Be Here Now: Why Oasis deserve another crack at America
September 4, 1996, Radio City Music Hall in New York City: Liam Gallagher ape-walks his way along the red carpet into the MTV Video Awards, slapping at overhead microphones and gurning at the hordes of press clamouring for quotes. “I can’t wait to play,” he tells me, strutting past en route to a live performance of ‘Champagne Supernova’ that will see him spit beer on the stage, lob the can into the crowd, sing “Champagne supernova up your bum” to a televised audience of 100 million and sling his microphone to the ground before storming offstage.
Behind him on the carpet, his brother Noel shuffles by, less enthusiastic about proceedings. How come? “America innit,” he says, equal parts weary, wary and hard-bitten.
Flash forward five years to May 11, 2001, The Joint venue at the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. As the first chords of ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ strike up, Liam stalks moodily offstage, leaving Noel to sing to a decent but hardly rammed-to-the-rafters crowd awaiting headliners The Black Crowes. Instantly, a UK tabloid journalist stood beside me leans into my ear, scenting scandal. “Does Liam always leave the stage for this one?” they ask.
By now, six years after their disastrous attempt to capitalise on the success of their second album ‘(What’s The Story) Morning Glory’ in America – the album reaching Number Four in the Billboard charts and selling 4million copies – Oasis had been all but written off in the States. ‘Be Here Now’ had peaked at Number Two but sold a quarter of the number of copies there. ‘Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants’, a minor hit at Number 24, managed only a fifth of ‘Be Here Now’’s sales. The Bad Boys Of Britpop hype had long since blown over; now Oasis were back on the support slot slog, with only a core cult of US fans and a small coterie of British music press reviewers and gossip hounds paying them much attention.
Word is that Oasis are planning to announce a raft of massive shows across North America (and in Asia, Australia and South America) as part of their comeback phenomenon – far and away the biggest shows they’ll have ever played in the States. Thirty years after their last significant chance, the band are finally set to break big in America. And, far from it being a case of reunion hysteria sweeping the globe, this is a benchmark of success at first taken for granted, then fought hard for, and now ultimately, deservedly earned.
Oasis’s relationship with America has been amongst the bumpiest this side of Fidel Castro. As ‘Definitely Maybe’ went stratospheric back home in 1994, the band shipped out on a debut US tour that, like so many homeland superstars, brought them straight back to earth – in dives like Seattle’s Moe’s Mo’ Rockin’ Café and the Cleveland Grog Shop – with a bump. Yes, there were showcase slots on MTV’s 120 Minutes and The Jon Stewart Show, plugging ‘Supersonic’ in the hope of igniting the same sort of hype wildfire that had carried them Stateside as Britain’s New Beatles. But Stewart’s credits cut short ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll Star’ long before it reached its hypnotic implant of a chorus, and finding themselves so feted back home but playing at a 250-cap club in San Francisco called Bottom Of The Hill can only have made the band realise just how steep and high the hill in question still was.
Straight back on the bottom rung and the back foot, the young, petulant Oasis – wild and confident as a cocaine bear – went quickly off the rails. When the tour arrived in Los Angeles on September 29, legend has it, they were thrown off air at the legendary KROQ-FM for swearing, got in fights with bouncers at the Viper Room and drew a police raid down on Bonehead’s hotel room when he wouldn’t stop playing ‘Supersonic’ at full volume until 6am. Then they sent an associate out to find them some cocaine, but he allegedly came back with crystal meth. “I don’t know who fucking got it, but it was there, and we all thought it was coke,” Noel said in the 2016 documentary Oasis: Supersonic. “We’re doing big fucking lines of it, and it just kept us up for fucking days.”
At the Whiskey A Go Go on Sunset Strip, all mashed off their nads on trucker speed, the band performed what Noel would later describe as their worst set ever. Opener ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll Star’ collapsed two minutes in when Noel seemed to have a feverish divine premonition that he was in The Strokes playing ‘Last Nite’. A clearly rabid Liam, meanwhile, grew by turns angry, agitated and bored throughout their fifty minutes, threatening the crowd, swearing at his bandmates, changing lyrics (“Maybe, I don’t really wanna know how you pick your nose…”) and nodding meaningfully at his brother on the ’Married With Children’ line “Goodbye, I’m going home”. In fact, amid the brotherly altercations that followed, it was Noel who quit the tour the next day, disappearing for two weeks without warning.
“I went to San Francisco, ’cos I’d left the band at that point, and I was, well, I don’t know what I was doing,” he told NME in 1998 of his legendary AWOL period that inspired ‘Talk Tonight’. “I was just off me fucking head. And I met this chick, and she sorted me head out, really. Actually, she ended up grassing me up to the record company ’cos they were all looking for me, so she told them where I was, and they came to get me!”
Melissa Lim claimed in 2016 to be the woman in question, taking him in having first met him at the Bottom Of The Hill show. “He was very upset,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I took him in, fed him and tried to calm him down. He wanted to break up the band… I told him, ‘You can’t leave the band — you’re on the verge of something big.’”
And they were. Two extensive American tours in 1995 – including two punchy appearances on David Letterman, playing ‘Morning Glory’ and ‘Live Forever’ – saw word of their melodic greatness and acerbic attitude spread across the world’s biggest music market. By the time ‘Wonderwall’ had reached Number Eight on the Billboard chart and ‘(What’s The Story) Morning Glory’ had gone quadruple platinum in the USA in 1996 – and on a roll from their Knebworth triumphs – America was an absolute sitter for Oasis live. But Oasis just couldn’t bring themselves to tap it in the back of the net.
Arriving at Heathrow on August 27 to start what was virtually guaranteed to be their breakthrough US tour, Liam suddenly remembered he needed to buy a house for his then-fiance Patsy Kensit to live in. “The house has just been sold and we have got to be out by the weekend,” he told reporters. “I am not going around touring the US when I’ve got nowhere to live.” He refused to board the plane with his bandmates and absconded to sort out his domestic affairs, leaving the band to play the first date in Chicago without him and surrogate singer Noel reportedly furious. He joined them – in high spirits, from what he told me – in time for the next two dates and the MTV Video Awards a week later in New York, but it was exactly the sort of disdain and irreverence he showed to the US music institution that night that saw the fizzing fuse of Oasismania quickly snuffed out.
“America…couldn’t handle the fact that we didn’t give a fuck about anything,” Noel said in conversation with photographer Jill Furmanovsky last year. “I think that’s the reason we’ve never really had a number one album in America – they wouldn’t go the extra mile for us because we wouldn’t go the extra mile for them. That’s why we’ve never been nominated for a Grammy – you’ve got to do all that stuff over there, you’ve got to kind of fake it a little bit and we just we couldn’t do it, which is why we’d always stall at Number Two.”
Certainly, breaking America at that time involved playing a very rigid and deferential game, paying your respects at key radio and TV stations, scratching the right backs so that they continue scratching yours. But Oasis’s issues were rather more fundamental. The 1996 tour collapsed two weeks later after Liam had allegedly started a feud with Mark Lanegan of support band Screaming Trees that threatened to get physical and Noel became increasingly aggravated by his antagonistic behaviour both onstage and off. Noel cancelled the final four dates of the tour and flew home, band management citing “internal differences”. And that, for some substantial time, was pretty much that for Oasis’s overnight American dream.
Over the coming decade, though, they saw sense, swallowed their pride and did their graft. Year by year, tour by tour, Oasis gradually built a solid following in the States. Their albums began creeping back up the charts – ‘Heathen Chemistry’ to Number 23, final album ‘Don’t Believe The Truth’ to Number 12. On their last tour there in 2008, they were an arena band, playing LA’s 20,000-capacity Staples Center and NYC’s Madison Square Garden. By most reasonable metrics, they’d drilled away at America until it broke, the old way. These new dates may be huge steps up from that, but they’re still on the same trajectory; the last, lost fifteen years are just a crack in the timeline. America, clearly, always secretly quite fancied the idea of a champagne supernova up its butt, and it should now adopt the brace position.
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Mark Beaumont
NME
