On September 29, 1994, following a somewhat shambolic crystal meth-fuelled Oasis gig at the legendary Whisky A Go Go club in Los Angeles, Noel Gallagher collected his passport and $700 from the band's tour manager, then pushed a note under her hotel room door to say that he was quitting the tour. For a few days at least, it looked like Oasis' dreams of rock n' roll superstardom were dead in the water, exactly one month on from the release of their debut album Definitely Maybe.
You can blame The Brian Jonestown Massacre for that.
The San Francisco psych-rock band, led by 'mercurial' frontman Anton Newcombe, and perhaps best-known as the subject of the acclaimed 2004 music documentary Dig!, were Oasis' support band on their debut US tour, and in a new [paywalled] interview with The Times, Newcombe admits that the two acts did not get on well at all.
“Noel Gallagher is standing there as we’re doing 15-minute songs, not getting into our psychosexual thing at all,” he recalls, “and then I told him that Oasis sounded like Guns N’ Roses. Joel [Gion, the Massacre’s tambourine player] gave them some crazy speed and they were up for the next three days.”
