Noel Gallagher talks about his favourite b-sides.
The rocker once said: “Oasis were a band built on the aura of the b-side.”.
He talked to Mr. Hyde about his top five from his own masterpiece.
- THE MASTERPLAN
“We had no b-sides for Wonderwall because I’d run out of songs, so over one weekend I wrote Round Are Way and this. I played it and Alan McGee said, ‘You can’t put that as a b-side.’ I said, ‘You asked me to write a song and that’s what I f*cking wrote. I haven’t got anything else.’ But that this was a b-side beggars belief.”
- HALF THE WORLD AWAY
“It was amazing when it was used [as the theme] for The Royle Family. When the show was at its height the label said, ‘We should put this out as a single – the research says we’ve got a No1.’ I was like, ‘No, it should remain as that b-side to that song.’ They said, ‘You’re fcking mental,’ but I didn’t care about sht like that.”
- ACQUIESCE
“I wrote this on the train to record Some Might Say after we broke down in the Severn Tunnel for two hours. Alan McGee called me in Canada to tell me it should be the single, but I didn’t think it mattered what the b-side was. When I look back I wish someone was paid to be bright enough to second guess me and say, ‘Don’t f*cking do it.'”
- TALK TONIGHT
“From ’93 to ’96 every song I wrote was a classic – I thought it’d last forever. If The Masterplan, the b-sides album, had come out instead of Be Here Now, we may have won the Nobel Peace Prize. I don’t think there’d be war in the Middle East, I don’t think there’d be radical Muslims. I think we’d have saved the world, the songs were that good.”
- ALONE ON THE ROPE
“In the digital age, there’s no such thing as b-sides, just songs I’ll eliminate – if they’re not perfect recordings or don’t have perfectly formed lyrics – as I’m putting albums together. I’ll be like, ‘That’s got better lyrics but that’s a bit more moody.’ But then I played this live once and it went down really well so I’m going to play it on the next tour.”
Source: Mr. Hyde
Photo: Getty