Oasis

Everybody knows three Oasis songs. Almost nobody has listened to all one hundred and forty-one.

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 One takes the first seventy, numbered and dated: Definitely Maybe, (What's the Story) Morning Glory? and Be Here Now, with every B-side and bonus track made alongside them, 1993 to 1997. Each song gets a full entry, and each entry ends in a verdict that does not hedge.

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. MacDonald had the Beatles, whom nobody needed persuading to take seriously. Oasis are the harder case and the more interesting one, because their best work has spent thirty years buried underneath their reputation.

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, so "The Masterplan" arrives inside Morning Glory beside the songs that beat it to the album, and the acoustic "Up in the Sky" follows the electric one.

The B-sides are the case. Between 1994 and 1998 this band put "Acquiesce", "Talk Tonight", "Half the World Away", "Rockin' Chair" and "The Masterplan" on the backs of singles, and a compilation of the leftovers reached number two. Putting them where they belong changes what the two famous albums look like.

A prologue covers Burnage, the Gallagher household and the Manchester apprenticeship up to the night at King Tut's in May 1993. Two long essays sit between the parts: on the newspapers, radio and television that could still deliver one band to an entire country, and on class, authenticity and what exactly was being sold.

Then the reunion changed the terms. 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, and that audience is owed a book which takes the songs as seriously as it does.

This one neither flatters nor sneers. 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, which turns out to be harder and more revealing than quoting would have been.

Best read with the records on.

Volume One covers 1993 to 1997, entries 1 to 70. Volume Two covers 1998 to 2025, entries 71 to 141. 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.