Don't Look Back In Anger

We thought the 90s were a beginning. But they were really an end.

The 90s band, Oasis, recently reunited. Over a million tickets for their concerts sold out in seconds. The reunion has struck a chord, tapped into a thirst.

Once the 90s were over, Oasis were sneered at for years: unoriginal, bland, northern English radio rock. Despite their major success, they had ‘nothing’ on the likes of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, or even Blur. And Nirvana was meant to be the great 90s rock band.

Those annoying smug, music critic types moved onto Radiohead, Dave Matthews, Pearl Jam, or who knows what else, and later began pretending they enjoyed rap music. In short, Oasis was soon an unwelcome blip in the ironic, self-conscious, nihilism that is modern culture.

But would ever any of those other musicians dare to say in 2020 England that ‘the virus was bullshit, masks are bullshit’? Noel Gallagher did. Would Kurt Cobain? Not a chance. Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam insisted on masks at his concert in late 2021, as well as demanding vax certificates. How rock ‘n roll.

(Eric Clapton and Van Morrison are the only other musicians who I know of who spoke up. I can’t think of any movie people who did. Politicians? A handful.)

As a teenager growing up in English-speaking South Africa in the 90s, Oasis had meant something to me. Sure they were ridiculous, somewhat clownish in their Manchester, working-class ‘pubbishness’. Sure it was not high art. But play the opening piano notes of ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ and I am instantly somewhere else: driving down a sunny road on the way to school in my dad’s car when suddenly it comes on the radio, drowning out the station’s stupid jokes, news, and ads; finding a neighbour owns the physical CD and I can just put it on and listen to the whole album at will; returning to a world where you could not hear your new favourite song at the touch of a button, but, if you were lucky, you might be able to tape it on a hi-fi if it was played on the radio at the right time. Then you had it ‘forever’, or until the tape got tangled up.

In short, Oasis was pop music, in the best sense of the word.

Their first big hit was a song called ‘Live Forever’. Noel Gallagher, senior brother and songwriter in the band, recalls that he wrote it after listening to a Nirvana song. Excuse the language as I quote him; this is just how these people speak:

At the time . . . it was written in the middle of grunge and all that, and I remember Nirvana had a tune called 'I Hate Myself and Want to Die', and I was like . . . 'Well, I'm not fucking having that.’ Kids don't need to be hearing that nonsense… Seems to me that here was a guy who had everything, and was miserable about it. And we had fuck-all, and I still thought that getting up in the morning was the greatest fuckin' thing ever.

No wonder he hated masks. He’s on the side of life.

When I first saw the album, ‘(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?’, I was struck by its strange, blurry centre image. It seemed to me to suggest a transitory moment of recognition as one walked down an everyday street in an everyday town.

The inside sleeve had a strange kind of prose poem. In one sense it is sentimental rubbish. In another sense… it isn’t… Not to my teenage self anyway:

… Words cut you from all angles, backed up by a monumental sound that rises high, high and high to crash against your rocks and then changes, majestically and magically to soothe the wounds inside.

As you are dragged inside on this trip abandon, you hear a council estate singing its heart out, you hear the clink of loose change that is never enough to buy what you need, boredom and poverty, hours spent with a burnt out guitar, dirty pubs and cracked up pavements, violence and Iove, all rolled into one, and now all this.

At the end you flip over and start again because now you are not isolated. They have gone to work so that you can go home…

In this town the jury is always rigged but the people know. They always know the truth. Believe. Belief. Beyond. Their morning glory.

Noel Gallagher would later say, “Oasis were the last great, traditional rock-n'-roll band. We came along before the Internet so, if you wanted to see us, you had to be there.”

They also came along before political correctness, before the assault on youth and joy, when life felt safer and saner, before we were suffocated by the therapeutic health-and-safety regime, where you could light a smoke and make an edgy joke without being fired or arrested. No wonder the tickets sold out so quickly.

For those of us who grew up on the 90s, a guy in a Manchester pub somehow wrote an elegy for our entire youth.

Maybe we should look back in anger.