(What's The Story) Morning Glory?

Album review

Few albums can say that they have defined a generation, but (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? is undoubtedly among that elite crowd. Recorded over the course of just 15 days in 1995, the album catapulted Oasis from crossover indie act to worldwide pop phenomenon, flooding the charts with retro-rock riffs and unforgettable hooks. To say that its impact was titanic would be an understatement. It became the fastest-selling album in the UK since Michael Jackson’s Bad. It has sold over 22 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling albums of all time. And it was the knockout blow in the battle of Britpop, being twice as successful as their rival Blur’s contemporaneous album The Great Escape.

Following up from the incredibly popular Definitely Maybe was no mean feat, but Oasis pulled it off without a hitch. The idealistic hope-against-the-odds message from their beginnings was replaced with realism and reflection. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Noel Gallagher commented that while their first album “was all about dreaming of being a pop star in a band, the second album is about actually being a pop star in a band”. They had reached where they wanted to be, and were wondering what lay beyond fame and fortune. The Mancunians had clearly enjoyed enough sex, drugs and rock’n’roll to yield four sides of vinyl, though they never limited themselves purely to counter-culture clichés. Noel Gallagher’s songwriting took on a notably more introspective tone, nestled in amongst jauntier tracks like She’s Electric and Roll With It. His philosophising shone through perhaps most obviously on Cast No Shadow, a song which was dedicated to The Verve’s frontman Richard Ashcroft and details the struggle that songwriters (and more universally, all of us) face when they desperately try to say the right thing and it keeps coming out wrong. Elsewhere, we find the attitude and aloofness that Oasis do so well. The cocaine anthem Morning Glory rides along a continuous wave of stadium-filling guitars as Liam Gallagher sings “All your dreams are made / When you’re chained to the mirror and the razor blade”. And then of course, there are Oasis’ biggest hits: Don’t Look Back In Anger, which urges the listener to live regret-free; Champagne Supernova, which despite its famously nonsensical lyrics (Slowly walking down the hall / Faster than a cannonball we’re looking at you) resonates with people the world over; and the often-imitated-never-replicated Wonderwall, where you’d be hard-pressed to find any Brit who doesn’t know all the words. Being more than just wedding dancefloor fillers and karaoke classics, the three tracks brilliantly capture the band’s skill for drawing complexity from simplicity. Ultimately, this album marked the beginning of the long-drawn-out end for Oasis and the albums that followed never quite lived up to the glorious rock and carefree euphoria found here. But then that’s another story… © Abi Church/Qobuz