Living forever with Oasis: Remembering the Nineties

Back in 1995, I was fourteen years old and desperately looking for new rock’n’roll. Ever since I’d been introduced to The Beatles some three years before that (by my mother!!), I’d been living and breathing rock. Back in 1994 Calcutta, there wasn’t much by way of rock albums that one could lay their hands on. 

There were a few stores run by cool uncles (who were only in their 30s, bless them)—like Rhythm’n’Blues in Gariahat (they also sold knock off jeans)—that stocked cassettes, but mostly those were The Doors Greatest Hits or some random thing by Paul Secada, or Mick Jagger’s She’s The Boss (the cassette was so pirated, they even misprinted the title to She’s The Bose). The time lag between new music, and it showing up in Calcutta, was like being stuck in an event horizon.

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So here were this new, snotty band called Oasis, from England, out with a new album that was setting the world alight, called (What’s The Story) Morning Glory. One of the singles from that album, Wonderwall, was tearing up the charts in Britain, the black and white video of the song a regular fixture on MTV India. The singer looked cool, apparently loved The Beatles, and wanted to be bigger than them. I was intrigued and excited.

But most teenagers in Calcutta didn’t know about them, they were more into the new Def Leppard album. Who didn’t know about Def Leppard? They had a one-armed drummer, hair like noodles and every kid with a guitar could play Pour Some Sugar On Me. Other kids were into Metallica, or Nirvana, or (god save me) Dire Straits. Oasis? Huh? I had some spare change saved up, about Rs50, so I now had a dilemma. Should I buy (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? Or should I give into dumbass peer pressure—and the advice of Rock Street Journal—and buy Def Leppard’s new album Adrenalize? (Full disclosure, Adrenalize actually came out in 1992, but we were in the Calcutta time warp.)

I liked Liam Gallagher’s Beatlesque hair better, and Morning Glory’s Pink Floydesque album cover was cooler than that of Adrenalize. So, I bought Morning Glory. My reasons were entirely superficial, but boy did I make the right decision! At that impressionable age, I had found my band. I will love The Beatles forever, but they’d been broken up for 25 years at that point, John Lennon dead for fifteen! What band would I grow up with, I’d often wondered—pore over new releases, read about in the magazines, love from afar? In Oasis, I had the answer.

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As I read the news about the Gallagher brothers getting back together on Tuesday, I was, at first underwhelmed. But then, slowly, I’ve been feeling this weird kind of joy. My band are back! Noel’s guitar solos, Liam’s sexy voice, that almighty noise of two guitars thundering away in the service of brilliant screw-you songs! What’s not to love? Yes, they’re getting back together as a money-minting nostalgia act, yes they have nothing new to say, and well, they’ve had nothing new to say pretty much since 1997. 

But that’s not really the point of falling in love with a band, is it? A band is just a proxy for how you’d like to see yourself, how you self-mythologise, how you’d like to create a superhero reality for yourself that sustains you through the terrible everyday indignities of being a teenager. Oasis’s music is a vibe, a sneering, rolled-fist challenge to the world trying to put you in your place, telling you that you’re not good enough, or rich enough, or pretty enough, or smart enough to make it.

Through the years, blasting Oasis out at full volume has helped me deal with rejection, with sorrow, carrying me away in a bum rush of stupid, grinning euphoria. These days, I go on an Oasis bender about once a year, going through their albums till I’m sick of them, like overdosing on cheap chocolate. And so, welcome back you lumpen, troglodyte twerps, we missed you!

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