{"id":173924,"date":"2025-09-27T23:59:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-27T23:59:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/173924\/"},"modified":"2025-09-27T23:59:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-27T23:59:11","slug":"thirty-years-ago-oasis-made-whats-the-story-morning-glory-a-britpop-blockbuster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/173924\/","title":{"rendered":"Thirty years ago, Oasis made (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? \u2014 a Britpop blockbuster"},"content":{"rendered":"

Unless this is your first day on the internet, you’ve no doubt noticed Britpop-era icons Oasis are back together, playing their first shows in 16 years<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The tour has already netted an estimated \u00a3400 million<\/a> ($815 million) before arriving in Australia in late October.<\/p>\n

Contemporaries like Blur<\/a>, Pulp<\/a>, Suede,<\/a> and Supergrass<\/a> have all experienced their own revivals or remained active, but few seem to have captured the current moment quite like Oasis.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“Biblical”, as the band and their fans would put it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It is a successful comeback that has drawn much excitement. But also, derision.<\/p>\n

Reappraisal of Oasis’s legacy has caused some to wonder if they were really all that great to begin with<\/a>, largely amounting to ‘What if The Beatles were football hooligans?’<\/p>\n

An op-ed in The Guardian called them<\/a> “the most damaging pop cultural force in recent British history”, blaming the Gallagher brothers’ “knuckle-dragging ideas on sexuality and politics” for the crime of setting back social attitudes, presaging Brexit and conservative nationalism.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The Gallagher brothers at the first Oasis reunion concert on Friday, July 4, 2025, in Cardiff. (AP: Scott A Garfitt\/Invision\u00a0)<\/p>\n

Indeed, the brothers’ droll, foul-mouthed way with words was glamorised by tabloids, earning a reputation as large as their chart-busting songs that helped define the ’90s.<\/p>\n

Of all the reasons people are so ecstatic about an Oasis reunion, a good number of them can be found on the group’s best-selling second album, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?, released 30 years ago this week.<\/p>\n

There is, of course, the inescapable Wonderwall<\/a>, the epic Champagne Supernova, the swaggering Roll With It, and swooning Don’t Look Back In Anger \u2014 an instant classic inspired by a snippet of John Lennon conversation and a nod to his famous solo single.<\/p>\n

“Aren’t those two chords the same as Imagine? No shit,” Noel Gallagher once remarked<\/a>, engaged in a mock exchange with an imaginary cynic.<\/p>\n

“‘You can’t do that!?’ I can and I will. And I have. And you’ll buy it, so f*** off.”<\/p>\n

Love him or loathe him, he was absolutely right.<\/p>\n

A Britpop blockbuster<\/p>\n

Despite a muted reaction from the music press, decrying the follow-up to 1994’s raw debut Definitely Maybe<\/a> as generic, laddish, lazy, and “phoney Beatlemania<\/a>“, Morning Glory was hugely popular.<\/p>\n

It wasn’t just a hit. It was the fastest-selling album in the UK since Michael Jackson’s Bad, eventually shifting more than 23 million copies worldwide.<\/p>\n

“There was that moment where \u2026 we were number one in the singles [and] albums charts, consecutively for weeks,” said Noel Gallagher.<\/p>\n

“That was the kind of shit I dreamt about when I was at school, do you know what I mean?”\"Oasis's<\/p>\n

Oasis’s Noel Gallagher performing live in front of 40,000 fans on April 27, 1996, in Manchester. (Reuters)<\/p>\n

The album spent five weeks atop the Australian charts and has since gone eight-times Platinum, its influence audible in Australian acts ranging from Jet and The Superjesus to DMA’S and Middle Kids<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“Nobody had any f***ing idea what was going to happen. I wrote the songs; I was more surprised than anyone,” remarked Gallagher.<\/p>\n

“I’ve said it many, many times, but if I had known then what I know now about just what Wonderwall would become, or Don’t Look Back In Anger, I’d never finish those songs. I’d still be fiddling around with it.”<\/p>\n

If anything, the guitarist-songwriter was anticipating a poor reception from critics, who chastised the pivot towards beer-y balladry and big, pop-friendly choruses.<\/p>\n

“It didn’t get one good review \u2026 We were kind of waiting for that because most people, our record company included, were expecting Definitely Maybe Part Two.”<\/p>\n

The outcome was an added surprise for British media, who only a few months earlier had fuelled a rivalry between Oasis and Blur, capitalising on ‘Cool Britannia’ and updating the ‘Rolling Stones vs Beatles’ chart face-off for the ’90s.<\/p>\n

Dubbed the ‘Battle of Britpop’, it saw London’s artsy, middle-class Blur pitted against Manchester’s working-class Gallagher brothers, each releasing singles from their respective upcoming albums on the same day: August 14, 1995.<\/p>\n

Blur’s Country House would beat Roll With It to number one. Oasis may have lost the battle, but (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? won them the war.<\/p>\n

Bigger and better<\/p>\n

Definitely Maybe introduced Oasis as the most exciting British band of the ’90s, a Manchester quintet using rock’n’roll as their ticket out of their ordinary existence.<\/p>\n

(What’s The Story) Morning Glory? made them massive worldwide. An unapologetic pitch for global domination stocked with stadium-sized anthems with mass appeal that drew on familiar sources.<\/p>\n

As Gallagher noted in a 1996 interview with Rolling Stone<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“The first album is about dreaming of being a pop star in a band. The second album is about actually being a pop star in a band.”<\/p>\n

Morning Glory has the vitality and attitude of its predecessor, but the gestures are grander, with a wide-screen sonic sensibility that capitalised on Noel Gallagher’s blossoming abilities as a songwriter, expanding into more intricate arrangements and surprisingly sensitive territory.<\/p>\n

The melancholy Cast No Shadow features some of his most elegant and vulnerable lyrics, inspired by The Verve’s Richard Ashcroft (who opened Oasis’s comeback shows in the UK and Ireland) and riffing on chords from Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here.<\/p>\n

The cello-assisted yearning of Wonderwall and piano-led Don’t Look Back In Anger possessed a timeless quality. Sure enough, 30 years on, they’re both deathless hits.<\/p>\n

Loading Instagram content<\/p>\n

Beyond the over-saturated singles, the rest of Morning Glory can still thrill.<\/p>\n

The title track is a reminder that Oasis could rock \u2014 a maelstrom of wailing guitars signalled by a helicopter before Liam Gallagher’s delivery of one of the great couplets about cocaine power fantasies ever penned:<\/p>\n

“All your dreams are made\/When you’re chained to the mirror and the razor blade.”<\/p>\n

Roll With It and the whimsical She’s Electric are perfect examples of Beatles songs “played with the attitude of The Rolling Stones and the volume of The Who,” as ABC writer Matt Neal put it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, The Jam frontman and Modfather himself, Paul Weller, played harmonica on the stormy Swamp Song instrumental interludes, and searing guitar histrionics on the epic curtain-closer Champagne Supernova.<\/p>\n

“Thank God he did,” Noel Gallagher reflected. “It was crying out for a guitar solo because mine was a shocker.”<\/p>\n

He had held a similarly self-deprecating streak towards his songwriting abilities.<\/p>\n

“Everything that I do is a nod to something or other. I’m not a genius. I’m a fan of music. Paul McCartney’s a genius, and Morrissey and Bob Dylan. I’m just fans of theirs.<\/p>\n

“I’ve got a good knack of putting shit together but I’m not a snob about where it comes from. I’ll tell you. Nothing is original, there’s only 12 notes anyway.”<\/p>\n

That self-awareness belies Gallagher’s talent for siphoning decades of British rock fanaticism \u2014 from The Kinks through to The Smiths and The Stone Roses \u2014 into a proverbial sonic trifle that was at once familiar but boasted a distinctive flavour.<\/p>\n

Sibling chemistry<\/p>\n

Responding to his elder brother’s growth, Liam Gallagher upped the ante on his already commanding vocal sneer.<\/p>\n

\"Liam<\/p>\n

Liam Gallagher’s vocals were “f***ing on another level on that record,” his brother Noel remarked in 2020. (Dave Hunt, file photo: AAP)<\/p>\n

His instantly recognisable mix of unimpeachable bravado, charisma and yearning resulted in some of the most memorable rock vocal performances of his, or anyone’s career.<\/p>\n

Especially on Wonderwall, its name taken from a lesser-known George Harrison album and originally dedicated to Noel’s ex-wife, Meg Matthews.<\/p>\n

Who else could bring such conviction and sense of drama to lyrics whose own author was quick to dismiss as meaningless?<\/p>\n

“You know, people have said that to me down the years, ‘What does ‘slowly walking down the hall faster than a cannonball mean?'” Noel Gallagher said in his Take 5 with Zan Rowe<\/a>, illuminating an important comparison between Champagne Supernova and I Am The Walrus by The Beatles.<\/p>\n

“I’m like ‘take enough drugs you’ll know what it means’. Sitting on a cornflake? Yeah, I’ve sat on many a cornflake.”<\/p>\n

Beyond the hedonism, Gallagher’s songwriting is less about meaning than it is about mood and magnetic simplicity.<\/p>\n

Loading Instagram content<\/p>\n

Don’t Look Back In Anger, Some Might Say, Wonderwall, Champagne Supernova \u2014 these songs feel pregnant with importance, even if ultimately, they’re apocryphal.<\/p>\n

They gesture at something thoughtful without being profound, which, for better or worse, has proven to resonate with a broad audience.<\/p>\n

Just ask the band’s resident ‘man on the street’, Liam Gallagher: the boorish, extroverted yin to Noel’s relatively understated yang.<\/p>\n

Despite their in-fighting, he clearly relished his elder brother’s bar stool philosophy and bulletproof melodies that played to his strength as a vocalist.<\/p>\n

Recording a classic<\/p>\n

Having already recorded and released Some Might Say in April 1995 (which topped the charts months before the ‘Battle of Britpop’), in May, Oasis decamped to Rockfield Studios, a former dairy farm situated in the Welsh countryside of Monmouth.<\/p>\n

They were booked in for six weeks but ended up finishing the album in less than half that time.<\/p>\n

“We worked hard. I think it was 12 business days,” Noel Gallagher remembers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

He’d been boasting to journos as early as Definitely Maybe’s release that he’d already written songs for a follow-up. In truth, there was the makings of half an album.<\/p>\n

\"Five<\/p>\n

Oasis (from left): Liam Gallagher, Paul McGuigan, Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs, Alan White, Noel Gallagher in November 1995 outside Earls Court, London, touring (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? (Oasis: Facebook)<\/p>\n

“Half the songs have got a second verse \u2014 they were all written before I got [there]. And the rest of the songs, it’s just the first verse twice,” he recalls. “That was me getting in here and going ‘oh well, f*** it’.<\/p>\n

“You’re just working on instinct because you don’t second-guess anything when you’re young.”<\/p>\n

That sense of vigour and audacious machismo was all over the album, which reunited the band with producer Owen Morris.<\/p>\n

“In the first five days we’d recorded Roll With It, Hello, Wonderwall, Don’t Look Back In Anger and Champagne Supernova,” he told Q Magazine in 2011.<\/p>\n

The most productive week in Britpop history?<\/p>\n

Why we still love Wonderwall<\/a><\/p>\n

A quarter century after its release, why does Wonderwall still speak to so many people?<\/p>\n

A feat made more remarkable considering the band hit the decks only a week after recruiting drummer Alan White (replacing Tony McCarroll), who swiftly found his place in the group dynamic.<\/p>\n

“I soon cottoned on,” White told Q Magazine. “I was the Cockney c**t and they were the Manc f***ers. As a kind of family unit, it felt really good.”<\/p>\n

The same can’t be said for the Gallaghers, whose infamous sibling rivalry inevitably reared its head and temporarily brought sessions to a grinding halt.<\/p>\n

Whereas Noel was laser-focused on overcoming difficult second album syndrome, staying up late working on mixes, and nailing the perfect take, Liam would quickly hammer out his vocal takes and become bored.<\/p>\n

“There was loads of pubs in town that we’d heard were good,” he said in a 2020 Rockfield documentary<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“It was like ‘get in there and f***in’ smash it out and then f***in’ pub’!”The night that nearly broke Oasis<\/p>\n

After one particularly heavy drinking excursion, Liam invited a 20-strong entourage \u2014 “a load of f***ing idiots back from the local village,” according to Noel \u2014 for a party back at the studio’s on-site accommodation.<\/p>\n

That included members of British grunge band Cable, who began winding Liam up. Things turned sour, and drunken fisticuffs ensued, which only escalated once Noel returned from recording to the scene.<\/p>\n

Liam remembers his brother’s fury<\/a>: “‘What you doing bringing people back when we’re working?!’ And I get it but \u2026<\/p>\n

“My argument would be: What are you doing f***ing taking 900 f***ing takes to f***ing do one guitar when you should be in the f***ing pub with me? You know what I mean? Entertaining me?”<\/p>\n

The ensuing brawl involved air rifles, a cricket bat, a tossed rubbish bin, \u00a3800 in property damage, and Liam shouting obscenities after Noel as White drove him back to London.<\/p>\n

The future of the band, let alone the album, was uncertain.<\/p>\n

“Me and our kid [Noel] had a bit of a scuffle,” Gallagher junior told Q Magazine in 2011.<\/p>\n

“I went home with a broken arm, broken leg and a shotgun on me shoulder, and me mum goes ‘What kind of f***in’ music are you making down there!?’<\/p>\n

The brothers didn’t show up at the studio the following week.<\/p>\n

“People felt they might not finish the album, for sure,” Oasis photographer Michael Spencer Jones told BBC<\/a>. “It was a serious falling out \u2026 on another level.”<\/p>\n

It’s widely regarded as one of the worst conflicts in a very long list of volcanic Gallagher clashes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But that same tension is deeply intertwined with what many consider Oasis’s finest musical hour, a toxic chemistry that’s, weirdly, also a winning formula.<\/p>\n

“That’s the story of the band’s life really. It’d sort of be good one minute and then it’d be chaotic the next,” says Liam.<\/p>\n

After almost 10 days, and some delicate behind-the-scenes diplomacy, the Gallaghers decided not to look back in anger.<\/p>\n

The band reconvened at Rockfield and finished off recording She’s Electric, Cast No Shadow, Hey Now, and Morning Glory.<\/p>\n

“That second session was the best, easiest, least fraught, most happily creative time I’ve ever had in a recording studio,” Morris recalled.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Noel Gallagher was “furious” when he first saw the cover for (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? It was shot in London’s Berwick Street. (Oasis: Michael Spencer Jones)<\/p>\n

Oasis ended up having songs to spare, recording several B-sides that \u2014 in Noel Gallagher’s own estimation \u2014 were “good enough to launch any band’s career.”<\/p>\n

Acquiesce, Talk Tonight, Headshrinker, Rockin’ Chair, Underneath The Sky, and The Masterplan: all fan favourites that featured on a compilation, also titled The Masterplan, that many<\/a> consider <\/a>ranks<\/a> alongside the first two studio albums as Oasis’s best work.<\/p>\n

In retrospect, Gallagher believes it was his most fruitful creative period.<\/p>\n

“The Masterplan’ might’ve been the last of the f***in’ great culturally significant songs that I wrote,” he said in 2020<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Live forever<\/p>\n

In 1996, Oasis headlined two historic concerts at Knebworth, England, to more than 250,000 fans \u2014 some of the biggest concerts in British history.<\/p>\n

“Nothing was ever the same after that,” remarks Gallagher. “Then the money came in and all f***ing hell broke loose.”<\/p>\n

Be Here Now, the band’s third album, was released in August 1997 to rave reviews (from critics who’d learned to save face after slagging off its predecessor). It became Britain’s fastest-selling album ever, but swiftly denounced as a disappointment.<\/p>\n

The long, indulgent “sound of five men in the studio, on coke, not giving a f***,” as Noel Gallagher put it in the 2003 Britpop documentary Live Forever.<\/p>\n

Loading…<\/p>\n

Liam, on the other hand, thought “it was f***ing great, and I still think it’s great. It just wasn’t Morning Glory.”<\/p>\n

Indeed. Be Here Now was considered rock-bottom because Morning Glory is credited as being Britpop’s pinnacle, the barometer by which Oasis was subsequently measured.<\/p>\n

Their 2000s records contained flashes of brilliance but began to sound tired, bloated, and struggling to reach the rarefied heights of their earlier output.<\/p>\n

Oasis always acted as if they were invincible, but (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? marked the point they were legitimately unstoppable.<\/p>\n

“We’d made it, we got to the top of the mountain and we were treated like The Jam and The Beatles,” reflected Gallagher.<\/p>\n

Now, 30 years later, Oasis is enjoying the fairytale rock narrative the Fab Four never got to: the reunion.<\/p>\n

As polarising as the Gallaghers and their graceless public personas could be, the music they made as Oasis possessed a magnetism that brought audiences together.<\/p>\n

Just ask the social media users sharing in the opposite of Schadenfreude in seeing the long-feuding Gallaghers seemingly enjoying each other’s company on stage again.<\/p>\n

Witness the crowds of people singing along word for passionate word. And it isn’t just aging Millennials in football jerseys and bucket hats but younger fans<\/a> belting out classics that have outlived their ’90s origins.<\/p>\n

Is this collective evidence that Oasis really is the long-touted ‘People’s Band’ after all? Not maybe. Definitely.<\/p>\n

“The people that made [the greatest] records, they’re not making them for journalists,” Noel Gallagher remarked around Morning Glory’s 25th anniversary.<\/p>\n

“They’re making them for the people, and the people decide what’s hot [and] what is not. And that’s it, the end.”<\/p>\n

Listen to Double J’s Classic Albums<\/a> for more stories behind the best records of all time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Unless this is your first day on the internet, you’ve no doubt noticed Britpop-era icons Oasis are back…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":173925,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[64,63,23322,134,45961,113068,113074,113071,113067,113073,113070,113072,113069],"class_list":["post-173924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-djfrontpage","tag-entertainment","tag-oasis","tag-oasis-anniversary","tag-oasis-live","tag-oasis-lyrics","tag-oasis-morning-glory","tag-oasis-reunion","tag-oasis-whats-the-story","tag-oasis-wonderwall","tag-whats-the-story-morning-glory-oasis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173924\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/173925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}