Whilst he hadn’t been one of the five hundred and ten people who had been sent a copy of the promo as a reader of the NME he had been aware there was a buzz about the band from the beginning. As soon as he heard them, he could hear where they were coming from but he had been reluctant to pass further judgement before he heard more of them. The omens were good: here was a band that unashamedly played rock music not afraid of being derided as out of touch. He began to follow their progress in the music press. Quite often a week didn’t go by when they weren’t involved in some sort of attention grabbing altercation. There had never been a band in his time that had attracted such notoriety. In 1994 rock bands were by and large seen as being conservative in the comparative light of the club scene. But then, once upon a time, white guys with guitars, the sort of guy that looked a bit like him if he squinted whilst studying his own reflection, had been the height of popular cool. He knew this because he had read countless biographies of classic bands that he had only ever been able to experience second hand. By the time Oasis released their second single he was a fan and two months later on hearing ‘Live Forever’ for the first time he declared it the best record that had ever been made.
From a distance ‘Live Forever’ sounded a bit like something playing in the distance but after smoking a joint with his head sandwiched between the speakers it sounded like the conglomeration of every record he had loved from ‘Street Fighting Man’ to ‘I am the Resurrection’ to ‘Anarchy in The UK’ whilst importantly not sounding exactly like any one of them.
It had been with the words from ‘Live Forever’ ringing in his ears that he had moved to London. For the first time in his life anything seemed possible and Oasis were testimony to this. One day you could be mooching around Affleck’s Palace and the next day you could be on Top Of The Pops singing ‘I’m going to Live Forever’ with the conviction that you had actually defied medical science and were going to live forever. Until then, he had spent his nondescript adult life mooching around his own mental equivalent of Affleck’s Palace just waiting for something to happen. Now even the most ordinary day seemed filled with infinite possibilities and the band’s first album with its tales of moving to the city and wanting to be a rock’n’roll star (written, importantly, when none of the band were such) reflected his new-found sense of adventure. In those heady days he would wake in the afternoon with a hangover and a blurred recollection of what he had been doing for the last two days. Sometimes after waking up he would look around and wonder how he got there.
If you were to have seen him during this period and you’d had a drink and it was dark you might have mistaken him for the band’s sixth member. But although he’d never openly admit he felt like the sixth member he seemed to have no problems behaving as such, whether it was in the way he swaggered down the street as if he had a garden gnome in each pocket or in the manner he confessed, after six pints, to a foreign exchange student that he was mad-fer-her and did she want to follow him to the toilets. It was as if his sense of who he was had been shaken awake by the band’s arrival and as they continued to grow from strength to strength, so did his own self-belief until every time he saw Oasis playing on television he felt a rush of adrenalin as if he was actually standing on stage with them.
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White paper, silver/reflective front and back covers, black and white inside. Sticker from the Music and Tape Exchange.
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