Few bands have ever meant as much to as many people as Oasis. From Burnage in Manchester to the biggest stages on the planet, Liam and Noel Gallagher soundtracked generations with songs that became part of British culture. When it ended after a backstage argument in Paris in 2009, the split felt final. For sixteen years, Oasis existed through the records, old footage, stories and increasingly unlikely rumours of a reunion.
Then, in August 2024, the great wait was finally over.
Live ’25 did more than simply bring Oasis back together. Across 41 sold-out shows, from Cardiff and Manchester to Dublin, North America, Asia, Australia and South America, the reunion reminded people why these songs had endured in the first place. A generation who had never had the opportunity to see Oasis suddenly could, while those who had grown up with them were able to experience the band again.I was there for the final night of the Manchester run at Heaton Park, a show that felt less like another date on a reunion tour and more like a homecoming sixteen years in the making. I wrote about that night in my review, ‘The Best There Was, The Best There Is and The Best There Ever Will Be’.
The scale of the comeback was such that it has since been captured in an official Live ’25 documentary, complete with rehearsal footage, backstage access and the first joint interviews with Liam and Noel in more than two decades.
And they are not finished. Oasis have now announced Live ’27, a 38-date world tour, taking them through the UK, mainland Europe, the United States and Ireland. The run includes five nights at Celtic Park, an extraordinary 11-show homecoming at Manchester’s Etihad Stadium, four nights at Knebworth and a return to Slane Castle.
Oasis heading back out again makes this feel like the perfect moment to return to the songs that made it all possible. Long before stadium residencies, reunions and sixteen-year waits, there were the records: songs about escape, friendship, regret, confidence, love and the stubborn belief that something better might be waiting around the corner.
What follows is my personal Top 10 Oasis songs. It is entirely subjective, probably contentious and guaranteed to leave out something somebody else would have at number one. That is part of the appeal. Oasis have one of those catalogues where almost everybody has their own song, their own memory and their own idea of what the band sounded like at their absolute best.
Some choices are obvious. Others probably will not be. There are songs that mean more to me because of when I first heard them, songs transformed by seeing them live and others that have simply refused to lose any of their power no matter how many times I have played them.
These are mine.
By the time Oasis released ‘Little By Little’ in 2002, they were a very different band from the one that had arrived with ‘Definitely Maybe’. The line-up had changed, Creation Records was gone, and the reckless certainty of their earliest records had started to give way to something more reflective.
Released as a double A-side with ‘She Is Love’, ‘Little By Little’ became one of the defining songs of that later period. It is also one of Noel Gallagher’s finest Oasis vocals. The song had initially been intended for Liam, but vocal problems meant Noel ultimately took the lead, and it proved to be the right decision. His voice suits a lyric that feels considerably older and more contemplative than much of Oasis’s early material.
Where ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Star’ and ‘Live Forever’ look towards everything that might happen, ‘Little By Little’ sounds like somebody stopping to consider what has already happened. There is still optimism in it, but it comes with the understanding that life rarely develops exactly as planned. That is probably why the song seems to improve with age. Its questions about ambition, existence and whether any of us really become the people we imagined feel increasingly relevant the older you get.
The song also found a second life after Oasis split. Noel Gallagher kept it close during the High Flying Birds years, and repeated appearances in his solo sets meant ‘Little By Little’ never became trapped in 2002. Instead, it was passed on to another generation.
My generation.
I was too young to experience Oasis properly the first time around, so Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds became one of the ways these songs reached me. Hearing ‘Little By Little’ in Noel’s solo shows gave it a life beyond ‘Heathen Chemistry’ and let people my age form our own relationship with it, rather than simply inheriting somebody else’s nostalgia.
That is important when talking about the song’s place in the Oasis catalogue. There are tracks from the 2000s that remained closely tied to the period they came from, but ‘Little By Little’ kept travelling. Noel’s solo performances helped turn it into a song that younger Oasis fans knew, loved and sang before many of us ever believed there was a chance of seeing Oasis themselves.
Then Live ’25 brought it back into the band’s own set.
In a show dominated by ‘Definitely Maybe’, ‘(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?’, ‘Be Here Now’ and ‘The Masterplan’, ‘Little By Little’ stood almost alone as a representative of the later Oasis years. Hearing thousands of people sing it felt like the two lives of the song finally meeting: the people who had been there in 2002 and the generation who had discovered it through Noel afterwards.
That is a big part of why it makes my Top 10. ‘Little By Little’ is not simply one of the strongest songs from later Oasis. It is one of the songs that helped connect my generation to them in the years when the band themselves no longer existed.
By the time Oasis finally returned, we already knew every word.
There could hardly have been a better way for Oasis to introduce themselves. ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Star’ opens ‘Definitely Maybe’ without even considering the possibility that the band might fail. Oasis had barely begun and were already writing from the perspective of people who knew exactly where they were going.
That confidence was crucial. At a time when plenty of alternative rock treated fame with suspicion, Oasis wanted everything. They wanted the records, the stages, the attention and the possibility of becoming the biggest band in the world. ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Star’ turns that ambition into a manifesto.
The swagger is obvious, but there is something more important beneath it. The opening image of life in the city with no easy way out explains why the fantasy matters. Becoming a rock star is not simply about fame; it represents escape. That idea runs throughout ‘Definitely Maybe’, with Noel Gallagher repeatedly writing about refusing to accept that the circumstances immediately around you should determine the rest of your life.
‘Rock ’n’ Roll Star’, ‘Live Forever’ and ‘Cigarettes & Alcohol’ approach that feeling from different directions: ambition, optimism and frustration. Together, they contain almost the entire philosophy of early Oasis.
Thirty-one years later, ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Star’ closed the main set on Live ’25. By then, Liam Gallagher no longer had to convince anybody that he was a rock ’n’ roll star. What made those performances particularly brilliant was the way he could turn the sentiment back towards the audience. Tens of thousands of people who had spent the evening shouting Oasis songs were briefly invited inside the fantasy.
A song originally about escaping an ordinary life had become something everybody in the stadium could share.
If you wanted one song to explain why Oasis’s B-sides became almost as important as their albums, ‘Listen Up’ would make a convincing case.
Released in October 1994 as a B-side to ‘Cigarettes & Alcohol’, it arrived when Oasis were already moving at ridiculous speed. ‘Definitely Maybe’ had only been out for a matter of weeks, yet Noel Gallagher was still producing songs good enough to have been central tracks on most bands’ albums.
Instead, ‘Listen Up’ was placed on the back of a single.
That almost feels absurd now.
The opening carries some of the same momentum as ‘Supersonic’, but ‘Listen Up’ gradually becomes something more expansive. At over six minutes, it has room to stretch, with guitars circling Liam’s vocal while the rhythm section keeps pushing forward.
Liam sounds magnificent on it, but what really elevates ‘Listen Up’ for me are the lyrics. I genuinely think they are among the finest Noel Gallagher has ever written.
There is the familiar early-Oasis defiance, the refusal to be told how to live or what to believe, but it is mixed with a vulnerability Noel did not always make so obvious. The song is about independence, but not the uncomplicated kind. It acknowledges that choosing your own path can leave you isolated, and that freedom sometimes means accepting loneliness alongside it.
The admission that he does not mind being on his own gets to the heart of the song. Oasis are remembered for communal music, arms around shoulders and choruses designed to be sung by thousands of people, yet ‘Listen Up’ is much more inward-looking. It is about standing apart from everyone else and deciding that, however uncomfortable that might be, it is preferable to becoming something you are not.
Noel develops the idea further as the song progresses. There are questions about whether life has any predetermined direction at all, how much control any of us really have and whether the things we spend our lives chasing ultimately mean anything. He was still only in his twenties, writing for a band that had barely become famous, yet ‘Listen Up’ already contains the kind of reflection that would later define songs such as ‘The Masterplan’.
That is why I rate the lyric so highly. It manages to be philosophical without pretending to have the answers. There is uncertainty everywhere, but also a stubborn determination to carry on regardless.
The music mirrors that contradiction perfectly. The chorus soars like one of the great optimistic Oasis anthems, while the words underneath are far less certain. The world is there to be conquered, but the person trying to conquer it is already wondering what any of it actually means.
It eventually found a natural home on ‘The Masterplan’ in 1998, where it helped prove that the mythology around Oasis’s B-sides was justified. These were not leftovers. At their best, they contained some of Noel Gallagher’s greatest writing.
The song has also unexpectedly returned to the spotlight. In 2026 it was chosen to play over the closing credits of the Oasis reunion documentary, ‘Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger’. It does not feature in the Live ’25 set itself, which makes the choice even more interesting. After a film built around Liam and Noel finally finding their way back to each other, the credits roll to one of the great songs they had left untouched on the reunion tour.
Maybe it means nothing for Live ’27. Maybe somebody simply knew it was the perfect song to end the film with. Either way, hearing ‘Listen Up’ given that moment felt like a reminder of just how deep the Oasis catalogue goes.
That is enough to put it at number eight.
‘Bring It On Down’ is Oasis at their most openly punk. Before ‘Supersonic’ became their debut single, it was one of the songs being considered to introduce the band, but recording it proved considerably more difficult than expected.Tony McCarroll struggled to capture the drum part Noel wanted, eventually leading the band to try a session drummer.
Even that failed to solve the problem. McCarroll returned to the kit and finally delivered the performance the song required. Somewhere inside all that chaos, Oasis changed direction and ‘Supersonic’ eventually became the debut single instead. In hindsight, history probably worked out for the best.
‘Bring It On Down’ remains one of the rawest recordings on ‘Definitely Maybe’. The guitars scrape, the drums sound furious and Liam delivers the lyric with a level of contempt that makes the whole thing feel barely contained. Most importantly, the anger has a target.
The song speaks directly to outsiders and people who have been told where they belong. That places it close to ‘Cigarettes & Alcohol’, although the response is different. ‘Cigarettes & Alcohol’ turns frustration into escapism, whereas ‘Bring It On Down’ sounds ready to fight back.
That aggression has helped the song age surprisingly well. Liam revived it during his 2024 ‘Definitely Maybe’ anniversary tour before Oasis themselves placed it near the beginning of the Live ’25 set. A track that had spent years feeling like one of the deeper cuts on their debut suddenly sounded completely at home inside a stadium, and perhaps it always should have.
Few Oasis songs explain the world that produced the band as clearly as ‘Cigarettes & Alcohol’. Musically, it is shameless. The central riff owes an obvious debt to T. Rex’s ‘Get It On’, something Noel Gallagher has never exactly attempted to disguise. Oasis take that glam-rock swagger, make it heavier and dirtier, and somehow make it sound completely natural coming from them.
The reason the song has lasted, though, is not simply the riff. It is the frustration underneath it
“Is it worth the aggravation to find yourself a job when there’s nothing worth working for?” remains one of Noel’s most direct lyrics because it came from a world he knew intimately.
Noel belonged to the generation often described as “Thatcher’s Children”, those who grew up during Margaret Thatcher’s governments between 1979 and 1990. Across that period, Britain went through recession, industrial decline and a dramatic rise in unemployment. The impact was particularly visible in many working-class communities in the North of England, where the disappearance or contraction of traditional industries changed the expectations facing young people growing up during the 1980s. National unemployment rose from 5.4 per cent in 1979 to more than 11 per cent during the middle of the decade.
For Noel, none of that was theoretical. He left school and spent periods unemployed, living the reality he would later write about. The dole queue was part of everyday life, not some image invented years later once Oasis became successful. Looking back, he remembered going to sign on alongside his brother, his friends and their fathers, describing it as one of the most “soul-destroying” things he could imagine. “At the time, it was just life,” he recalled. “I’d left school and gone on the dole. But what message does that send? My dad’s got no future?”
He has also remembered the period more simply: “That was the Maggie Thatcher age - everyone was there with their dad.”
That context is what gives ‘Cigarettes & Alcohol’ more substance than its title might suggest. This is not simply a celebration of getting drunk, smoking and avoiding responsibility. Beneath the swagger is the frustration of being told to work hard and follow the conventional route while looking around and seeing very little evidence that the route still led anywhere.
What makes the song unmistakably Oasis is the response. Noel does not turn that frustration into self-pity. He turns it into escape. If the future being offered to you looks empty, find something that makes the present worthwhile: music, friends, a night out, cigarettes and alcohol. There is something reckless in that philosophy, obviously, but there is also the stubborn refusal to accept that this is all life is allowed to be.
That connects ‘Cigarettes & Alcohol’ directly to the optimism elsewhere on ‘Definitely Maybe’. ‘Live Forever’ dreams of something better, ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Star’ imagines escaping through music and ‘Bring It On Down’ directs its anger towards the people who look down on you. ‘Cigarettes & Alcohol’ sits somewhere between all three. It acknowledges the bleakness around it and then turns the guitars up anyway.
The specific Britain Noel was writing about has changed, but the underlying feeling has not disappeared. Every generation encounters its own version of being told what adulthood is supposed to look like while wondering whether the promised rewards are actually there.
That is why ‘Cigarettes & Alcohol’ still works. Beneath one of Oasis’s biggest riffs is something much more important: the sound of a young songwriter looking at the life apparently waiting for him and deciding he wanted something else.
Only Oasis could treat a song as good as ‘The Masterplan’ as a B-side.
Released in 1996 alongside ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’, it could comfortably have been one of the centrepieces of ‘(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?’. Instead, it was placed on the back of a single, another extraordinary example of just how rich Noel Gallagher’s songwriting run had become during the mid-1990s.
By 1998, the song had become the title track of ‘The Masterplan’, the compilation that finally gave Oasis’s B-sides the spotlight they deserved. In many ways, there could not have been a more appropriate song to name it after.
Lyrically, ‘The Masterplan’ operates on a different frequency from much of early Oasis. ‘Definitely Maybe’ is filled with escape, ambition and the belief that something better is waiting around the corner. ‘The Masterplan’ is more accepting of the fact that sometimes you simply do not know what is coming next.
There is something comforting in that. Noel does not pretend to have worked life out. Instead, the song accepts uncertainty and suggests that perhaps the best any of us can do is take the opportunities that come our way and see where they lead.
That was one of the first Oasis ideas I connected with properly on a personal level. As a teenager, the image of endless doors and endless possibilities captured the strange feeling of having your whole life in front of you while having absolutely no idea which direction you were supposed to take. There is excitement in that, but also fear. ‘The Masterplan’ never tells you which door is the right one; it simply suggests that eventually you have to choose something and live with where it takes you.
That feeling is matched by one of Noel’s most beautiful arrangements. The acoustic guitar keeps the song intimate while the strings gradually widen everything around it. Noel never needs to force the vocal either. Compared with some of Oasis’s enormous productions, ‘The Masterplan’ works because it knows when to hold something back.
During the years Oasis were apart, Noel kept the song alive in his High Flying Birds sets, allowing another generation to claim it in much the same way they did ‘Little By Little’. When Oasis returned for Live ’25, ‘The Masterplan’ opened the encore. A song once deemed suitable for the back of a single was now being sung by tens of thousands of people at the biggest shows of the band’s career.
There is something wonderfully Oasis about that journey. Their B-sides were never really B-sides in the traditional sense, and ‘The Masterplan’ might be the greatest example of all.
Before Live ’25, ‘Champagne Supernova’ had started to become almost too familiar to me. It is one of those Oasis songs that has always been there, played at gigs, on radio stations and in indie clubs to the point where it becomes easy to forget just how extraordinary it actually is.
Then I heard Oasis play it together at Heaton Park and the whole thing opened up again.
There has always been something impossible about ‘Champagne Supernova’. Noel himself has admitted that parts of the lyric resist straightforward explanation. Images appear because they sound right or feel right rather than because they fit neatly into a traditional narrative. Somehow, that lack of literal meaning is exactly what allows the song to mean so much.
Questions about people changing, time moving on and being caught beneath forces bigger than yourself accumulate across more than seven minutes. Some images are surreal, others unexpectedly vulnerable, but together they create something that feels more emotional than logical.
The studio recording is also one of Oasis’s greatest musical achievements. Paul Weller adds lead guitar and backing vocals, helping push the song beyond straightforward Britpop and into something more psychedelic. The track takes its time, gradually building until the outro feels like it could go on forever.
That patience is essential. ‘Champagne Supernova’ does not rush towards its climax because it knows the journey is part of the point. I had heard that journey hundreds of times before July 2025. At Heaton Park, it became something else entirely.
Watching Oasis close their Manchester homecoming with ‘Champagne Supernova’ while fireworks exploded above the park completely changed my relationship with the song. People around me were crying, others were simply staring upwards, and thousands of voices seemed to merge into Liam’s.
It didn't feel like sadness, exactly. It felt closer to relief, gratitude and disbelief all happening at once. For sixteen years, Oasis had existed in the past tense. Suddenly Liam and Noel were standing on the same stage again, and one of their greatest songs was filling the Manchester sky.
For those few minutes, everything that had happened between them felt irrelevant. The song was bigger than the feud, bigger than the reunion and, somehow, bigger than the occasion itself.
For a band so often associated with volume, swagger and confrontation, one of Oasis’s greatest songs is built around almost nothing more than Noel Gallagher, an acoustic guitar and a moment when he nearly walked away from the band altogether.
‘Talk Tonight’ came from Oasis’s disastrous first American tour in 1994. The infamous Whisky a Go Go show in Los Angeles descended into chaos, with the band in no condition to play properly and tensions between Liam and Noel reaching breaking point. Noel left afterwards and headed to San Francisco, seriously considering whether Oasis were worth continuing.
There he spent time with Melissa Lim, a woman he had previously met briefly. She gave him somewhere to disappear for a few days, fed him, walked around the city with him and, according to the story that has followed the song ever since, helped convince him not to give everything up.
The beauty of ‘Talk Tonight’ is how ordinary those experiences become in Noel’s writing. Walks, conversations and strawberry lemonade find their way into a song about being far from home and finding comfort in another person at exactly the moment you need it.
There is almost none of the mythology usually associated with Oasis here. No declaration that they are going to become the biggest band in the world, no wall of guitars and no attempt to sound untouchable. Noel sounds exhausted, vulnerable and grateful.
That is what makes the song so affecting. Liam was capable of turning Noel’s songs into enormous declarations, but on ‘Talk Tonight’, Noel’s own voice is exactly what the lyric requires. There is a fragility to the performance that might have disappeared if anybody else had sung it.
Released as a B-side to ‘Some Might Say’ in 1995, it is another reminder of how ridiculous Oasis’s B-side catalogue became. ‘Talk Tonight’, ‘The Masterplan’, ‘Listen Up’, ‘Acquiesce’ and ‘Half the World Away’ could have formed the foundations of another band’s career. Oasis scattered them behind singles.
The story gained a lovely full-circle moment during Live ’25 when Lim attended the Rose Bowl show, more than three decades after those few days in California. Whether she literally saved Oasis is impossible to know, but she was certainly there during a moment when Noel needed somebody, and that moment gave us one of his finest songs.
For all the noise Oasis made, ‘Talk Tonight’ proves they could be just as powerful when almost everything else was stripped away.
If one Oasis song changed everything, it was ‘Live Forever’.
Noel began writing it before he joined the band, during a period when the life Oasis would eventually give him still seemed completely out of reach. The melody began with an idea inspired by The Rolling Stones’ ‘Shine a Light’, but what Noel built from it became something completely different.
Where much of alternative rock at the beginning of the 1990s dealt in alienation, cynicism and self-destruction, ‘Live Forever’ looked upwards. Its optimism was not accidental. It reacted against the idea that misery somehow made music more authentic.
Noel has often contrasted the song with Nirvana’s ‘I Hate Myself and Want to Die’. He admired Kurt Cobain, but struggled to understand how someone could have achieved everything and still view life through complete despair. Oasis came from almost the opposite position. They had very little, and that made the possibility of something better exciting.
That outlook runs through ‘Live Forever’. The song is about wanting more without apologising for it, believing life might hold something beyond whatever circumstances you were born into, and refusing the idea that disappearing quietly is inevitable.
When ‘Live Forever’ was released in August 1994, Cobain had died four months earlier. That contrast between the two outlooks only deepened the song's significance, but reducing it to an anti-grunge statement misses what makes it endure. At its heart, ‘Live Forever’ is about refusing disappearance. That can mean fame, family, friendship, love or simply memory. Noel left enough space inside the words for generations of listeners to place their own lives there.
Liam’s performance completes it. Noel wrote the optimism, but Liam sings it as though every word is already fact. There is no hesitation or embarrassment in his voice. He sounds completely certain that there must be something more.
That certainty is a huge part of what made Oasis different. They arrived without asking permission to dream bigger than the circumstances around them.
Three decades later, hearing tens of thousands of people sing ‘Live Forever’ together gives the title an entirely different meaning. Oasis broke up, sixteen years passed and an entire generation grew up without ever seeing them. The songs survived anyway.
In that sense, Noel got what he wanted. Oasis found a way to live forever.
It would be my number one were it not for one song.
Leaving ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ outside my Top 10 feels ridiculous, but that is what happens when you try to rank a catalogue like Oasis’s. There are songs I personally return to more often, yet I am not sure there is another Oasis track that has come to mean so much to so many different people.
I have already written about the full story behind ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’, so there is little point repeating every detail here. What matters for this list is the journey it took after Oasis released it.
Noel wrote the song during the ‘Morning Glory’ period, openly drawing inspiration from John Lennon. The piano introduction immediately recalls ‘Imagine’, while other Lennon references appear throughout the lyric. It also became the first Oasis single with Noel on lead vocals rather than Liam, helping establish that there could be another voice at the centre of the band.
Over time, however, ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ stopped belonging solely to Oasis.
Following the Manchester Arena attack in May 2017, mourners gathered in St Ann’s Square. After a minute’s silence, one person began singing the song and the crowd gradually joined. A record written more than two decades earlier suddenly became something the city could use when normal words did not feel sufficient.
That moment permanently altered the song. It had always been a huge Oasis anthem, but afterwards it acquired another meaning entirely. It could still fill football grounds, pubs, weddings and festival fields, yet it could also carry grief, remembrance and solidarity.
That is an extraordinary thing for any song to become.
During Live ’25, Noel often barely needed to sing the chorus because tens of thousands of people were already doing it for him. It no longer feels like a song that requires a performer and an audience. Everybody in the room owns part of it.
There are took on an entirely different meaning. Oasis songs I personally love more, which is why it sits outside my ten. But if somebody told me ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ was the most important song Oasis ever recorded, I would understand exactly why.
For me, ‘Slide Away’ is Oasis.
It contains everything I love about the band: the guitars, Liam Gallagher at his absolute best, Noel’s instinct for melody and, underneath all that swagger, an emotional vulnerability that Oasis sometimes tried to disguise.
Its story also begins with one of the great acts of generosity in Manchester music. Johnny Marr gave Noel a Gibson Les Paul at a point when Oasis were still playing small venues and Noel was struggling with unreliable equipment. The guitar had already passed through remarkable hands before Marr gave it to another Manchester songwriter who was about to change British music.
Noel has said that once he picked it up, ‘Slide Away’ seemed to arrive almost immediately.
The song has long been connected to the ending of Noel’s relationship with Louise Jones, his long-term girlfriend before Oasis became famous. Whether every word can be mapped neatly onto that relationship almost does not matter because the performance makes it feel completely autobiographical.
Liam delivers one of the greatest vocals of his career. The rasp and attitude remain, but underneath them is desperation. By the time the final section arrives, he no longer sounds like somebody simply performing a love song. He sounds like somebody trying to stop something important from disappearing.
The guitars behave the same way. ‘Slide Away’ keeps building and building, eventually spilling into an extended outro that Noel once jokingly dismissed as “sonic waftage”. It is a very Noel Gallagher phrase for something that is actually one of the most beautiful passages Oasis ever recorded.
Everything becomes tangled together towards the end: Liam’s vocal, Noel’s harmonies, the guitars and the repeated phrases. The song seems unwilling to stop because stopping would mean accepting that the thing being sung about might really be over.
That made hearing it during Live ’25 particularly powerful. After sixteen years apart, Liam was once again singing one of Noel’s greatest love songs while his brother stood only yards away. At Heaton Park, all the history surrounding Oasis inevitably entered the song with them. Nobody needed to explain the symbolism because you could hear it.
The reunion also finally gave ‘Slide Away’ something it had somehow never possessed before. A live recording from Cardiff was released during Live ’25 and took the song into the UK Singles Chart for the first time, more than three decades after ‘Definitely Maybe’.
There are bigger Oasis songs and more famous Oasis songs. ‘Wonderwall’ will always be the one everybody knows, ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ became something much larger than the band and ‘Live Forever’ probably explains their philosophy better than anything else Noel wrote.
None of them affect me quite like ‘Slide Away’.
It contains the y,outhful belief of ‘Definitely Maybe’, but mixes that optimism with fear, devotion and the knowledge that something you desperately love might still disappear. That combination takes it beyond Britpop or the 1990s. It could have been written decades earlier or decades later and the emotion would remain exactly the same.
‘Live Forever’ might be Noel Gallagher’s greatest statement of optimism. ‘Slide Away’ proves that he could write a devastating love song too, while Liam gave him the performance it needed to become something even greater.
For me, it remains the greatest Oasis song.
There it is: my ten favourite Oasis songs. The list has changed before and it will probably change again. Live ’25 already altered the way I hear several of these tracks, and with Live ’27 ahead there will be another opportunity for songs I thought I knew inside out to become something different.
That is one of the reasons Oasis continue to matter. Their songs are not trapped in the years they were written. ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Star’ means something different when Liam sings it in his fifties than when he was a young man imagining his escape from Manchester. ‘The Masterplan’ changes once you have lived through some of those endless decisions yourself. ‘Champagne Supernova’ changes when the band you thought you would never see together again plays it beneath fireworks in Heaton Park.
Sometimes the ranking changes for a much simpler reason. ‘Morning Glory’ used to sit at number eight. It remains one of the definitive Oasis live songs, and hearing that riff during Live ’25 was exactly as thrilling as I hoped it would be. But ‘Listen Up’ is the song I return to more. I think it contains some of Noel Gallagher’s finest lyrics, and every time I hear it I seem to find something else inside them. That is enough to change the list. Plenty of others could easily have made the ten. ‘Supersonic’ remains one of the greatest debut singles British guitar music has produced. ‘Some Might Say’, ‘Acquiesce’, ‘Half the World Away’, ‘Cast No Shadow’, ‘Morning Glory’, ‘The Importance of Being Idle’, ‘Lyla’, ‘The Hindu Times’ and ‘Falling Down’ could all make convincing cases.
Then there is ‘D’You Know What I Mean?’, one of the most gloriously excessive things Oasis ever recorded and another song that, depending on the day, could easily force its way into this list. The depth of the catalogue is what makes ranking Oasis so enjoyable. Two people can love the band equally and produce completely different Top 10s.
For all the discussion that will surround Live ’27 over the coming months, from tickets and support acts to extra dates and potential setlist changes, everything ultimately comes back to these songs. They survived the split, they made Live ’25 possible, and they are the reason millions of people are willing to go through all of it again.
Feel free to share your own Top 10 in the comments. I am almost certain yours will look completely different. Mine still ends where it always seems to: ‘Slide Away’.