Heathen Chemistry

Whether the product of the Gallagher brothers actually sitting down to a quiet Sunday dinner and patching things up privately, or the lucrative machinations of their respective agents meeting “secretly” in upmarket London restaurants, Oasis are, rather unsurprisingly, back together and touring.

Meh.

We’ve had promises like this before in recent years, from The Stone Roses to The Verve to Supergrass, with things eventually falling apart once everybody remembers why they fell out in the first place. Saying that, Supergrass appear to still be going. I just think they’re nervous about entering a confined and stressful studio space.

In the 90s, you couldn’t avoid the sound of Oasis even if you tried. They were the prophesied-return of The Beatles (even though Oasis’ sound is more 1970s glam rock), in that their edgy rock songs crossed over into pop hysteria.

Good grief it was annoying, with even the band’s official logo looking like something you’d see printed on the side of a pair of cheap trainers.

(What’s the Story) Morning Glory was the album that really hit the wider audio and visual media hard. At one point, you could walk down the high street and pretty much hear the entire album played out from shop to shop. I actually hadn’t heard a single track from their Definitely Maybe debut until I finally sat down to get into the band in 2004.

But let’s back up a bit.

Apart from the odd tease here and there, for the first two decades of my life I’d been mostly listening to film scores and classical music. Little me would gleefully sit there with compilation tapes lost in his own messed-up world. Good times. But things were destined to change. After my parents had a messy break-up and divorce around the 2001-02 period, suddenly I felt safe listening to something slightly more mainstream than Elliot Goldenthal and Richard Wagner. My conservative mother had moved out in order to return to her Merseyside roots and dad was busy shagging his new girlfriend, so nobody was around to mock my burgeoning change in musical tastes.

And they usually would have done.

Now earning a living in offices, where radios pierced the deafening silence of bureaucracy hard at work, I started to notice the tunes I kept hearing over and over again. Who knows whether it was because of what was going on at home or just the music of the time resonating with me, but I gently entered the shallow end of the, erm, rock pool. Beginning with Travis and Stereophonics and Coldplay, I soon waded in deeper with Radiohead and The Smashing Pumpkins.

But not Oasis. I had been bludgeoned over the head with them too much over the years, so they were on the back-burner until I felt ready.

Right, let’s jump forward now…

Yes, I eventually bought up all of Oasis’ albums at once and went through them one-by-one, in a very workman-like fashion, as I still do with artists to this day. It’s the one thing I’m formal and organised about. While I found the ambition and petulant whine of their first two albums memorable, I warmed more to the obscene decadence of Be Here Now. Which still, to this very day, remains a tragically under-appreciated album. I mean, I just don’t hear what everyone else seems to have a problem with. “Too many guitars”?! What?! Have you actually listened to Definitely Maybe and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?! Move along if that’s your problem with Be Here Now. Let’s face it, people don’t like it because the band were just generally overplayed on the airwaves anyway and the press turned against the Manchester five-piece.

Be Here Now is a fine album, full of great songs that are lusciously produced.

But we’re not here today to talk about that release, are we? No. You see, general opinion was/is that Don’t Believe the Truth was the band’s big comeback after the dreary and uninspired Standing on the Shoulder [sic] of Giants, but it wasn’t. Heathen Chemistry was. It’s a record that revealed the band’s joyful sound as having returned, being brim-full of passion and colour, without outstaying its welcome. Which is what music in the late-90s had been thoroughly lambasted for.

Opening with the greatest wake-up call in modern rock history, “The Hindu Times”, this album became the start to my Saturday/Sunday mornings for quite a few years. How one can listen to this bombastic introduction and not punch the air and pogo dance as they brew their morning coffee, as I would do, is beyond me. I am a morning person though, so perhaps I am alone there.

I just know I’ll never feel as fresh and full of energy as I do in those first few hours. I’m simply no good to anyone after midday.

I would argue “Force of Nature” is something of a minor early misstep, as I really believe you should keep the pace going after your opening track. “Force of Nature” just grinds things momentarily to a halt. “Hung in a Bad Place” or closer “Better Man” would have been wiser choices, but hey-ho. “Force of Nature”’s bouncing percussion is just off-putting, as is the pinky-plonk piano part and raspy lead guitar riff. Not that I’m complaining or anything. It’s a fine song, with attitude to spare and certainly should have made the cut. It’s really the production of it that mildly bothers me.

So, yes, “Hung in a Bad Place” picks up the pace wonderfully, leading us into the delightful “Songbird”. This one feels like a sketch scribbled on a cool summer evening in a picturesque garden. Ahhh. Like the album as a whole, it gets in and out without upsetting the professional music press with too much instrumentation or runtime. They do have other things to be getting on with, after all.

And then Noel gets his ballad, in the form of “Little by Little”, which is the song from Heathen Chemistry that received the most airplay. I must’ve seen the music video floating about on television at least twice a day at the time. Remember music television? When they used to show music videos and concerts? I believe they’ve all been infested by reality bollocks now. Sigh. Progress, huh?

Instrumental side changer (if you’re listening to this on vinyl, I guess) “A Quick Peep” is the sort of thing I really want to be producing. You know, as a hobby. I have no excuse now that the weather is gloriously cold again, so I shall start literally dusting off my instruments and recording gear and get my arse into action. Oh I do so love a mid-album instrumental! I wonder if somebody has compiled a playlist of the greatest examples of this. Or perhaps I should do it. Hmmm…

I really enjoy how “(Probably) All in My Mind” bleeds gracefully into the campfire romp “She is Love”, with the former’s title displaying an unnecessary but fun use of brackets. These two songs, representing a loose medley of sorts, pre-empted Green Day’s American Idiot by a couple of years. Not that such devices hadn’t been used in the past, even the recent past, but this one certainly presents an early example of such a thing in the post-Britpop years.

I still find it amusing how, initially, retrospective articles and documentaries about 90s music attempted to downplay “Britpop” as an actual genre, claiming it was just an invention of the music press. That attempt at “Britpop denial” has given way to embracing the idea wholeheartedly, which is in everyone’s best interest.

The haunting “Born on a Different Cloud” is just a pinch too creaky to be on here, sounding more like a Standing on the Shoulder of Giants-era slog, but the piercing feedback, creating a ghostly howl, is interesting enough to warrant inclusion. And, of course, “Better Man” is a driving standard that gives us a crowd-pleasing end to things.

So, there you have it. A bit of a random post by me this morning, but my mood has lifted enough over the weekend to risk listening to something other than comforting Dutch power-pop. Which I’ve been clinging too for weeks now. I’m blaming the summer, as I will until the day I die, for sapping my will to indulge in other stuff. I’m seriously considering getting my passport sorted and disappearing off to Greenland between June and August from now on.

We shall see.

Let me know which is your favourite Oasis album, as it is a matter debated across the British Isles as regularly as the fucking weather. I’ve actually still never listened to their as-now final album, Dig Out Your Soul, so perhaps that may turn out to be my favourite. Stranger things have happened. I don’t know what I’m afraid of, so I should probably just bite the bullet and stick it on.

Do stay in touch, darlings.

Toodles!