roll, from a time when smartphones and streaming music didn’t exist.
“Oasis has seen a gradual swell of popularity over the last few years but this announcement, I think, will kick things into overdrive,” Corcoran says, summing up the moment. “If these last few days are anything to go by, this will be a cultural moment like nothing we’ve seen since Oasis in the mid ‘90s.”
“People go on and on about the past being this wonderful, magical thing, but that early period really does seem like the last golden period for music,” Noel Gallagher concedes.
And Liam Gallagher? When he reflects on successive generations of music fans discovering Oasis, he says, “I’m blown away by it, man. They’re definitely yearning for a bit of that reality.”
Still, he adds, “I miss being in a band and being with my brother and all that, cause I think we’re good. I think there’s been nothing like us since. And if it happens, it happens. And if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.”
Apparently, it’s happening.
Jeff Slate is a songwriter and music journalist who has written for The Daily Beast for over a decade. His work has appeared in ‘The Wall Street Journal,’ ‘The New Yorker,’ ‘Esquire,’ ‘Rolling Stone’ and other publications. He is the co-author of ‘The Authorized Roy Orbison’ and ‘Guitar,’ rock legend Earl Slick’s memoir, and has written liner notes for The Beatles, Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones, among others.
