Not As Biblical: 10 songs Oasis should have never released

Posted On September 8, 2024September 8, 2024

For as much joy as they brought to the world, there’s a good chance that no one was properly ready when Oasis first emerged on the scene. In an era of rock that was so firmly dominated by bands with their hands in their pockets and immersing themselves in irony, hearing the Gallagher brothers sing at the top of their lungs about how they were going to live forever was enough to bring everyone’s collective spirit up when they emerged on the scene. Optimism is all well and good, but some Britpop lowpoints should have never seen the light of day.

That doesn’t mean that everything that Oasis did is absolute shite or anything. They are responsible for some of the most formative years of many artists to have come out since, so please don’t let some jackass on the Internet take away the personal experiences that you have with a specific song, project, or whatever else.

Then again, there are some moments where Noel was either phoning it in or was clearly not ready to be writing classics when he stepped up to the plate for every one of these tracks. There might even be some merit to a handful of these tunes, but they may have needed to be properly fleshed out or given one final remix before they were worthy of being on an album or a B-side.

Because as much as they talk about being the greatest band in the world, not even the Gallaghers were perfect, and this is just a small sample of when they ended up coughing up a few naff tracks. Far from unlistenable all the time, but to borrow a phrase from Liam himself, far from biblical status either.

10 songs Oasis should have never released

10. ‘Sittin’ Here In Silence On My Own’ – ‘Let There Be Love’ single

One of the biggest upsides of being an Oasis fan was getting all of their fantastic B-sides. Such songs would normally be reserved for material that wasn’t quite enough to make the album, but in the glory years, having more tunes that were good enough to be A-sides on their own was far from a bad problem to have. But somewhere around the 2000s, they began to drop the ball with their odds and ends, and ‘Sittin’ Here In Silence On My Own’ is among one of the most faceless tracks they put out.

Granted, it’s not like ‘Let There Be Love’ was an uptempo single. The duet between Noel and Liam is always a welcome thing to hear, but outside of a sloppy live rendition of ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Star’, hearing Noel croak out this ballad in less than two minutes is just a slog, especially since the riff is borrowed from The Beatles’ ‘Sexy Sadie’.

The beauty of Noel pinching from other artists came from how he made the tune his own, but all this does is affirm the fact that he just wants to go home and is stuck in the studio, forced to bash something out. Noel gets unfairly maligned as the lighter singer in Oasis, but hearing him in this state makes him sound more than a little bit bored.

9. ‘Put Yer Money Where Yer Mouth Is’ – Standing on the Shoulder of Giants

In the grand scheme of Oasis history, Standing on the Shoulder of Giants is a bit of a weird case. If you wanted to, you could almost call this a ‘Gallagher Brothers’ album, considering most of the group quit or was fired during the production, only leaving drummer Alan White as the non-family member of the band. This should have made for their most personal set of cuts, but in between the downtempo material is this forced piece of electro-rock messing about. 

Although ‘Fuckin’ In the Bushes’ kicks off the record in roaring fashion with a great guitar lick, ‘Put Yer Money Where Yer Mouth Is’ is where the album loses its momentum and never gets it back. Despite Mark ‘Spike’ Stent’s history of working with acts like Spice Girls, having that poptastic backing instrumental just feels wrong coming out of Oasis, especially when everything that Noel wrote was one half-decent verse that overstays its welcome after two goes-around.

As much as people like to cast out Liam’s first attempt, ‘Little James’, for a list like this, that is far from the true nadir of the album. The true Britpop comeback needed some rockers on the record, but I’d gladly take a sincere song Liam wrote over something that screams cynicism from the moment it starts.

8. ‘A Quick Peep’ – Heathen Chemistry

The eternal question that everyone poses when talking about bands is whether bad or plain boring is worse. While something openly offensive will grate on the nerves occasionally, playing something that elicits absolutely no emotion isn’t going to do a band any favours when putting together a tracklist. And while Heathen Chemistry is probably the weakest album in the Oasis canon by default, ‘A Quick Peep’ doesn’t really help its case.

Since this was when the group began getting more democratic, it’s understandable that some quality would have to be left by the wayside. Then again, who in the hell thought that their future would be making some quasi-hard rock ditty for an instrumental, especially when they try to play around on it for a few minutes before just giving up on the idea and moving on to the next one?

The biggest crime of this pick, though, has to be the fact that Andy Bell was blocked out of the room on this one. Bell was already a fantastic performer in Ride and had even written some quality tunes for the project, but there’s no chance that someone in their right mind thought this should be chosen for the album instead of ‘Thank You For the Good Times’.

7. ‘To Be Where There’s Life’ – Dig Out Your Soul

Throughout most of Dig Out Your Soul, it felt like Noel and Liam were building towards something bigger. After downtuning their guitars on pieces of the record, tunes like ‘The Turning’ and ‘The Nature of Reality’ sounded like they were about to get a little more cerebral before everything came crashing down in 2009. Sadly, we’ll never know what that project was building to, but ‘To Be Where There’s Life’ might have been a good reason not to get our hopes up too much.

While Gem Archer is a fine guitarist in his own right and has written great material both in and out of Oasis, this spiritual psychedelic song sounds like a track wasted by comparison. It does fit in with the mentality of the record, but the lyrics definitely need a lot of work, which isn’t a good thing when the rest of the instruments are based around just one chord looping throughout the entire piece.

It’s not like Oasis can’t make magic out of simplistic loops like this. ‘Who Feels Love?’ is the ultimate example of this track style being done right, but it just sounded as if the guys just wanted to throw on one extra cut midway through the album and call it a day. Maybe it was because of tension within the band, but it doesn’t make it any less of a dirge.

6. ‘The Girl in the Dirty Shirt’ – Be Here Now

Most Oasis fans knew that any new album meant getting one or two silly moments thrown into the mix. As much as Noel liked to take a few jabs at Blur for being too jovial, he could easily match Damon Albarn in raw whimsy on something like ‘She’s Electric’. While it’s not very original for someone to take yet another slogging to Be Here Now, one of its most forgettable cuts does turn up halfway through the record.

Done in the style of those whimsical British pop singles, ‘The Girl In The Dirty Shirt’ feels like the kind of slice-of-life story that Ray Davies threw out when working with The Kinks, which fits considering ‘Come Dancing’ is mentioned by name in the lyrics. While there are a lot of great nostalgic classic rock moments on Oasis records, this is the first that doesn’t scan properly, especially with those C7 chords bashing away in the instrumental breaks.

And given that it’s on Be Here Now, that also means it goes for far longer than it should, meaning that everyone has to sit through the more forgettable moments on the project because Noel needed to fulfil his ambition to stretch everything out. If there’s anything that we’ve learned from Be Here Now, it’s that there’s no shame in keeping things fairly concise.

5. ‘Soldier On’ – Dig Out Your Soul

By the time Oasis were ending, Liam had turned himself into a good enough writer to match his older brother. The entire Oasis canon didn’t have nearly enough Liam tracks to flesh out that statement. Still, considering Noel was releasing ‘Falling Down’, it was impressive to see ‘Our Kid’ keep up with him on beautiful ballads like ‘I’m Outta Time’. For all of the strengths that Liam had during this period, he may not have been equipped to close the album on ‘Soldier On’.

While ‘Better Man’ off of Heathen Chemistry was also far from his best effort, ‘Soldier On’ feels like a dirge for all the wrong reasons. Not every one of Liam’s songs could be considered complicated, but it’s practically caveman-simple towards the end, as he continues to repeat the same lines over and over again while sounding absolutely bored out of his mind.

Even the tape didn’t bother to capture the final moments, with the last few seconds featuring the sound of a broken tape machine spinning. If that was intended as a joke, I’d be very impressed, but it might have been a bad omen to signal that not all was well within the Oasis camp anymore.

4. ‘Sunday Morning Call’ – Standing on the Shoulder of Giants

Noel Gallagher was never given the nickname ‘The Chief’ by accident. He was the one who called the shots every time the band walked into the studio, and it’s hard to argue with the results when he took them to the greatest heights any band had ever been. If the 1990s were a massive party, though, Standing on the Shoulder of Giants was the hangover, and ‘Sunday Morning Call’ was the ballad that should have been turned into a B-side.

It’s bad enough that it was coming right off of the other Noel ballad, ‘Where Did It All Go Wrong’, but whereas that was a captivating piece on the band itself, this is a slog that barely gets itself into gear. The melody is pretty strong in the chorus, but since it’s being played at such a slow tempo, it’s hard to notice it too much over the virtual audio NyQuil being hammered out behind everything.

Not even Noel could defend it, calling it one of his least favourite Oasis tunes and even trying to have it removed from their greatest hits record, Time Flies. An opening single like ‘Go Let It Out’ almost promised this would be a different kind of record, but given that ‘Let’s All Make Believe’ was right there, it feels like a missed opportunity we got this on the album in its place.

3. ‘Digsy’s Dinner’ – Definitely Maybe

So, I’m potentially walking on incredibly thin ice here. I mean, saying that part of Definitely Maybe is one of the band’s worst moments is like telling a Pink Floyd fan there’s something wrong with Dark Side of the Moon; someone’s liable to kick my ass over it. If I must die on this hill, though, be sure to write on the tombstone that ‘Digsy’s Dinner’ is easily the bottom tier of Oasis’s 1990s years.

I’ll start with the positives, considering that it’s a moderately catchy melody of the variety you’d find in the 1960s. Outside of that, the fact that it disrupts the flow of the record right after ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’ is one of the biggest fumbles they ever made, especially with the coy piano solo thumping away around the halfway point.

While it’s a little funny hearing the story about the real-life Digsy who inspired Noel, the fact that ‘Slide Away’ comes right after this just makes it look that much worse. For all of the blood, sweat and tears that went into recording this album a few times over to get it just right, it’s still a mystery as to why this could stay.

2. ‘The Swamp Song’ – The Masterplan

The words ‘Oasis’ and ‘instrumental track’ don’t really belong in the same sentence together. Their greatest strength was hearing Noel’s tender voice or Liam crushing every single tune he wrapped his voice around, so what’s the point in messing around with a purely instrumental ditty? Even though pieces of ‘The Swamp Song’ are interesting for what they are, the best moments were clearly already used during the interludes on What’s the Story Morning Glory.

Aside from being a great piece for them to jam on at the beginning of their shows before Liam came on, that kind of energy doesn’t really translate to the studio. People are losing their minds because they are psyched to be at an Oasis gig, but as a B-side, especially, it feels like filler compared to the other fantastic tracks on the ‘Wonderwall’ single.

If anything, it’s more questionable as to how the hell it ended up being included on the compilation album The Masterplan. So many B-sides to go around throughout their 1990s output, but while it made sense to include the live version of ‘I Am the Walrus’, why not put something like ‘It’s Better People’ or even ‘Cloudburst’ on in place of ‘The Swamp Song’.

1. ‘Columbia – Live’ – ‘Songbird’ single

The common consensus for anyone in Oasis’ heyday was that you needed to catch them onstage. Outside of being one of the loudest bands to come out of people’s stereos, having every amp cranked whenever they played and hearing them pound away on their instruments was a thing of beauty watching the live footage of their shows at Maine Road. And before people call for my head to put ‘Columbia’ in the top spot, just have a listen to what was included on the single to ‘Songbird’.

It’s already questionable that a live cut was used in place of an original B-side, but this version of ‘Columbia’ is one of the worst renditions they have ever played. Outside of the instrumental, the drums often go out of time with everything, which is a major upset, considering this was Alan White’s workhorse era in the group.

And that doesn’t compare to whatever poor Liam was dealing with, sounding more throaty with every word and creating a chorus of dying cats when he harmonises with his brother on the choruses. Maybe they needed some energy on the CD after ‘Songbird’ and ‘You’ve Got the Heart of a Star’, but including something that’s physically grating on the ears wasn’t going to win many people over.

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