Noel Gallagher on 30 years of Definitely Maybe

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On the day their debut album, Definitely Maybe, was released, Oasis played an in-store show at Virgin Records on Oxford Street in London. It was August 29, 1994. Queues snaked round the corner and the band were on edge and excited. They had been up all night and were already famous, with celebrity hangers-on. Evan Dando, of the US band the Lemonheads, had attached himself to them, and Lars Ulrich from Metallica was obsessed. The snooker renegade Alex “Hurricane” Higgins was a regular follower, as were the gangsters “Mad” Frankie Fraser and Reggie Kray, who called them up from prison. Anna Friel was in their circle, along with Kate Moss and, of course, Patsy Kensit, Liam’s future wife.
Definitely Maybe became the bestselling debut in history. It’s the second most streamed album of the Nineties (following another Oasis album, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, with more than 800 million streams.
“I guess it’s the definitive Oasis album,” Noel Gallagher says of the record he wrote 30 years ago. “It has the spirit, the arrogance of youth. Teenage anthems. It’s live — no bullshit. If we’d made only that album, then I’d still be as happy as I am now.”
It begins with a mission statement, Rock’n’Roll Star, before gliding into the anthemic Live Forever and the escapist, optimist working-class rush of Cigarettes & Alcohol. My favourite songs are the epic Columbia and Slide Away. None of the tracks really sound like the Beatles; they snarl and pummel like the Sex Pistols or Guns N’ Roses. But the Beatles were the reference point for Oasis simply because no British band had made music this essential for years.
I ask Gallagher when he realised that the band he led would be a success. “Well, we knew the songs were great because we played them every night and all the shows were outrageous,” he says. “But at that time it was just a good album — nothing more, nothing less. It’s only through time that it has become what it is now.”
Fame happened very quickly. Oasis were signed in May 1993 after the Creation label boss Alan McGee chanced on a gig in Glasgow. After that, they embarked on a string of attention-grabbing shows before releasing their first single in April 1994. Liam and Noel, the brothers from Burnage in Manchester, were only 21 and 26 respectively (the bassist Paul “Guigsy” McGuigan and drummer Tony McCarroll were 23 and guitarist Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs 29).
Brian Cannon, the graphic designer who did the cover and crafted its image, speaks about their desperate ambition at the time Definitely Maybe was recorded. “They thought, ‘If this doesn’t work, we’re f***ed. It would have just been menial jobs for the rest of their lives.”
Liam was the first Gallagher brother to join the band, when it was called Rain — a group founded by the other three with Chris Hutton, after they all met in Manchester playing football. Liam joined as the singer when Hutton was sacked and it was he who decided to change the band’s name to Oasis. Noel joined soon after.
Cannon was part of the band’s inner circle. “People say, ‘Oh, you just toured the country getting hammered with Oasis.’ And there was an element of that, but it was part of the process. They were so good. But the music industry is a lottery. Thing is, they won.”
Why does Cannon think they succeeded? “First, great songs,” he says. “Second, the chemistry between brothers was newsworthy, while Liam is a good-looking guy, despite doing nothing. He just stood there. Third, Noel had the Brian Clough effect. Clough won the European Cup with Nottingham Forest, who’d been relegated three years previously. How? Everyone played out their skin. He was a charismatic leader and that was the same for Oasis. Everyone went the extra mile because the prospect of not having that job was a disaster.”
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Johnny Hopkins was Oasis’s first publicist, placing him at the eye of a storm. “They came out of the indie scene, but completely transcended it,” he says. Hopkins remembers McGee phoning at midnight from Glasgow after seeing Oasis for the first time. Hopkins was in bed and asked if they could speak in the morning, but McGee kept calling. “I have to tell you about this!” he raved.
The next day Hopkins heard his first Oasis song, the bold Bring It on Down. “It sounded punky and political,” he recalls — words not associated with the band much, but ones that fit a track that bellows about “outcasts” and the “underclass”. “The cassette had a distorted Union Jack on the front, like a Union Jack going down the toilet. That seemed to be a comment on the state of Britain in 1993, how the north of England had been run down.”
Hopkins met the band soon after, when Liam, Noel and Bonehead travelled to the Creation offices in London in an old BMW. The trio stood in a room, in a triangle, back-to-back and proceeded to answer questions. “There was so much laughter, love and respect between Liam and Noel,” Hopkins says. Noel always knew the value of press — he would call Hopkins twice a day with stories to put in the NME or Melody Maker.
“And you know, some of those stories weren’t true,” Hopkins says. Can he offer an example? “They played an industry gig in 1994 in Gleneagles,” he replies. “And Noel got on the phone and told me they’d nicked Jackie Stewart’s golf buggy and were riding it around the course. Those stories won people over. Fans wanted to be Noel, but wanted to sleep with Liam. As for Bonehead, Guigsy and Tony? Well, while you might aspire to be Noel, there was a sense that you could actually be one of them.”
Cannon first met Noel in a lift — in a Manchester warehouse. “Where the f*** did you get them trainers from?” the frontman asked the designer. It was the early Nineties and Cannon was wearing Adidas at a time when the fashion was for grunge. He stood out — like Oasis would soon. Cannon had recently taken his mother to Italy and, while in Florence visiting the Uffizi, had bought the trainers that led Noel to notice him and the visual style of Oasis to be born.
“It all dates back to Renaissance paintings,” Cannon says, laughing, and he does not just mean those Italian trainers. The cover of Definitely Maybe, that cluttered living room shot taken at Bonehead’s house in Didsbury, Manchester, was also inspired by the Renaissance practice of having its paintings littered with visual metaphors — most specifically, for Cannon, The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck.
The band were all asked to bring an object of personal value to the shoot. There is a photo of Rodney Marsh playing for Manchester City, because that is who Guigsy and the Gallaghers supported, and one of George Best too, because Bonehead was a United fan. A photo of Burt Bacharach is there at Noel’s request. The pink flamingo belonged to Bonehead. The terraced house on Stratford Avenue has, to tourists, become the Mancunian band’s version of Penny Lane.
It must have been tough to follow the success of their first album. “We never thought about things like that,” Noel says. “We went directly from the last night of the Definitely Maybe tour to record (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, and then spent the following 29 years — and counting — trying to live up to both albums.”
• Every song on Definitely Maybe — ranked
Oasis started to end almost as soon as they began. McCarroll left for good before Morning Glory, sacked by Noel for either poor drumming, a fight in Paris or both, while Guigsy and Bonehead left before the fourth album.
In 1999 McCarroll tried to sue Oasis for £18 million for lost earnings before he accepted an out-of-court settlement of £550,000, which meant giving up future royalties. Then, in 2010, he brought out his memoir — Oasis: The Truth. “I’m often referred to as the nearly man, the stupidest man in pop music,” he wrote in a book that is a mixture of reflection and bitterness, most of the latter aimed at Noel.
“The old Noel was a genuinely good lad,” he wrote. “Maybe the new Noel has just been a cocaine powered creation.” McCarroll declined an offer to speak to me for this article, but one line from his book sums it up well: “Do I regret the way it all ended? Of course. I didn’t get to enjoy it for long.” He still lives in Manchester and spent 2021 recovering from a heart attack.
As for the others? Bonehead has kept in with Liam, playing live for the singer for over a decade. Guigsy, according to McCarroll, has “retired to his back garden in north London”. Cannon says Guigsy’s life now is “a self-imposed exile”. The only photos of him on the Instagram account of his wife, Ruth, are from back in the day, a man who casts no shadow.
It has been 15 years since Liam and Noel had yet another altercation in Paris, ending Oasis. “People still think this fallout is a put-on,” says a baffled Cannon, who has stayed in touch with both Gallaghers. “You’re dreaming — they have not spoken to each other since 2009.”
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Reunion rumours will never cease. Glastonbury next year? The 50th anniversary of Definitely Maybe, when Liam will be 71 and Noel 77? It would be a surprise, what with Noel saying a few years ago: “You might do it for $200 million, but let’s say you didn’t need $200 million?” Noel is worth an estimated £50 million.
So instead of looking forward, he looks back — to 1993 when five young men made the album of a generation. “In hindsight,” Noel admits, “we didn’t really know what we were doing. We were trying to ‘make a record’, but none of us had ever done one before. So, we just set the gear up and got into character and pressed record. The rest, as they say, is mystery.”
By David Sinclair
Definitely Maybe 30th Anniversary Edition is out on Aug 30.
What’s your favourite Oasis album? Let us know in the comments below