OASIS - "The Importance Of Being Idle"

(#1016, 3rd September 2005)

When I heard the news Oasis were reuniting, my first thought was, “thank God, an angle on the ‘Idle’ entry”. It’s not impossible that this might even end up only being their penultimate Number 1. It would be a surefire news story if “Wonderwall” finally got there, the charts’ existence these days in the eyes of the media being a way to retcon quirks of the 20th Century or update long-standing records.

Like - I suspect - a lot of people, the fact of Oasis’ non-existence didn’t seem particularly vivid to me anyway. Both Gallaghers were alive and vocal and making music, and music that seemed like it could have happily come out under the Oasis brand name. There is a parlour-game-stroke-cottage-industry of using solo work to make post-split Beatles albums, complete with baroque alternative histories of what the Fabs got up to as a working band in the early 70s. A similar exercise for Oasis would have been trivially easy. I wonder if anyone bothered.

The obvious point to make about this alternative history is that at no point would it have involved the Oasis people were joining 500,000 strong online queues about. The Oasis that are returning and the Oasis that split up are two very different animals: nobody is paying half a grand because they are desperate to hear songs from Don’t Believe The Truth, and obviously Noel and Liam know that too. Entertainment is multiversal nowadays, and the Oasis that people are paying for split up in 1997 and rejoin us from Earth-B to play only the bangers.

The guarded voices of dissent on Reunification Day came from people who remembered the Oasis of the 00s rather than the Oasis of the mid-90s. Both in practical terms - 00s Oasis were notoriously inconsistent live - and because the 00s band spent half their time insisting they were the 90s band in a state of perpetual, album by album reformation. Every record, it seemed, Noel would admit that the last one was shite but this one is the Oasis people wanted. The reunion is a way to finally put that decade to bed, pull out a couple of tracks tops from the later records - “Stop Crying Your Heart Out” seems big on streaming - and play the songs that made them famous. Bringing up how mediocre they were for how long feels beside the point. Though on a blog like Popular, long tails of underachievement have a habit of wagging. And are there any other artists with 14 year careers whose public would expect them to stick almost entirely to the first 4?

And yet. For all the carping I can muster, it’s impossible to deny the fact that the reunion has uncovered a huge degree of goodwill and excitement about this band. So what’s going on?

One of the noticeable parts of the response for me has been veteran journalists getting excited about the fact that young people like Oasis too. It is always interesting who finds an audience among people in their teens and early 20s, and it’s not always who you might expect. But I feel like it’s being mentioned as a kind of “gotcha” to the Oasis haters - look! They’ve stood the test of time! It’s an approach I’d respect if it came from people who showed the slightest interest in any other music ‘Gen Z’ likes, rather than using young listeners as a way to validate nostalgia.

But let’s take it seriously. What do younger listeners like about Oasis? What is the band giving them that they aren’t getting elsewhere? It’s unclear what proportion of their 27 million Spotify listeners are under, say, 40, but Spotify stats still give a reasonable picture of what modern audiences (however old they are) value about Oasis. And the answer is pretty clear: hug rock. The big, lighters aloft, stadium rock ballads. Wonderwall. Don’t Look Back In Anger. Stop Crying Your Heart Out. Stand By Me. Live Forever. Champagne Supernova. The only “rocker” that tops 100m streams is “Supersonic”. Oasis are a band best loved for their mid-tempo scarf-wavers.

To which you might say, duh. But it’s true, I think, that this particular kind of heart-on-sleeve blokey pop is genuinely not well served by current bands. Sheeran does it a bit. Coldplay when they’re not fannying around. We’ve seen a kind of half-hearted revival of it from Benson Boone this year. But - “Hey Jude” aside - Oasis probably are the hug rock GOATs, and the fact I dislike a lot of those songs speaks to my squeamishness at the genre rather than the band’s facility with it.

But if that’s what people want from Oasis, it’s worth thinking about what they don’t want, as over the next six months all sorts of claims are going to be made about the meaning of the Oasis revival. I don’t think it means people are longing for the 90s, or Britpop, or rock in anything beyond its most capacious stadium sense. I don’t think the Oasis reunion presages the return of “the guitar” to prominence, and I certainly don’t think the early heat and venom of the band are on people’s minds. I even doubt that the idea of “rock stars” and the Gallaghers themselves are much of the appeal - it’s not like they’ve been reclusive, or refrained from public sniping. Some of those things might find new appeal in the slipstream of the reunion, but I think there’s one thing Oasis did that people loved and don’t have easy access to, and it’s a thing huge open air gigs are particularly responsive to. Good luck to them.

Back in 2005, meanwhile, the band as it actually was scored a final number one. It didn’t feel like the last, as “The Importance Of Being Idle” was the first time for several records the band had managed a second chart-topper from an album. But it turned out this was more an artefact of collapsing singles sales than of any return to form. In 2000, the Number 1 single sold below 50,000 for only two weeks out of 52. In 2002, it was five weeks. In 2005, it was 25, and “Idle” was one of them.

But if it does turn out that this song’s the end of us and Oasis, it’s no bad place to finish. “Lyla” was the sound of a band that had driven themselves into a ditch, heaving and panting to try (and fail) to get out of it. “The Importance Of Being Idle” has more focus and a tighter brief - it’s Noel Gallagher doing a Kinks pastiche, with lyrics that keep to the theme suggested to him by a title of a book he found in the garage. Laziness as the subject of the last Oasis Number 1? The review writes itself. But for once it would be unfair - this is Noel’s best vocal on an Oasis single, and the challenge of capturing the sharp, down-to-earth songwriting of Ray Davies circa “Dead End Street” pushes him a bit harder than another Oasis-by-numbers lead single could.

Of course, you could object that Ray Davies had a charm - and a nasty streak - that Noel Gallagher has never had a hope of matching. And you’d be right. But as we saw when I looked at “Lyla”, there was never much hope of Oasis successfully catching up with music, so why not look back in a slightly different direction from usual?

5 out of 10