Spare a thought for all the recovering Oasis addicts out there
It’s a tough time for a lot of us right now
There’s no such thing as an ex-Oasis addict. When you huffed (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? as much as some of us did in 1995, quitting is one thing, but then you’ve got to stay there. Needless to say, it’s been a tough week for a community that’s lost close friends to Dig Out Your Soul.
Kimberly Holloway was the Oasis dealer in my year, who pushed Morning Glory en masse to a coach-load of us driving to and from Hampton Court Palace on a class trip. Aged 13, Kim spoke like she could kick the shit out of anyone, so our coach driver agreed to play her tape of the album continuously there and back. That tape changed all of our lives for a short time, and mine forever.
My school went so hard on Oasis through 1996 that none of us even knew about Blur. A lad in the year above sang ‘Cast No Shadow’ at the talent show and everyone wanted to shag him even though he looked like a shoe. Could I sing ‘Cast No Shadow’?, I thought. We were united in obsession, all the way up to Be Here Now, which separated the wheat from the chaff. There weren’t many of us on the wheat side, let’s just say that. And for clarity, I should say that the wheat loved Be Here Now; the chaff spread themselves between The Prodigy, Spice Girls and Robbie Williams. How many of those had written ‘The Girl In The Dirty Shirt’!?
It’s easy to deride coke apocalypse Be Here Now these days, but it wasn’t the content of the album that moved my classmates along, simply trend. None of us were listening close enough to realise that the band had been too spannered to include bass guitar on it; it just sounded like more (only slightly shitter) Oasis, and that was very much fine by me. At a party someone put on ‘Don’t Go Away’ and claimed it was written about Princess Diana and everyone was briefly onside again. We were too busy pretending to be sensitive to realise that the song had been released 10 days before she died.