Oasis

**The band everybody stopped listening to made three of its best records after nobody was watching.**

Oasis have been written about more than almost any British band of the last forty years, and written about badly. The books are about the fights, the drugs, the brothers and the quotes, which is to say they are about everything except the records.

This is a book about the records. Volume Two takes the last seventy-one, numbered and dated: *Standing on the Shoulder of Giants*, *Heathen Chemistry*, *Don't Believe the Truth* and *Dig Out Your Soul*, with every B-side and bonus track made alongside them, 1998 to 2025. Each song gets a full entry, and each entry ends in a verdict that does not hedge.

These are the years the received account skips. A band that had lost its editor, and whose editor had never been a person but a constraint, turned over almost its entire membership, acquired three more songwriters, and quietly got good again while the country was busy being embarrassed about *Be Here Now*. The book applies exactly the same standard to 2008 as to 1994, which produces a different shape of career from the one everybody remembers.

Two long essays sit between the parts: on the economics of the record industry at its peak, which is where the B-sides came from and where they went, and on the two brothers and what their relationship actually did to the songs. A closing narrative part carries the story past the last recording: Rock en Seine, the fifteen years of separate careers, the feud as public entertainment, and Live '25.

Over two million tickets, the second highest-grossing tour in the world in 2025, and a generation who were not born when *Definitely Maybe* came out singing every word back. Whatever the 1990s decided about this band has been overruled by an audience that was never consulted the first time.

The model is Ian MacDonald's *Revolution in the Head*, the book that proved you could take a band everybody already had an opinion about and get somewhere new by going through the catalogue song by song and refusing to look away from any of it. The method is adapted rather than copied: each album keeps its running order, and everything else is threaded into the place in the story where it was actually made.

Some of these songs are masterpieces, some are very good, some are fascinating failures and some are simply rubbish, and the book says which is which, with reasons. No lyrics are quoted: every description of what a song says is written from scratch.

Best read with the records on.

*Volume Two covers 1998 to 2025, entries 71 to 141. Volume One covers 1993 to 1997, entries 1 to 70. Both volumes carry the full introduction, all five appendices, the bibliography and the complete list of all 141 songs, so either can be read on its own.*