Rushing, crashing guitars, melody-driven, Beatles-influenced songs and a voice – Liam Gallagher – that for many embodied the growling, feather-spitting arrogance of rock music: What does “Definitely Maybe”, Oasis’ debut album, mean today, 30 years after its release?
Is it, as Melody Maker raved, “a record full of songs worth living for, made by a band of ruthless northern scoundrels you’d gladly join”? Is it, as it was named in a 2006 poll by NME and the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles, the greatest album of all time (pushing the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band into second place)?
Or is the album, as the band’s songwriter Noel Gallagher said, full of “cheap tunes”? (“Don’t be afraid of the obvious, because it’s all been done before,” he added.) If a talent for writing songs that stayed true to their primary influences was all too evident, so too was an enormous ambition – “think penthouse, not sidewalk,” Gallagher said at the time of the album’s initial release.
Context is everything: the Gallagher brothers were second-generation working-class Irish people living in the Manchester suburb of Burnage – “a pub, a fish’n’chip shop and a betting shop, that’s it,” Noel recalls – and spent their dole money at weekends, dreaming of becoming the biggest rock’n’roll band in the world.
Aside from Noel’s devotion to fusing the Beatles’ back catalogue with classic UK pop – T-Rex, Slade et al. -, psychedelia and the Sex Pistols, some of the songs still have a powerful impact today.
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Over the decades, some of the music may have become too familiar to be as powerful as it once was, but when you listen to Rock’n’Roll Star, Shakermaker, Live Forever, Cigarettes & Alcohol, Supersonic and Slide Away, it’s easy to go back to 1994 and realise that something significant was happening. For people of a certain age, Definitely Maybe was a rebirth, an exciting, swaggering example of how rock music could redefine itself even when mired in cliché.
Of course, time has not always been kind to everything. Over the years, with the era’s enthusiasm waning, reappraisal has delivered a different verdict. As with every subsequent Oasis release – in addition to every album, solo or otherwise, released by Noel and Liam – there are songs that no amount of Sex-Beatles wildness/melody and raspy vocals can save. Whatever the band’s re-forming for a 2025 tour of Ireland and the UK, mediocrity hovers over Bring It on Down, Digsy’s Dinner and Married with Children.
However, if you skip these, you have a series of songs that are characterized by the capture of The Wait, not only A Moment.
