The 10 best Oasis songs that never begin or end

Analyzing a distinct feature of the band's production

The other night I left a happy hour and on the walk home I put on “Listen Up.” Jangly guitars filled my ears for blocks, and in the chorus Liam Gallagher hit the nail on the head. I’ve been trying to find my way back home.

I don’t know who was more impaired: Me, or Oasis when they recorded the song. “Tony McCarroll’s drums are even drunker than usual, which sets the tone of the rest of the sloppy musicianship, which sounds loose and disorganized and somehow absolutely perfect,” wrote music critic Steven Hyden.

Contributing to that perfection is the song length. Despite having only two identical verses, “Listen Up” is almost seven minutes long. My buddy Miles, who will be a regular supporting character in this newsletter, thinks it should be 30 minutes. 

But it’s not just that “Listen Up” is long. Drugged-up and self-obsessed bands indulging in their songs is basically the history of rock music. (See: the Grateful Dead.) The distinction is “Listen Up” doesn’t really end—it fades into guitar feedback and the sound of instruments being placed down and silenced. “Live Forever” does the same. “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” devolves into a sludgy jam. “Shakermaker” dwells for an eternity on the song’s melody and chorus. And that’s just songs from Oasis’ first album. There isn’t a single hard stop on Definitely Maybe.

This trait is seen throughout their discography. The best Oasis songs settle in, like a fog, or float off, like cigarette smoke. At the same time, they feel urgent, essential. The extracurricular activity at the beginning and end of their songs somehow makes them both tangible and transcendent. 

To honor this recurrent creative decision and production choice, I’ve ranked the 10-best components of Oasis songs that make them never really begin or end.

10. The “‘Wonderwall’ Cough”

“Why was Noel Gallagher called the ‘chief’?” he asked himself in a video for Radio X, referring to his heavy-handed control of Oasis. If there’s any doubt, the band’s imprint is called Big Brother Recordings.

It’s annoying, then, that Noel not only said there was no significance to the “‘Wonderwall’ cough”—someone clears their throat at the final second of “Roll With It” as it bleeds into “Wonderwall”—but he also expressed incredulousness at being asked about it. The man slaved over the recording of (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? and he either can’t or doesn’t want to recall a distinguishing feature of song that’s been played billions of times.

In my first piece for this newsletter, I wrote, “There is no liking or disliking the songs of the Morning Glory era. They just are. This album is one of the best-selling and best ever because it just is.” This applies to the Wonderwall cough. Most listeners hear the song without it, as it’s not on the track itself, and it’s the song that everyone’s familiar with. But with the cough “Wonderwall” is transformed. It’s no longer the meme song that floats in the ether. It’s deeper somehow. I don’t know why. It just is.

Underrated, Overrated, or Properly Rated: Oasis

9. Gibberish in “Cum on Feel the Noize”

The Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus” is Oasis’s most famous cover, but “Cum on Feel the Noize” is their best. The studio version appeared as a B-side to “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” and it rips. Of course, Oasis couldn’t leave well enough alone. The last 30 seconds of the track is nonsensical banter recorded in the studio. They had so much fun inside their songs they never wanted to leave them.

8. The never-ending “All Around the World”

Be Here Now is infamous for its length and overproduction, and the poster child of that is “All Around the World.” It “ends” only after nine minutes of run time, and it does so unwillingly. The music is still playing while the producer fades the volume. But like someone in a mustache disguise, it reappears on the album two songs later as “All Around the World (Reprise).”

The song did have more modest beginnings. A video from 1992 shows an unknown Oasis rehearsing “All Around the World” in the most British and most ‘90s of basements. But the song always never ended. The archival video fades to black while they’re still jamming. They never wanted to let go a song they believed in. Some say the the world doesn’t need nearly 12 minutes of “All Around the World.” I say those people are wrong.

7. Oasis celebrate themselves in “Whatever”

It’s incomprehensible that a band with a single album, released just four months prior, would be given the money to produce a song with an orchestra. And that orchestra would play a three-minute long outro. And at the end of that outro, the band would record themselves hooting and hollering and chanting the band’s name. And the band would release that song without a shred of irony.

6. “The Masterplan” creates its own universe

Noel counts off “The Masterplan” in a false bravado, then the song unfurls. It ends with random strumming and someone singing the Beatles’ “Octopus’s Garden” in a squeaky voice. It makes no sense. The brackets of the song are not related in anyway to the song itself. Yet “The Masterplan” is one of the best pieces of music the band ever produced, which is to say it’s one of the best pieces of pop music ever produced. It’s a perfect example of how the weird shit in Oasis’s songs changes the context and perception of them. “The Masterplan” without its intro and outro is a song. “The Masterplan” with them is a life.

Honorable Mention - Bonehead is drunk in “Bonehead’s Bank Holiday”

The story goes that Noel wrote this ditty for Bonehead, the band’s rhythm guitarist, to sing, but Liam and Bonehead arrived at the studio from the pub, with the latter unable to see straight, let along sing well. Noel fired Bonehead from his temporary duties, but Bonehead’s ineptitude is immortalized in the recording.

There is no significance to this, besides Oasis being a band that relished in releasing a song on which their rhythm guitarist named Bonehead is hammered.

5. “(It’s Good) To Be Free”

Miles and I played “(It’s Good) To Be Free” constantly on our trip to the west coast of Ireland. The song brings me back to Doolin every time I listen to it. All I want to do is live by the sea. Fittingly, the song ends in an accordion-based vamp that wouldn’t be out of place in a cozy Irish pub. There’s even chatter and laughter in the background as the song winds down.

What does the accordion and chatter and laughter have to do with three-and-a-half minutes of music that precedes it? I have no idea. “(It’s Good) To Be Free” is essentially two distinct songs overlapping each other, like musical tectonic plates. It’s just easier to accept both “songs” as a synchronous whole rather than try to figure out where one ends and the other begins.

4. “D’you Know What I Mean?” comes in for the landing

The first 45 seconds of the opening track to Be Here Now is the sound of helicopter rotors and distorted guitars. That’s basically all you need to know to understand Be Here Now.

3. The subtlety of “Half the World Away”

It’s quick, but “Half the World Away” opens with trademark studio-speak. “Yeah, you’re on,” someone tells Noel, before he chuckles and kicks off one of his best songs. The problem is Liam should have sung it.

In any case, that two-second non-musical intro creates a stage for “Half the World Away,” and the soft chords at the end gently puts it to bed. Noel feigned ignorance of the Wonderwall cough, but he knew exactly what he was doing creating the context for these songs within the songs.

2. The “Talk Tonight” twofer

Not only do we get studio-speak to start “Talk Tonight,” but we also get a cough while Noel is playing the guitar and about to launch into the first verse. Who on earth wouldn’t do another take? Who records themselves saying “Just take me watch off,” loudly sets the watch down, then coughs in the middle of the first bar, and uses that take??? It’s explicable, just as it is essential. Noel knows great songs like Einstein knew physics. There’s an invisible force holding it all together, and he’s able to translate that force into a formula.

1. All of “Champaign Supernova”

An ocean tide brings “Champagne Supernova” into our ears. An organ/kazoo-type thing ushers it out. Steve Hyden summed up this song best.

“Whenever I hear this song, I think about the day in 1996 when I sat in my buddy Marc’s truck during our senior year of high school,” Hyden wrote for Uproxx. “His girlfriend had just dumped him, and he was crushed:

“Champagne Supernova” came on the radio, and it was not his jam.… But when Liam sang, “Someday you will find me / caught beneath the landslide / in a champagne supernova in the sky,” my big strong and macho buddy cried his eyes out…. In that moment, he was transformed into Liam mewling “why, why, why, why?” (I think, like Liam, we were also gettin’ high.)

Now, can I explain what a champagne supernova in the sky is? I cannot. But I know Noel wrote it, and I know Liam interpreted it, and I know that somewhere in that process those words became profound. And I know how it makes me feel — it makes me feel like I’m watching a high school kid having his heartbroken. And how can that not move you? And how can you not love the band who moved you like that forever?