Worst/most cringeworthy lyric on Oasis' 'Be Here Now'

I actually ended up reading a Noel interview yesterday and found this quote.

Of course. I’m proud of everything that we ever did. I mean, some songs are pretty shit, and there’s a couple of periods you’d rather forget, but I think on the whole… I think we made three great albums and four good ones, which is not bad out of eight. Kind of a 50 percent record. That’s pretty good, I think.

I honestly don't know which albums he rates as good ones and the great ones. The only album I know he hates is Standing and obviously he loves Definitely Maybe but no idea which category the others would fall into. Is he now claiming Be Here Now is a good album?

I think he rates Don't Believe The Truth highly, alongside the first two.

Unless he's counting The Masterplan too!

he hates be here now

I have seen him say negative things about the second album too though. Channel 4 did another albums countdown in about 2005, when What's the Story placed he was listing the songs on there he doesn't like. Also on Live Forever he talks about how annoyed he was that What's the Story became so big instead of Definitely Maybe "Why is everyone buying that one when it's no way near as good as the first album" or something along those lines.

There was an interview in the NME when Heathen Chemistry came out and they asked him "Why should we believe you that you think this a great album, when the next album comes out are you not just going to slag this one off and say the newest album is your best since Definitely Maybe" Can't quite remember his response now but remember thinking it was kind of cool they asked him that. Sure enough when they next album came out that is exactly what happened.

ned they were an old peoples thing or a indie kid thing at best. seriously no young person gave a shit about the beatles back then til oasis. I got funny looks when i was like 17 and liked them. Now every young kid loves the beatles and abba

― ۩, Friday, January 24, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This might be a US/UK thing then.

― Ned Raggett, Friday, January 24, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yep. i started listening to music seriously and reading the nme and melody maker in 89. the beatles and other pre-punk rock acts didn't get talked about much then. the velvets were the "old" band that got cited the most. this would change later in the 90s with the introduction of magazines like mojo and uncut that focused on retro stuff.
also, there was no classic rock radio format in the uk back then. the beatles got played on oldies radio and that's not what young people listened to. when i moved to the us in the late 90s it was weird to discover classic rock radio and meet people who'd all grown up listening to led zeppelin and pink floyd, bands i'd barely heard.

he hates be here now

― OutdoorFish

In that DVD commentary that got posted the other day he said "We should have never made SOTSOG" I've always assumed that is his least favourite.

Channel 4 100 Best Albums Of All Time

But Only The Top 50…

Broadcast 17th April 2005

As Voted By Apx ½ Million People Apparently! Via The Ch4 Web Site.

OK Computer

1. Radiohead – Ok Computer
2. U2 - The Joshua Tree
3. Nirvana – Nevermind
4. Michael Jackson – Thriller
5. Pink Floyd – Dark Side Of The Moon
6. Oasis – Definitely Maybe
7. The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
8. Madonna Like A Prayer
9. Guns ‘N’ Roses – Appetite For Destruction
10. The Beatles – Revolver
11. R.E.M. – Automatic For The People
12. The Beatles – The Beatles
13. Queen – A Night At The Opera
14. Coldplay – Parachutes
15. Oasis – (What’s The Story) Morning Glory
16. Alanis Morressette – Jagged Little Pill
17. Led Zeppelin – Led Zeppelin Iv
18. The Verve – Urban Hymns
19. Jimi Hendrex – Are You Experienced
20. The Smiths – The Queen Is Dead
21. John Lennon – Imagine
22. Radiohead – The Bends
23. Bob Marley & The Wailers – Exodus
24. The Stone Roses – The Stone Roses
25. Simon And Garfunkel – Bridge Over Troubled Water
26. Bjork – Debut
27. The Doors – The Doors
28. Abba – Arrival
29. Michael Jackson – Of The Wall
30. Duran Duran – Rio
31. Sex Pistols – Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols
32. David Bowie – Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars
33. The Beach Boys – Pet Sounds
34. Joy Division – Closer
35. The Rolling Stones – Let It Bleed
36. Blur – Parklife
37. Bruce Springsteen – Born To Run
38. Billie Holiday – Lady Sings The Blues
39. The White Stripes – Elephant
40. Black Sabbath – Paranoid
41. The Specials – The Specials
42. The Rolling Stones – Exile On Main Street
43. Frank Sinatra – Songs For Swinging Lovers
44. The Clash – London Calling
45. Prodigy – Fat Of The Land
46. The Velvet Underground – The Velvet Underground & Nico
47. Dire Straits – Brothers In Arms
48. Pixies – Doolittle
49. Aretha Franklin – Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You
50. The Libertines – The Libertines

check #50

I read an interview where he was lamenting be here now

30. Duran Duran – Rio

I love it when an online fanbase makes a difference. Not that Rio isn't an amazing album it just stands out a little bit in that list.

I read an interview where he was lamenting be here now

― OutdoorFish

I think he just got his calculations wrong. I've recently heard but those albums for the first time and there's no way either of them could be put in the good category.

yeah i mean, rio basically IS in the top 30 albums ever made, imo

Rocker Noel Gallagher cringes every time he hears a song from Oasis' 1997 album Be Here Now, insisting the tracks make no sense as he was drug-addled when he wrote them.

The guitarist worked at a breakneck pace to record the hotly-anticipated follow-up to (What's The Story) Morning Glory?, but just weeks before heading into the studio with his bandmates he realised he had no lyrics for the songs.

Gallagher decided to spirit himself away in a Caribbean bolthole to write the words, and he has regretted his decision ever since.

He tells British magazine Event, "I had all the music but not the words. We were starting in two weeks, so I went to some Caribbean island and I thought I'd do it all in two weeks. I listen to those words now and I just cringe. I was heavily into drugs at that point and I just didn't give a damn."

yeah i mean, rio basically IS in the top 30 albums ever made, imo

― John Fitzgerald Chicken (imago)

I prefer the first album these days but yeah it's a classic. Just not the kind of album that makes those lists usually. I'm also aware they have a very loyal fanbase. They recently made the top five of Radio 2's best albums ever list too.

Britpop threads always get so many posts!

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:AlternateRioalbumcover.jpg

Paul Mathur's "Take Me There - The Oasis Story", an official book published in late 1996, has a description of Be Here Now months before it even came out:

As the sky darkens, and the monsoon rolls back over, we adjourn inside to the ante-room to hear a rough tape of the next Oasis album, working title: Be Here Now.

It's good. Very good. And it's going to blow away any premature declarations that Oasis have peaked.

'I always wanted to do the third album,' says Liam. 'Morning Glory was all right, but I knew we could do better. And this next one is going to prove it.'

The rough tape starts with a trippy guitar instrumental, out of which suddenly roars the sound of a jetliner landing. It's a searing, defiantly rock opening, building a sound that's picked up by all of the songs that follow. Numbers like the aforementioned 'My Big Mouth' and 'Gettin' Better, Man' have lodged into the subconscious after only a couple of listens, but the rest of the stuff is just as good. Titles like 'Fade In/Out', 'Stand By Me', 'All Around The World' (that particular one written almost three years ago) and 'Girl In The Dirty Shirt' all suggest that when the album is released in 1997, it should emphasize that it's far too early to even think about writing the band off.

'I want to get that Strawberry Fields feel,' says Noel, 'and a different feel to Morning Glory. If the first album was a soundtrack for going out on the piss and the second was for staying home having a shag, then the next one's going to be about staying at home having a shag and going straight back out on the piss again afterwards.'

it should emphasize that it's far too early to even think about writing the band off.

Select Magazine also got Noel Gallagher to open up about the Be Here Now material in their Knebworth '96 coverage (August 1996)...

From the gig review:

"We're gonna do two new songs now," Noel announced on Saturday, "So if you're bootlegging this and the tape's running out, tough shit." 'My Big Mouth', it soon became clear, is an instant 'Some Might Say'/'Morning Glory'-type hit, while 'It's Getting Better, Man' is the real killer, replete with a sluttish early-70's rock-beast bassline. The second night it sounded even better. But then everything did.

and then the interview later on in the piece:

Q: Tell us about the new songs.

A: "I've got 15 songs on a cassette. Like I say, I went to Mustique with Owen [Morris, producer of the first two albums] with a digital eight-track and a keyboard to do the strings on. I played them on acoustic and Owen programmed the drums in. It's the first time I've ever done any
demos, bar 'Live Forever' and 'Up In The Sky'. But it sounds good. Should be out around June. We've been doing two of the faster ones live. 'My Big Mouth' sounds fuckin' excellent, like a cannon going off in your head. 'It's Getting Better, Man' is like the big fuckin' party tune, quite camp as well -- our Liam with his fuckin' hand on his hips, ha! There's about four like that, quite Stooges-like. Then there's the stuff in the vein of 'Don't Look Back in Anger', and there's a couple of 'Wonderwall's on there. I definitely want to use some form of sequencing, and mad keyboard noises, just to make them sound a bit more '90's. I'm starting to get me head round sampling. What have we got? 'Don't Go Away', 'Stand By Me' -- that's pretty good. I was looking for a bit in the chorus. It goes, (sings) 'Nobody knows the way it's gonna be', so 'me' rhymes with 'be', three syllables, thank you very much. I thought it was a good title for a song anyway. 'All Around The World', 'The Fame', which are me being a sarcastic twat. The lyrics go, 'I'm a man of choice / In an old Rolls Royce / Sat here howling at the moon / Is my happening too defeaning for you?' It's about people who say fame's changed us, and us saying, 'If you lived the life we fuckin' live...'

so 'me' rhymes with 'be,' three syllables, thank you very much

So basically, a whole year before the album came out, they had most (if not all) the songs for Be Here Now, plus the B-sides, and even had the idea of the way to begin the album with the sound of the jet etc. and not once between then and the album coming out (all throughout the writing and recording and putting the album together) did someone step in and say "uh, guys, this actually isn't very good!" or "you may wanna fix these lyrics up" or "you may wanna shave a few guitar tracks off the final mix" or "Noel, it would be a really bad idea to make the songs go on for this long"...

From another Select interview from late 1996, which is hilarious in hindsight...

"Anyway, we go in and start recording in October (1996), we're gonna do the single, have it out in January (1997), and around then we'll start recording the album. The last one took about 15 days, so we're probably gonna take about three weeks this time. No, we're planning to spend about three months on it, and hopefully it'll be out for June (1997), with a single first. All depending whether we split up in the studio and the usual bollocks, walk-outs and bust-ups and trying to get Bonehead out of the boozer."

did someone step in and say "uh, guys, this actually isn't very good!" or "you may wanna fix these lyrics up" or "you may wanna shave a few guitar tracks off the final mix" or "Noel, it would be a really bad idea to make the songs go on for this long"...

c'mon we know this doesn't happen with superstars. You know the Hugh Padgham-Macca story?

Then, tellingly, there's this conversation with Q Magazine in February 1996 (roughly about half a year before Knebworth)...

Q: You seem to have ambiguous feelings about songwriting. You've said it comes naturally and that it's very difficult too.

Noel: "The music is easy. Like at the moment I've got this fucking blinding riff on the guitar - and the intro and the chorus and the bridge. I've even got the title: 'New Suede Shoes'. Nothing to do with Elvis. The melody comes next. Then I get to my biggest failing. I sit down and go (despondently hunches over imaginary guitar), "Fuck, what am I going to say?" I said everything I ever wanted so say in 'Rock'n'Roll Star'."

Q: Then maybe you agree with some of the reviews of (What's The Story) Morning Glory? which said the lyrics were slack?

Noel: "I know I could do much better. I could take more time over them."

Q: Apart from the Lyrics, do you ever get blocked?

Noel: "Except for 'New Suede Shoes', I've been blocked since coming out of Rockfield. A good six months now. It's the only time in my life I've just had one song on the go."

Q: Does that frighten you?

Noel: "Frightens the fucking life out of me. But I know it's going to come."

Q: You've often given the impression that you hoover cocaine by the bucketful and some would suggest that's a vice.

Noel: "Whoever said I'm on a line of cocaine every 40 minutes, I'll sue the fucker. That's out of order. In Oasis, Guigsy, Bonehead and Alan White don't take drugs. Me and our Liam do. We'll take anything that's put in front of us because that's just the kind of guys we are. But we've never been on stage out of it. We've never taken heroin or crack. We do take too many drugs, though, and I wish I'd never started. In fact, I wish I'd never started smoking cigarettes or drinking beer or taking cocaine or ecstasy because I'd have a lot more money now than I do have. The one thing about us is we're honest. If we're asked whether we take drugs, we say yes. I was brought up by my mam not to be a liar. take cocaine. Big fucking deal. It's a social thing and I've been doing it since before I was even in a band. But we're in a vicious circle. You become an addict."

c'mon we know this doesn't happen with superstars. You know the Hugh Padgham-Macca story?

― Bryan Fairy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, January 25, 2014 2:40 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

True, but that was the first time McCartney had worked with Padgham, and he'd had a seriously long career under his belt even by that point. Oasis were working with pretty much the same people they had done from the very beginning, so you'd think at least one person would have stepped in and said something. Although, it's quite possible that they were too scared to at that point.

All these interviews are really funny with how things actually turned out. I'm getting an urge to start rereading My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For the Prize (The Creation Story) again. The Be Here Now era was just fascinating. Stories about the security of the album just before it came out and people at the company actually having doubts about the quality of the album when they heard it.

It sold very well no?

Rocker Noel Gallagher cringes every time he hears a song from Oasis' 1997 album Be Here Now, insisting the tracks make no sense as he was drug-addled when he wrote them.

LOL at "insisting", like anyone's arguing any different.

It sold very well no?

― I wish to incorporate disco into my small business (chap), Saturday, January 25, 2014 4:03 PM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes, it did. In the UK it shifted something insane like over 350,000 copies on its day of release alone. But that had a lot to do with the album coming on the back of the success of Morning Glory, not to mention the tight, extremely paranoid security surrounding the album. There's a legendary story about Steve Lamacq on Radio One getting a preview of some of the tracks on the album over a week before it came out, and he was allowed to air them on the condition from the bands management that he talked over the tracks. He lasted one day of previewing the tracks before the bands management told him he couldn't preview any more because he didn't talk over them enough.

Journalists were apparently asked to sign NDA's not to discuss the album with anyone, including their own girlfriends! Even within Creation Records, their own record label, the Oasis camp effectively alienated themselves from the rest of the label because they were being incredibly paranoid and secretive about the whole thing.

It did sell well (1.8 million in total) but it sold over half its sales in those first two weeks. Think by the time the third single had come out it pretty much stopped selling completely. Morning Glory had sold over 4 million by that point so it really was a disappointment for the record company. Just looking at Wikipedia I'm kind of surprised to see it has still sold more copies than Definitely Maybe. Also surprised to see Dig out Your Soul is their worst selling album overall. Always assumed it was SOTSOG.

and not once between then and the album coming out (all throughout the writing and recording and putting the album together) did someone step in and say "uh, guys, this actually isn't very good!" or "you may wanna fix these lyrics up" or "you may wanna shave a few guitar tracks off the final mix" or "Noel, it would be a really bad idea to make the songs go on for this long"...

― Toni Braxton-Hicks (Turrican), Saturday, January 25, 2014 2:19 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there's this bit from some old Melody Maker review that floats through my head where the writer is talking about the song 'Round Are Way' and the fact that no-one in the entire chain, from the band in the studio to the people printing the record sleeves, had it in them to tell Noel that he was spelling the word 'our' wrong

dig your own soul is far and away the worst album title and I hate to think what it might contain

You know that thread recently where the musicians playing on the album were saying "We didn't know it was bad when we were working on Bowie's "Never let me down"

Same thing. Everyone's hyped up on these Oasis sounding songs, the trees and the woods can't be seen..

Thing is, around half of "Be here now" is alright, half of what's left is curate's egg stuff, and a bunch of stuff isn't good at all..

xpost Dig yr own soul isn't so bad.

The Be Here Now era was just fascinating.

yes, the story of money in the culture industry, how fascinating. also produces fascinating threads with lists of hundreds of difft shades of nostalgia pills and the same ancient brit dudes blathering on about said pills. nothing could be more fascinating.

at least turrican's exhuming of interviews is cringeworthy entertainment for a few lines.

but seriously, there are like 1.999 x 10^99 more interesting topics than oasis and 1.998 x 10^99 more interesting topics than britpoop.

the shrill as fuck treble-y production on BHN is what kills it. you can squint and imagine I Hope I Think I Know and My Big Mouth easily fitting onto Definitely Maybe if you mess with your bass and 'mid' settings enough.

matt p: shame hardly anyone else seems to be interested in them (i deny the existence of britpop btw)

see now this is why we can't have crap things

;_;

standard form from matt p there

This thread has made me want to actually listen to BHN, which I have never done

Worst most moronic Oasis album title

i am listened to the alt mixes of dig out ..

they really should have worked more with richard fearless.

they really should have worked more with richard fearless.

shrill as fuck treble-y production = sounds better to coked-up ears

the shrill as fuck treble-y production on BHN is what kills it. you can squint and imagine I Hope I Think I Know and My Big Mouth easily fitting onto Definitely Maybe if you mess with your bass and 'mid' settings enough.

― piscesx, Saturday, January 25, 2014 5:36 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, the trebly production and the insane amount of rhythm guitar overdubs really torpedoes 'My Big Mouth' in particular. I'm sure it sounded absolutely stupendous to the band and Owen Morris while they were making it in the studio, but on most home stereo systems it just sounds like static.

In fact, it's curious how Owen Morris never worked with Oasis again after Be Here Now.

yeah, don't believe the truth is very annoying too as a title (again hate to think what horrors lie within), makes me think of that band thom yorke's brother or cousin was in, the unbelievable truth