Britain in 1995. The Mutually Assured Destruction of the Cold War is but a distant memory, the Islamic terrorism of the coming decade a mere twinkle in Osama bin Laden’s eye. Grunge has been vanquished, Kurt Cobain has passed on, but Princess Diana is very much alive. Chris Evans has his own Friday night cartoon show, and Tony Blair is poised to return power to the people for the first time since the signing of the Magna Carta. It’s a time that, looking back from the global tumult of 2024, seems almost impossibly idyllic (in the West, at least – I wouldn’t have much fancied being in Rwanda).
(What’s the Story) Morning Glory? is the defining album of this moment in British cultural history. Funnily enough, though, it’s not the best Oasis album (that’s Definitely Maybe, the confrontational and unreconstructedly Mancunian equivalent of Appetite for Destruction), maybe not even the second best (that would be The Masterplan, an assemblage of bewilderingly good B-sides released two years after Morning Glory). But it is undoubtedly the quintessential Britpop record. From late 1995 until summer 1996, it was utterly ubiquitous; its singles were permanently on the radio, its progenitors constantly on television, and there was generally no escape from it. Everyone at my school was obsessed with it, with a few exceptions, including myself, because I was going through a black nail varnish phase, and only later found the chops to admit that I liked it and listened to it in secret.
Does Morning Glory speak directly to the effervescent spirit of mid-90s Cool Britannia, in the same way that Damon Albarn strove to with “Girls and Boys” or “End of a Century”? Well, not really, because Noel used up all of his lyrical ideas – that is, his one lyrical idea – on Definitely Maybe, by singing about the drudgery of life on the dole in Manchester as an aspiring, rock-obsessed musician. By 1995, all that remained was oh-that-word-sounds-nice-here nonsense (“I know the roads on which your life will drive”), and the occasional half-baked, half-witted self-help platitude (“there ain’t no sense in feeling lonely, they got no faith in you”).
But that’s OK – as we saw on the Out of Time and Nevermind reviews, by 1995, almost everyone was writing lyrics like this anyway, with only a few noble exceptions turning their brains on before picking up a pen. What makes Noel Gallagher’s case particularly galling is that he actually had some talent in this area, successfully peppering his vast reams of lyrical offal with the occasional arresting line that sticks in your head and somehow saves entire songs. Unfortunately, most of the time, he couldn’t be arsed.
Anyway, enough about the lyrics, because Morning Glory’s status as the Britpop album par excellence owes in no small degree to a preponderance of anthemic rock megahits. Clearly, Oasis did this deliberately, even cynically; they were consciously reaching for the crown of biggest band in Britain, which at this point in time was atop the head of aspiring Eastenders extra Damon Albarn. Oasis fronted their (ultimately successful) campaign with radio bangers that sounded good in stadiums, and everywhere you look on Morning Glory, there’s a heavily calculated drunken-sing-along-waiting-to-happen. The best of these is undoubtedly “Don’t Look Back in Anger”, on which a warm piano, glorious guitar solo, and towering vocals expertly distil a sunny summer’s day into a four-minute rock classic.
Given the power of “Don’t Look Back in Anger”, it seems strange that “Some Might Say” was chosen as the lead single. It’s another hymn to good times and good weather, but it’s sludgier, less clean-cut than “…Anger”, and apparently the demo sounded “sleazier”, more redolent of Definitely Maybe. The second single, “Roll With It”, was another questionable choice; an uncomplicated, unremarkable rocker which famously lost out to the Jack-in-the-Box japery of Blur’s “Country House” in the “Battle of Britpop”. But whatever you might think about these songs, they’ve retained a certain socio-cultural relevance: “Roll With It”, for example, still plays at the end of Manchester City home games, and there’s a big banner in the Etihad with “some might say we will find a brighter day” emblazoned on it. If that counts.
The flip side to the stadium singalong is of course the cigarette-lighters-aloft acoustic softie, and here too, Morning Glory delivers the goods. As miserable Scottish music-for-bedwetters purveyor Fran Healy would later ask, “what’s a Wonderwall anyway?”, and it’s easy to be cynical about the song’s kitschy lyrics, as indicated by Steve Coogan’s syrupy sendup (and as Ryan Adams’ drippy cover singularly failed to conceal). But, let’s face it, “Wonderwall” is a great song, and it never gets old, not least because of its affecting Britpop strings, which incidentally are back in full force on the equally good, if not better, “Cast No Shadow”. This is a quite heartbreaking tribute to Verve frontman Richard Ashcroft, who probably didn’t cast a shadow at this point in time, because he weighed about six stone. Anyway, it’s a highlight of the album. Now might be the proper point in the review to mention “She’s Electric”, but I am unequal to this task, as I find it to be unlistenably chirpy and diabolically twee, so I won’t.
Despite all this conspicuous crowd-pleasing, there are moments on Morning Glory where the punky, aggressive, sneering Manc scallies of Definitely Maybe briefly elbow the millionaire rockstars off the stage and threaten to sink the whole project. On the doomy and arduous “Hey Now!”, you rather wish they hadn’t bothered. But there are other moments where the taste of blood is delicious indeed. The opener, “Hello”, teases us with the plaintive guitar riff of “Wonderwall”, before launching into furious glam; Aladdin Sane but wearing a parka instead of makeup, and threatening to glass you if you look at him the wrong way. The title track, meanwhile, is one of the album’s finest moments, a belligerent ode to mid-90s largesse, and one of those instances where Noel Gallagher briefly morphs into an accomplished poet (“All your dreams are made when you’re chained to the mirror and the razor blade”). Cocky, cocaine-fuelled Britpop at its absolute best.
After all this raucousness, Morning Glory ends with the sound of waves lapping against the shore. It’s the morning after the night before on a lilo off the coast of Ibiza, and the hangover is savage, but more frivolity lies ahead – “a champagne supernova in the sky”. The benign, pacific guitars which open the song quickly escalate into a blistering, self-consciously epic, seven-minute power rock marathon with, as ever, lyrics that are hit (“how many special people change?”) and miss (“slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball” – wuh?) In the context of the album, it sounds like the last hurrah at the end of a party, the final day of a Club 18-30 fortnight in the Balearics, and a wistful but affectionate farewell to youthful revelry.
In retrospect, this is precisely what “Champagne Supernova” was. By 1996, the bell was beginning to toll for the bigwigs of Britpop – key figures like Albarn and Cocker would soon descend into the darkness of addiction and interpersonal turmoil, sentiments which were amply articulated on later, more downcast Britpop records like Blur and This Is Hardcore. The Gallaghers, meanwhile, proved characteristically incapable of confronting and dealing with such negative emotions – which surely would have constituted an admission of weakness – and so they endeavoured to stay one step ahead of those cloying inner demons by imbibing industrial quantities of cocaine. Unfortunately, this resulted in a precipitous musical decline, which took bloated shape on Morning Glory’s follow up, the shockingly mediocre Be Here Now. The future belonged not to the Jack-the-lads and reprobates of Cool Britannia, but to freaks like Thom Yorke, and clean-living, limp-wristed, vegan undergraduates like Chris Martin. More’s the pity.
8/10
Highlights: “Don’t Look Back In Anger,” “Cast No Shadow”, “Morning Glory”.