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.
