This summer’s Oasis reunion tour is a real BFD for fans of the British band that tore up the charts during the ‘90s because no one really thought it would ever happen.
The band broke up after a backstage tussle between brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher, Oasis’ lead singer and its guitarist, in 2009. Prior to Oasis’ appearance at the Rock en Seine festival near Paris, things got physical between the pair. As quoted by the Far Out website, Noel recalls that, after a bit of bickering, Liam went to his dressing room, retrieved a guitar and “started wielding it like an axe,” noting, “he nearly took my face off with it.” Noel later said of Liam, “He’s the angriest man you will ever meet. He’s a man with a fork in a world of soup.”
Time may not heal all wounds (especially in the case of the Gallaghers), but in August of 2024, an announcement was made that Oasis would begin a world tour the following summer. With silly bickering behind them and lots of money in front of them, the Gallagher brothers have kissed and made up (well, they have at least reached the point where they can occupy the same stage for a couple of hours), embarking on a world tour that began in Wales and will come to these shores in late August, with shows in Chicago, New York and LA before heading to Mexico, South America, South Korea, Australia and Japan.
So just as the attention of many music fans is once again directed toward the brawling brothers from Manchester, two books have been released to coincide with the tour. The first, A Sound So Very Loud: The Inside Story of Every Song Oasis Recorded by Ted Kessler and Hamish MacBain (Pegasus Books, 374 pp., $28.95) provides, well, the inside story of every song Oasis has recorded. The other, Oasis Talking Shite by Not the Gallagher Brothers (Simon and Schuster, 208 pp., $28) is a compendium of quotes from the Gallaghers that fall under the category of, well, “talking shite.”
Naturally, both books reek of opportunism. A Sound begins with a transcript of Kessler and MacBain texting back and forth about rumblings concerning an impending Oasis reunion tour. After noting, “rumors getting pretty deafening,” Kessler proclaims, “Guess we better get on with this book, then.” In the case of Talking Shite, a photo of a cell phone accessing “Oasis Tickets” on the Ticketmaster website is juxtaposed with a quote from Liam, who says, “When rock and roll calls, you’ve got to pick up the phone.”
The two volumes lie at opposite ends of a continuum. A Sound So Very Loud is described in a press release as “forensically detailed.” In this case, the PR folks got it right, as Kessler and MacBain dig deep to provide extensive information about each song from the Oasis oeuvre, from the circumstances surrounding a tune’s composition to its instrumentation and musical style. However, not much is said regarding the actual recording of these tunes, which is something of a shame and which might be expected from a book of this type.
A Sound does, however, take the reader behind the scenes of some Oasis business dealings, as when Stevie Wonder (or his people) noted a resemblance between his song “Uptight” and Oasis’ “Step Out,” which was supposed to have opened side two of the album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? Wonder’s representatives demanded six points (six percent of the album’s royalties), but the Gallaghers held firm. Noel explains, “We said, ‘Do you know how much money you’re gonna get? Nothing, because it’s not going on the album. So you can fuck right off!’” As things transpired, “Step Out” ended up as the B-side of the single “Don’t Look Back in Anger.”
It is worth noting that Kessler (formerly of the magazines Q and the New Musical Express) and MacBain (also an NME alum) have enjoyed friendly relationships with Oasis over the years. In fact, A Sound So Very Loud is punctuated periodically with brief entries titled “On the Frontline with Oasis” which detail various instances when one of the authors got to hang out and maybe sink a pint or two with one or both of the Gallagher brothers.
In the spirit of professional courtesy, I will assume that these relationships have not interfered with Kessler and MacBain’s objectivity, even if the back cover of the book bears the quote from Liam, “Ted Kesler [sic] and Hamish McBain [double sic] are fantastic chaps.”
Oasis Talking Shite, on the other hand, has more modest aims, and on its own terms can be classified as a success. It is not clear who the authors are, but press materials state, “Not the Gallagher Brothers are not the Gallagher brothers (in case there was still any confusion), but they do share a love of rock ‘n’ roll, parkas, crisps, Man City and talking shite.”
Talking Shite might best be described as a diminutive coffee table book. Its dimensions are small, its length is rather short, and the only text is direct quotes from Liam and Noel on the left-facing pages and photos of the brothers with and without each other, often in the company of celebrities (Yoko Ono, Darth Vader, Tony Blair) on right-facing pages. Some of the photos demonstrate the Gallagher’s bilinguality, at least so far as obscene gestures go, with displays of both the American upraised middle finger and the British two-fingered variation.
The curation of quotes is uniformly excellent, demonstrating the boys’ skills in the wiseacre department. Sometimes their utterances are funny (Noel: “[Liam’s] like a squeaky toy that swears a lot…in a blazer.”), other times they cut deep (Noel: “[Liam’s] not as good as John Lennon. He’s not even as good as Jack Lemmon.”)
Liam gets in some serious digs in Noel’s direction as well. For instance, “Q: What’s the worst thing anyone’s said to you? Liam: Are you Noel Gallagher?” Or maybe “I like Noel outside the band. The human Noel – that’s my brother – I fucking adore him, and I’d do anything for him. But the geezer who’s in this fucking business, he’s one of the biggest cocks in the universe.”
As A Sound periodically pauses its listing of Oasis songs with “On the Frontline with Oasis” entries, Talking Shite interjects several installments of a “Guess the Wanker” quiz in the midst of the Gallaghers’ wit and wisdom. Five quotes regarding musical colleagues are placed opposite five photos, and the object is to match the quote to the rock star. For example, a photo of Jack White dressed all in black, wearing an Andalusian hat and rocking a feeble mustache, corresponds to Noel’s quote, “He looks like Zorro on donuts.”
What both books have in common is that they portray the Gallaghers as a couple of guys who always shoot straight, sometimes to the point of offensiveness. As Noel says in Talking Shite, “Every ludicrous thing I’ve ever said, I accepted the consequences, because I don’t think I’ve ever said, ‘Oh, it was taken out of context, that.’ Only wankers say that.”
