Oasis’s debut Definitely Maybe changed the game for British guitar music, turning five rogue-ish Mancunians into the biggest rock’n’roll band in the land. But anyone who had been paying attention could see it coming on the horizon. Oasis had already released a stunning debut single in Supersonic in April 1994 and just a few weeks before the release of Definitely Maybe, they had dropped a modern classic. Live Forever, released 30 years ago next week on 8 August, 1994, signalled the arrival of a generational talent, the sort of anthem that felt like it had been around for eternity the first time you heard it.
It was that way for Noel Gallagher’s bandmates when he showed them the new song he’d written, too. Gallagher Sr cast his mind back to that moment in the band’s brilliant documentary Supersonic in 2016. “Oasis was going for six months or a year at that point and I was writing songs just to amuse myself,” he said. “One night, I went down with a song and everything changed.”
That song was, of course, Magic Pie.
No, it wasn’t, don't be silly. It was Live Forever.
“[Oasis guitarist] Bonehead was saying, ‘You’ve not just fucking written that’,” Noel remembered. “ ‘There’s no way that’s your song’.”
“Well, I wouldn’t believe it,” Bonehead added. “For someone to just come in a room and go, ‘I’ll play you one of my songs and play you Live Forever, it’s like, ‘Fuck off, you didn’t write that’. He said, ‘Why didn’t I?’. I said, ‘Because listen to it!’. I thought, ‘Wow, what a song’.”
The, ‘you didn’t write that’/’yes I did’ debate went on for a while longer until Bonehead was convinced, his faith in Noel Gallagher’s songs probably pretty resolute.
"I knew enough about songs to know that was a great song,” said Noel. “And then one followed another and I was like, ‘This is happening now’.”
It certainly was: within a couple of years of writing those tracks, thousands upon thousands of fans would be singing the words to those songs back to them. It remains unlikely that it will ever happen again with Noel and Liam still refusing to kiss and make up, but here’s a clip of Oasis at their finest performing one of their very best:
