The Story of Oasis in 20 Songs

As the Gallagher brothers declare peace and prepare for their comeback tour—and as all their albums arrive on Apple Music in Spatial Audio—we’re looking back at the rise, crash, and resurrection of Britpop’s biggest band.

Late one night in May 1993, Creation Records managing director Tim Abbot picked up his ringing phone. It was the label’s founder, Alan McGee, breathlessly calling from Glasgow with news of Oasis, five lads from Burnage, Manchester that he’d watched support indie-pop outfit Sister Lovers. “He’s gone, ‘Man, I just saw this band, they’re a cross between the Pistols, The Stones, and The Beatles,’” Abbot told Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson in 2020. “And I said, ‘Well, that will do.’” McGee needed no convincing that it would, and had already offered the group a record deal. Before the year was out, singer Liam Gallagher, his guitarist/songwriter brother Noel, guitarist Paul Arthurs, bassist Paul McGuigan, and drummer Tony McCarroll were in the studio, recording their debut album Definitely Maybe. By the time Oasis released their debut single “Supersonic” in April 1994, just three days after the world had learned of Kurt Cobain’s death, Britpop was being hailed as an antidote to grunge. The UK music press celebrated Suede’s kitchen-sink melodramas, Blur’s suburban vignettes, and Pulp’s twitching-curtain confessionals as colorful, hyperlocal, and sharply melodic counterpoints to the insular howl emanating from Seattle. With “Supersonic,” Oasis added chin-out swagger and another killer tune to the party. What its lyrics about girls called Elsa sniffing Alka-Seltzer didn’t foreshadow though was how the band would soon become the voice of a generation. Little more than three months later, Definitely Maybe arrived ablaze with a combination of ferocity, attitude, and melody that upheld McGee’s “Pistols x Stones x Beatles” assessment. More important, though, was its sense of desperation. The album opened with the line “I live my life in the city/And there’s no easy way out” (“Rock ’n’ Roll Star”), heralding a collection of songs that expressed dead-end-job frustration and dole-queue boredom, and then longed for better things (“Live Forever,” “Slide Away”)—concluding that, in the short term, those better things might simply be “Cigarettes & Alcohol,” lasagne with friends (“Digsy’s Dinner”), or something a little headier (“Columbia”). With their dispatches from everyday drudgery, these working-class Mancunians offered Britpop something instantly more universal than the voyeurism and wry character sketches of some of their art-school-educated peers. Like fellow Mancs The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, Oasis were a rock band that drew on their city’s dance-floor history. “What I took from acid house, was like, ‘This is not an elitist thing,’” Noel told Wilkinson in 2022. “All the songs that had lyrics, they were all inclusive, it was all about ‘us.’ And they were all about ‘we.’ These songs are about us.”

If Definitely Maybe counseled hedonistic escape, Oasis also provided a soundtrack for the morning after. On the B-sides to their early singles, you’d often find an acoustic, Noel-sung ballad that presented the songwriter at his most vulnerable and compassionate. Here, he was putting an arm around a struggling friend (“D’Yer Wanna Be a Spaceman?”) and ruefully sensing the days passing him by (“Half the World Away”). Definitely Maybe was built on impatient energy but Noel’s tender, reflective side was a pillar of follow-up (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?. “Wonderwall,” the song that broke Oasis globally, was about finding salvation and solace in friendship. The sighing “Cast No Shadow” was inspired by Noel watching his friend, The Verve singer Richard Ashcroft, struggle with his place in the world. And the album closed with “Champagne Supernova,” seven slowly burning minutes of Oasis greeting their imperial period by wondering just how fleeting and warping fame might be. On an album that would sell over 20 million copies worldwide and later earn a spot on Apple Music’s 100 Best Albums list, these depths and sensitivities demanded a different approach from a singer who’d chewed up Definitely Maybe’s edges with a feral snarl. “Liam shouted Definitely Maybe, but …Morning Glory? was this absolute Noel, Owen Morris [producer] follow-on where the kid sang it,” Abbot told Wilkinson. “His voice totally changed. ‘Champagne Supernova,’ ‘Wonderwall,’ some of these songs are just fucking beautifully sung. That’s the beauty of those two albums, one’s as raw as fuck, one’s as polished as fuck, but they’re both rock ’n’ roll right the way through.” Even when third album Be Here Now arrived in 1997, with Oasis rich and famous enough to write the record in Mick Jagger’s Mustique villa, recruit Johnny Depp to play guitar (on “Fade In-Out”), and commission videos that took two dozen animators half a year to make (“All Around the World”), the standout songs tapped into Noel’s melancholy (“Don’t Go Away,” “Stand By Me”).

Like any brothers, the Gallaghers bickered. It’s just that they did it in ways that thrilled the tabloids and, occasionally, threatened to disrupt the course of British pop. Four months after the release of Definitely Maybe, Noel temporarily quit Oasis when a shambolic gig at LA’s Whisky a Go Go climaxed with Liam hurling a tambourine at his head. In 1995, the recording of (What’s the Story)… was suspended for 10 days after Noel attacked Liam with a cricket bat—the same year that “Wibbling Rivalry,” a Dictaphone recording of the pair arguing during an NME interview, reached No. 52 in the UK Singles Chart. The following year, Liam walked away from the group’s MTV Unplugged performance minutes before they were due on stage at London’s Royal Festival Hall. The band played on, with Noel assuming lead vocals—seemingly unruffled by the sight and sound of his younger brother heckling him from the royal box. We could go on. And on—right up to the August night in 2009 when, backstage at the Rock en Seine festival in Paris, Liam threw a plum in anger at Noel, and then a guitar, so Noel smashed up the guitar and walked out of the band, barely speaking to his brother for the next 15 years. But the point to be made here is that this flammable relationship also inspired some of Oasis’ best songs. The aching “Talk Tonight” is Noel’s account of the aftermath of the Whisky a Go Go drama. And while Noel would never give Liam the satisfaction of admitting a song was written about him, it’s impossible not to sense their relationship in the solidarity of “Acquiesce” (“Because we need each other/We believe in one another”) or the spite of “Let’s All Make Believe” (“So, let’s all make believe/That we’re still friends and we like each other”). And just who is Noel addressing when he sings, “Dance if you wanna dance/Please, brother, take a chance” while wistfully contemplating fate on “Wonderwall” B-side “The Masterplan”? In the 2000s, as Noel loosened his monopoly on the band’s songwriting, Liam’s “Guess God Thinks I’m Abel” put a Biblical spin on their relationship. Of course, Abel was murdered by his brother Cain, so it’s worth noting that even in 2019, when the brothers were still only communicating with each other through barbed social media posts and interview quotes, Liam told Apple Music, “I’ll still dig him out, because he needs to be dug out. And he’ll dig me out because I need to be dug out. But it is love, love, love, it’s not hate, hate, hate. I don’t hate him. I love him.”

It wasn’t just the bond between the brothers that proved brittle over the years. Bandmates have come and gone too. Alan White replaced McCarroll as drummer in 1995, his agile fills and rolls bringing lithe new fluidity to the band on (What’s the Story)…. After McGuigan and Arthurs quit during early sessions for 2000 album Standing on the Shoulder of Giants, they were eventually replaced by Ride’s Andy Bell and Gem Archer of Heavy Stereo. If Oasis ever gained a reputation for plodding conservatism—not discouraged by the occasional pronouncement like Noel’s 2008 declaration that “I’m not having hip-hop at Glastonbury”—then plenty of their 21st-century output argues otherwise. Largely recorded before Bell and Archer arrived, Standing… featured satisfying experiments with drum loops and samples (“Go Let It Out”) and trips into paranoid psychedelia (“Gas Panic!”). Bell and Archer’s skill and experience aided further left turns on later albums, particularly when Noel encouraged them—and Liam—to write songs. It produced the robust likes of “Songbird” (Liam), “A Bell Will Ring” (Archer), “Turn Up the Sun” (Bell), and “Love Like a Bomb” (Liam and Archer), and gave Noel the space (or competition) to inspire some of his most adventurous songwriting: 2008 single “The Shock of the Lightning” was him exploring a fondness of ’70s krautrock, for instance. Noel even credits this new democracy with rejuvenating Oasis. “I’d fallen slightly out of love with songwriting,” he told Lars Ulrich on the Metallica drummer’s Apple Music Radio show It’s Electric! in 2018. “To keep writing every 18 months to two years, 16, 18 songs on your own, it burnt me out. They really, really helped and some good stuff came out. I think it gave the band a longer shelf life. We might’ve called it a day five years earlier if it wasn’t for that.”

“If you took all the great tracks off those last four or five albums, you’d get a great album,” Noel told Wilkinson in 2021. “As a whole, the albums were good, but obviously not to the standard of the first three. But we never lost the ability to fucking do it live.” From Alan McGee discovering Oasis to the band imploding in a hail of plum juice and guitar shards, gigs are where so much of the Oasis story unfolded. Landmark shows included their two-night stand at Knebworth House in 1996—then the largest outdoor gigs in UK history—and their farewell to the old Wembley in July 2000, where they were the last British band to play the stadium before it got knocked down to be completely rebuilt. So it only seems appropriate that their reunion is happening on stage rather than—as far as we know for now—in the studio. In August 2024, 14 million people joined the online queue for the 1.4 million tickets available for the first 17 dates of the UK and Ireland leg of the 2025 tour. For Oasis’ part, maybe some of the appeal of playing live again is in bringing their existing songs to a new audience. When Liam played Definitely Maybe as a touring solo show in 2024, the crowds contained plenty of Britpop refugees drinking in nostalgia with their pints but also a lot of teens feeling the electric charge of hearing those songs live for the first time. “[The songs] mean as much today as they did then, to a new generation of kids,” Noel told Wilkinson in 2022. “And I’d like to say I was clever enough to foresee that, but I wasn’t. It was just coming from somewhere that was pure and wasn’t thought out—and I guess it’ll never die now.”