Garbage Days Revisited #80: Oasis - "Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants" (2000)

 

"Goin' leaving this city/Goin' drivin' outta town/And you're comin' with me/'Cos that time is always now" - Oasis - Go Let It Out

It seems to be a theme among the more successful bands we cover on both Garbage Days Revisited and Sounds From The Junkshop, right from the first SFTJ we did on Carter USM to the 100th a couple of days ago on the Darkness, that when you're at the top, the only way to go is down. And that's very much gonna be the theme of this column as we look at Oasis in the noughties or "The Aftermath Years" as they could be called.

It may not be the coolest thing to admit as a Britrocker but yeah, I used to like Oasis although I was very much in a minority among the other 15-year-olds who I used to hang around with at school, most of whom were into shoegazing and grunge. I guess you could say that while 1991 and the first few months of 1992 was the year my music tastes properly started to take shape thanks to the likes of Carter, the Senseless Things, the Wonder Stuff, Mega City Four etc, 1994 was the year when it started to evolve (we'll skip late 1992 and the whole of 1993 as very little noteworthy really happened then apart from maybe the Manics and Blur's Modern Life Is Rubbish). That was the year I discovered Terrorvision, Therapy?, the Wildhearts (well, okay, that was January '95 but near enough), These Animal Men, Pulp, Suede's Dog Man Star, Shed Seven, Kerbdog, the Almighty's Crank, the Charlatans' Up To Our Hips (stay tuned for a future GDR on that one)...and Oasis.

I'd heard Supersonic and Shakermaker when they breached the Top 40 but it was the group's third single Live Forever which properly reeled me in. After two years of the bloated corporate major label strain of grunge hearing blokes dressed like tramps whinging about how life was terrible, there was no hope and you might as well just give up now, hearing Liam Gallagher roaring "I wanna live, I don't wanna die" on that song really felt like a changing of the guard. Enough of self-pity, let's try and see the light at the end of the tunnel and get out into the fresh air instead of curling up in the foetal position feeling sorry for ourselves. When Definitely Maybe followed a couple of months later, it genuinely did live up to the hype and for me it still stands up alongside Earth vs the Wildhearts, How To Make Friends And Influence People, Dog Man Star, Troublegum, Crank, (Come On, Join) The High Society, His 'n' Hers and Up To Our Hips as one of the best albums of what, as we've already established, was a pretty stellar year really. Even the weakest track on it, Cigarettes and Alcohol, is still the sort of thing that every single band who'd followed in the Gallaghers' wake in 1996 would have killed to have written.

What happened afterwards is history of course, the group would well and truly go supernova, chalk up a pair of number one singles (Some Might Say and Don't Look Back In Anger) and put out a second album in (What's The Story) Morning Glory which was four fifths amazing but, looking back, was showing a couple of signs of the band wobbling even then. But the highs on that album were so awesome (Champagne Supernova still makes the hairs on my neck stand on end even now) that you could easily overlook the over-long Hey Now or the plodding Cast No Shadow. When they headlined Knebworth in the summer of '96 it really did feel like the Britpop Woodstock and I remember staying up till midnight taping that gig off the radio.

And then, of course, came the crash. I've already ranted at length about Be Here Now in my Worst Albums Ever feature last year but it really did break my 18-year-old heart when it was unleashed on the world. An overblown mess of coked-up overlong and over-produced dirges, it really did seem as though Noel Gallagher had well and truly lost the plot with his one time everyman touch well and truly gone to be replaced by a bunch of rich man's drivel for lyrics (as epitomised by the turgid comeback single D'You Know What I Mean?). Even the one good song on there (the wistful Don't Go Away which could almost have sat on its successor with lyrics like "I don't wanna be there when you're comin' down/I don't wanna be there when you hit the ground") suffers a bit from the awful production. The spell was broken, Oasis would never again be "mega" and your writer is still given to wandering around muttering darkly under his breath that Noel owes him a tenner whenever that album's mentioned (the thirteen quid I paid for it minus the three I got from Polar Bear record exchange in Leeds when I took it in there a couple of weeks later).

The aftermath of the album, with most magazines quickly backtracking on the good reviews they'd given it, sent the band into a tailspin. Guitarist Bonehead and bassist Guigsy would both jump ship leaving Liam and Noel as the two original members (drummer Tony McCarroll had been fired in the run up to What's The Story? to be replaced by Alan White, younger brother of Style Council drummer Steve) and the group essentially recording album number four as a trio. Gem Archer (who joined in time to play on a few tracks on the album) and Andy Bell (who didn't) were brought in from the wreckages of Heavy Stereo and Hurricane #1 respectively with Standing On The Shoulder (sic) of Giants seeing the light of day in 2000.

Standing... seems to get a bit of a poor rep when people look back at Oasis' career but I'd say that, while far from perfect, it's not actually all that bad and therefore probably the band's best candidate for a GDR column. I actually thought when I first heard the lead-off single Go Let It Out that it was comfortably the band's strongest since Don't Look Back In Anger with the excesses of the previous record shaken off in favour of a simple straightforward four minute singalong just like the band had done so well a few years previously. It got my hopes up for the album and, although it wasn't the all-killer no-filler affair that the first two were, it did at least show the band starting to claw their way back after the disaster of Be Here Now.

First up, the things wrong with it - Who Feels Love? is dreadful, I mean it sounds like Kula Shaker ferfeckssake and there's never any need for that while you can certainly tell that the Liam-penned Little James was his first foray into songwriting. But there's at least a few sparks here that show signs of life in the group - Put Yer Money Where Yer Mouth Is and I Can See A Liar are solid rockers (albeit ones that would've been B-side quality back in the group's imperial phase), the gentle Roll It Over makes for a decent album closer and Fuckin' In The Bushes is probably the biggest surprise on the album, a scuzzy instrumental which could almost be Vanishing Point era Primal Scream.

Overall though, Standing... mostly comes across as Oasis' comedown album after the wanton excess of Be Here Now and it's no coincidence that the three strongest songs on here after Go Let It Out are the trio at the start of side two which show the paranoia that kicks in when the party's over, your friends have gone home and you're all alone. As a year three student who was still kind of discovering himself a bit and making some pretty stupid choices with his life, it's probably not a surprise that they were the ones I was drawn to. Gas Panic's sense of the walls closing in ("What tongueless ghost of sin crept through my curtains/Sailing on a sea of sweat on a stormy night") and Where Did It All Go Wrong's sense that you're not getting any younger and the world's moving on without you ("You know that feeling you get/You feel you're older that time") that everyone starts to feel once they hit their twenties and see new waves of music that they don't "get" creeping up on them (even if it's a bit of a blatant steal of Paul Weller's Sunflower) definitely tapped into my paranoid early twenties psyche as did Sunday Morning Call, a song Noel's since come out as admitting he's not a fan of but I reckon he should cut it some slack - those lyrics "And you take what you want/But you won't get it for free" seemed to sum up a lot of mornings after to me in those years. As, you suspect, they did for its writer.

Unlike its predecessor, the critics were arguably out for Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants from the start and the album got much more lukewarm reviews than Be Here Now. The tours promoting it were a bit of a shambles with Liam and Noel at each others' throats and Liam turning up well and truly hammered at one of the group's flagship gigs at the Manchester Arena. Not for the first time the group's future was in doubt but they resurfaced in 2002 with Heathen Chemistry which is probably the strongest of their noughties albums. Powered along again by a strong lead-off single in The Hindu Times, it's two thirds decent and one third filler - Stop Crying Your Heart Out is probably the nearest the band ever got to a Don't Look Back In Anger for the noughties (despite a terrible video) and Little By Little, Born On A Different Cloud and Better Man are decent efforts as well. Even Force of Nature which I wasn't a fan of at the time has grown on me (I think possibly after seeing it used in the film Love, Honour and Obey to accompany Rhys Ifans swaggering down a corridor with a gun getting ready to shoot Jonny Lee Miller looking like the coolest motherfucker ever). Overall, this 'un ain't bad.

2005's Don't Believe The Truth I think was the first Oasis album I didn't bother with at the time, mostly after the terrible up-it's-own-arse pretentious promo video for lead-off single Lyla, a shame as listening back to it now, it's a good song. Ironically, the second single, The Importance Of Being Idle was a terrible song (basically an ultra-lazy rip off of the Kinks' Sunny Afternoon) with a great video (again starring that man Rhys Ifans). Listening back to that album now, it's actually a bit of an intriguing beast with Noel only contributing three or four songs and Liam, Gem and Andy picking up the slack making it possibly the least Oasis-like Oasis album. Like its two predecessors, it's not perfect but there's enough good moment (Turn Up The Sun, Love Like A Bomb, Guess God Thinks I'm Abel, Let There Be Love) to make it worth a curiosity listen.

2008's Dig Out Your Soul (which saw White replaced by former Icicle Works/Lightning Seeds man Chris Sharrock), on the other hand, is the sound of a band limping to a halt, basically trying to recapture the sound of 15 years before but not doing it as well and aside from lead-off single Shock of the Lightning, it's pretty anonymous to be honest. The band would call it a day the following year after one post-show punch-up too many between the Gallagher brothers - I seem to remember on hearing the news that my only surprise was that it hadn't happened much sooner. Of course, since then both have been active with Noel going full on trad rock jam band tedium with his dreadful High Flying Birds (also featuring Gem on guitar) and Liam after initially stumbling a bit with Beady Eye (which had Gem, Bell and Sharrock on board as well), cranking out a series of increasingly enjoyable solo albums culminating in C'mon You Know which we reviewed last month here. And yes, if you'd told my fifteen year old self that in this day and age Liam would be coming across as the more musically enjoyable (not to mention more likeable) Gallagher brother, I wouldn't have believed you either.

It seems weird that it's now over two decades since Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants came out but I think those who call it the worst Oasis album are maybe being a bit too harsh on it (obviously Be Here Now takes that award but for my money, Standing... is miles better than the torpid Dig Out Your Soul as well - I'd even nudge it slightly ahead of Don't Believe The Truth tbh). It may be the sound of a shaken band trying to get their sense of direction back but for me at least it did show that there was still life left in the operation and it provided the gentle soundtrack to a fair few hangovers and comedowns in my early twenties while I was trying to regain my own bearings. And sometimes, especially at that age, you need some comfort songs like that to remind you that even rock stars have their moments of serious self-doubt. They may never have reached those dizzying heights of 1994-96 again but at least this album and Heathen Chemistry proved that Oasis weren’t a spent force. Well, not quite yet anyway…