“There’s always a good story to every Oasis song,” new book explores

Journalist and author Hamish MacBain has spoken to NME about his book exploring the stories behind each and every Oasis song.

• READ MORE: Oasis live in Cardiff review: a supersonic reunion for a new generation

A Sound So Very Loud: The Inside Story Of Every Oasis Song was penned by former NME journalist Hamish MacBain and former Q Editor Ted Kessler – a duo described by Liam Gallagher as “the Dudley Moore and Peter Cook of music journalism”. Hailed by Supersonic documentary maker Mat Whitecross as “essential reading”, the book is a comprehensive deep-dive into Oasis’ music that explores the tales behind the lyrics and reveals the background to the writing, recording and impact of all the songs.

“We were planning to do this prior to the reunion, but obviously no one believes us now!” MacBain told NME. “We were in the pub outside The O2 before Liam’s ‘Definitely Maybe’ 30th anniversary shows. “I’d just seen these kids on the Tube who must have been about 15 singing ‘I Hope, I Think, I Know’ from ‘Be Here Now’, which is a pretty obscure track by 2025 standards. I was telling Ted and he was saying similar things.

“We said we should do a Revolution In The Head [The Beatles] style book about Oasis, because the standard critical analysis of Oasis is that they made two good albums and then the rest of it isn’t up to much. Whilst it may be true that they didn’t hit the same cultural relevance as they did with the first two albums, there’s still a lot of good stuff on the rest of the catalogue.”

Both MacBain and Kessler have been in the orbit of Oasis since the early days, having both met Liam and Noel back in 1994 when the band were still playing small venues. MacBain went on to write the band’s last ever tour programme and went on to pen the sleeve notes for the ‘Be Here Now’ reissue and co-author Any Road Will Get Us There (If We Don’t Know Where We’re Going) with Noel back in 2018.

Check out our full interview with the writer below, where he told us what he discovered by unpicking every song and the magic behind them, his thoughts on the reunion setlist, and if he thinks there’s a future and new material from the Gallagher brothers.

NME: Hello Hamish. Why do you think 2025 was the year for an Oasis comeback?

Hamish MacBain: “With the interviews that I’ve done with Noel, one of the reasons he gave for not reuniting with Oasis was: ‘Everybody who wanted to see Oasis had fucking plenty of chances to do it’. His heroes are The Smiths, The Jam and The Stone Roses who were all in and out in five years. The biggest venue The Smiths ever played was Brixton Academy, and The Stone Roses played about 100 gigs in total before they reformed.

“Oasis, by contrast, from ‘96 until they split up were just constantly playing stadiums around the world. ‘Anyone who wants to see us has surely had the chance’. That was probably true in 2009, then Supersonic [2016] came out and it felt like it all changed. It suddenly connected with this entirely new stratosphere of people and a stratosphere beyond that. The importance of Supersonic can’t be overstated – that really gave them a reboot in the minds of the yoots. Then Liam deciding to tour and do Oasis stuff was much more akin to an Oasis show than what he or Noel had previously been doing.”

And with Liam being such a character on Twitter too of course…

“The Twitter stuff definitely helped. And by complete accident, of course, but they’re probably the most clippable band ever. You go on TikTok now and there are just so many funny things that kids are posting: silly little interviews, archive clips, it’s just very, very entertaining and works perfectly in that 2025 kind of medium.”

What is it about your book that makes sense for this new 2025 audience?

“Anybody who’s coming to it now is doing so through playlists. You might hear ‘Champagne Supernova’ and ‘Live Forever’, but in between you might hear ‘Go Let It Out’. To them, it’s just another great Oasis song – it doesn’t have this baggage of, ‘Oh ‘OK Computer’ came out and then they made this rubbish album and it was all over and all these arguments came’.

“They would be the first to say that there are various Oasis songs that aren’t much cop, whatsoever, but the thing that we found is that there’s always a good story – even if the music isn’t up to much.”

Which stories stand out to you?

“For the last song on ‘Dig Out Your Soul’, ‘Soldier On’, I found this amazing story in my interview archives where Noel said that everybody in the band had forgotten they’d written it. Liam wrote it, and he was really pissed when they demoed it with Andy Bell. Nobody remembered it. Then The Coral were recording at Oasis’ studio at Wheeler End where they find a file on a hard drive called ‘New Oasis stuff’. Being naughty boys, they decided to have a listen and they found this song.

“They were playing a show and they brought it up saying, ‘We’re going to do that song ‘Soldier On’, la!’ No one in the band had any idea what it was until eventually Andy Bell said, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve got a CD of it’. There are always funny little stories like that knocking around. Plus Noel’s a brilliant raconteur and Liam’s a surrealistic, mystic strange man.”

So it was important to spotlight the lesser known stories?

“Much as our reference point was The Beatles book A Revolution In The Head, the actual recording of Oasis stuff is often not that interesting. It’s not The Beatles making ‘A Day In The Life’ and putting backwards music and sitars and what have you on it. It’s normally just bish-bash-bosh. That became the challenge: finding interesting ways in through the songs. You can sometimes get into the politics of the time and what else was happening in music.

“Obviously your ‘Wonderwall’s and ‘Champagne Supernova’s have all got crazy story about their afterlives. The more people started saying to us, ‘Do Oasis warrant a book of that ilk?’ The more we thought, ‘They really do’. A couple of people have joked to us, ‘Oh I’ll read the first half but might not read the second’.”

A lot’s been said about a perceived ‘decline’ for Oasis on this side of the millennium, but do you feel that’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

“It’s fair enough if you want to write a biography of Oasis to focus on 1994-1997. Culturally, they weren’t the force that they were. The Strokes came along in 2000 and that recalibrated what rock’n’roll was. Everyone was suddenly wearing skinny jeans and skinny ties. The reference points weren’t The Beatles and The Kinks, it was suddenly Gang Of Four, The Velvet Underground and Television. We wanted to tell the whole story, and the best way to do that is through the songs.

“People are coming back to them either as individual songs or as whole albums, but there’s a renewed interest in the whole spectrum of Oasis. Oasis are so disjointed anyway because you’ve got so many b-sides that are so massively important.”

Has there ever been another band with the same spoils of b-sides?

“Again: The Smiths, The Jam and The Stone Roses were all very good b-side bands, which I think is where Noel got that from. Oasis are playing about five b-sides in the set at the moment.”

“In the later years, you’ve got ‘Let’s All Make Believe’ which was the b-side to ‘Go Let It Out’ and what I’d say is one of the great Oasis songs. It’s a really, really lost track by Oasis song standards. There’s another called ‘Pass Me Down The Wine’ on the b-side to ‘The Importance Of Being Idle’ – that’s the best Oasis song that Liam ever wrote.

“Even at the end, there were still these magical b-sides just being tossed out there and not really given the love and exposure that they should have been. That’s part of the charm, isn’t it? Buying ‘Wonderwall’ as a kid and then getting ‘The Masterplan’. How can he do this? Just give us the shitty live version of something and save this for a single.”

Was there anything profoundly surprising for yourself personally in getting into these songs in such depth for the book?

“I never realised in ‘Bonehead’s Bank Holiday’ that when he says, ‘Her name was Avaline’, that was a pun for ‘have a line’. That’s a joke I didn’t get 30 years ago. Going into the history of a song like ‘Stop Crying Your Heart Out’ was really moving and interesting. It comes out in 2002, then England get knocked out of the World Cup and it’s on all the montages. Oasis stopped playing it quite quickly, then Leona Lewis covers it in 2009 and all of a sudden it becomes this X-Factor audition standard.

“If you go on Youtube, you’ll see Harry Styles and Liam Payne both singing it. That’s pretty extraordinary. Then in lockdown in 2020 a cover of it is released by Radio 2 as a charity single – and it’s got the maddest line-up ever. It’s just people like Cher, Bryan Adams, Lenny Kravitz singing lines over Zoom. I love finding the stories of songs that have had that second life.”

What do you make of the tour setlist?

“I think it’s perfect, to be honest. If I was really nitpicking, there was a rumour going around that they were soundchecking with ‘Round Are Way’. I’d have loved if they’d just drop a couple more deep-cuts in the middle. They’ve got stuff like ‘Fade Away’ and ‘Talk Tonight’ which are both amazing, but maybe if they rotated those with a couple of others from that time. There’s only one song from post their imperial period, which is ‘Little By Little’ and has been a really big highlight for me, but people will hold that up as a criticism to them and say they’re just coasting.

“Not to get all Blur vs Oasis, because fuck that, but no one is going to get upset if Blur don’t play anything from their first album. Maybe you’d be a miffed if they didn’t play ‘There’s No Other Way’. Second album, same thing. If you get ‘For Tomorrow’ you’ll be happy, if you get ‘Chemical World’, then great. From the first three or four Blur albums, they could get away with a total of six or seven tunes.

“From the first two Oasis albums, there are 12 songs that they’d get arrested for not playing. You’ve got to play ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll Star’, you’ve got to play ‘Live Forever’, you’ve got to play ‘Supersonic’, ‘Cigarettes & Alcohol’, ‘Slide Away’, ‘Hello’, ‘Roll With It’, ‘Wonderwall’, ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’, ‘Some Might Say’, ‘Cast No Shadow’, ‘Morning Glory’. There isn’t much room to move, already. Then you start tracking the b-sides and you’ve got to have ‘Acquiesce’ in there and ‘Half The World Away’.

“There’s not much wiggle room. They’re also not promoting a new album, they’re just promoting themselves. Just from a nerd point of view, I’d love it if they alternated a couple, but then I’m very privileged to have seen the show a couple of times. This is as good as I’ve ever seen them, at the minute – and I’ve seen them on every tour since ‘94.”

Do you think we’ll get to the very end of the tour with an identical setlist?

“I don’t know. The band are shit-hot. The thing of having both Bonehead and Gem [Archer] has really given it something. Bonehead is the secret sauce, really. Everybody used to say, ‘Oh he just plays bar chords and can’t play’, but he really adds this oomph to the sound.

“They’re not massively complex songs to learn, so hopefully they’ve got a couple in the bank if they get bored of something. It’s difficult to know what you’d want to drop, that’s the problem. There are about 15 that are undroppable. That production and the screens are wild, so there’s more to do with that too.”

Having been on the inner circle of Oasis with writing sleeve notes and helping Noel put the book Any Road Will Get Us There together, what’s your opinion on the chances of new material? Did you even see the reunion coming?

“I just don’t think that anybody knows, really. The manager said something about that, then Liam said, ‘Nobody knows what the future holds except me and Noel’. There does seem to be some genuine warmth between the two of them on stage. If you watch clips from Heaton Park there are lovely moments between them.

“The last time I saw Noel play solo was at Alexandra Palace about a month before the reunion got announced. He started by playing half of ‘Council Skies’. That’s not a guy who’s coasting on his catalogue. He’s still very much a going concern as a songwriter. I think ‘Council Skies’ is his best album. He’s constantly writing and has a backlog of songs. Who’s to say he’s not just going to wake up one day and go, ‘You know who’d be good singing this?’ I think it would start like that.

“A song isn’t on the cards, but I don’t think it’s impossible. The reunion seemed implausible not so long ago. Only they know.”

A Sound So Very Loud: The Inside Story Of Every Oasis Song is out now and available here.

Oasis kicked off their long-awaited ‘Live ‘25’ tour dates with two shows at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium and five homecoming dates at Manchester’s Heaton Park earlier last month. This past week saw them play the first three of their seven scheduled gigs at London’s Wembley Stadium.

The tour continues with more Wembley dates on Saturday (August 2) and Sunday (3). From there, the band will go to Edinburgh and Dublin, before heading across the pond for their North American shows.

The post “There’s always a good story to every Oasis song,” new book explores appeared first on NME.