In The Alternative Number Ones, I’m reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones. As Scott explains here, the column is now biweekly, alternating with The Number Ones on Mondays.
In August 1996, Oasis played two shows on the grounds of Knebworth House, a gigantic 15th-century country house just north of London. Lots of that moment’s big Britpop and electronic acts shared that bill with Oasis — the Charlatans, the Chemical Brothers, the Prodigy, Kula Shaker, the Manic Street Preachers, Ocean Colour Scene. There was also a tribute band called the Bootleg Beatles, and their presence might’ve been an effort to get people to acknowledge that Oasis were not a Beatles tribute act. But the people were there to see Oasis, not any of those other bands. and there were a lot of people.
Each of those Oasis Knebworth shows brought in 125,000 fans — a quarter-million motherfuckers over two nights. The press trumpeted the scope of the achievement, claiming that these were the biggest outdoor concerts in British history. Oasis could’ve played more. Four percent of the population of Great Britain applied to get Knebworth tickets. At that point, The New York Times reported that “there is an Oasis CD in roughly one of every three homes there.” This was their transcendent moment, the weekend in which they truly served as the sun around which British culture revolved. If you can watch footage of Oasis at Knebworth without getting goosebumps, then you and I are not the same.
Knebworth was not even three years after Oasis signed their deal with Creation Records. They’d become the most popular band in the UK, and possibly the world, in a wildly short span of time. One of the best rock documentaries I’ve seen in the past decade is 2016’s Oasis: Supersonic, which tells the story about how these two disreputable, bickering brothers from the Manchester council estates managed to become what they became. The movie ends with Knebworth, the one gigantic event that stood as an exclamation point at the end of Oasis’ ascent. Anything after Knebworth just wasn’t worth considering.
In Oasis: Supersonic, multiple band members muse aloud that the Knebworth shows should’ve just been the end of the band. Guitarist Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs claims that they should’ve finished those shows by telling the crowd, “We were Oasis.” Noel Gallagher describes the Knebworth shows as “the last great gathering of the people before the birth of the internet,” and in the context of the film, it doesn’t even feel like he’s overstating anything.
In real life, storybook endings almost never happen. Oasis couldn’t end after Knebworth. What would they do with the rest of their lives? Would they just go off and live in mansions and come out to occasional awards-show tributes? They weren’t built like that. In Supersonic, Noel Gallagher explains why they kept going: “That’s what shitkickers do. They ride it till the wheels come off.” Hell yeah, brother. I’m going to start explaining all my actions by saying, “That’s what shitkickers do.” Oasis straggled on, to diminishing returns, for another 13 years before the Gallaghers finally got sick of each other. Then they waited another 16 years before getting back together for a reunion tour that caused another wave of cultural excitement all over again. Rumor has it that Oasis will return to Knebworth next year. Maybe that will be their ending. Probably not, though. That’s not what shitkickers do.
Oasis: Supersonic ends with Knebworth because it’s a ready-made climax, a great place to cut things off. This edition of the column will dig into Oasis’ long decline at least a little bit, but the band’s run in the column ends exactly where it should. The “Wonderwall” column, which was really all about the band’s vertiginous rise, was just a few weeks ago. Less than a month after that song fell from the #1 spot on the Billboard Modern Rock chart, Oasis returned with the gorgeous, pinwheel-eyed seven-minute epic “Champagne Supernova.” It’s the last song on (What’s The Story) Morning Glory, and it’s Oasis’ last American alt-rock chart-topper. “Champagne Supernova” isn’t the real end of the story, but we should pretend that it is anyway.
This year’s Oasis reunion was a huge deal for a great many reasons. There’s nostalgia, of course. There’s the overwhelming desire to bring back something that can never truly happen agan — the last great gatherings of the people before the birth of the internet, perhaps. There’s the undying public fascination over the Gallagher brothers’ very public love-hate relationship, a story that the brothers themselves have been happy to stoke by saying many entertainingly bitchy things about one another over the years. Many of the actual Oasis songs, “Champagne Supernova” included, are fucking incredible, so that matters, too. But don’t discount the existence of a great rock documentary.
Anecdotally, I know a few people who had conversion experiences watching Oasis: Supersonic. These people might’ve liked Oasis in the way that you might passively like a thing that was on the radio when you were a kid. But then they saw this two-hour montage of glitz and glamor and beer and coke and resentment and spectacle, and they suddenly decided that Oasis were maybe the best band that ever lived. I don’t think Oasis were the best band that ever lived, but I get it. Consider the brief scene that captures the making of “Champagne Supernova.”
Owen Morris, the Welshman who co-produced (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? with Noel Gallagher, sounds slightly awed when he describes the Gallaghers’ process. It went like this: Noel writes a song. He pretty much wrote all the songs. At some point, the band records the backing track. Noel sits in front of his brother Liam, playing the song on acoustic guitar. Noel does this exactly once. Then he hands the lyrics to Liam, and Liam, having heard Noel sing the song that one time, belts it out directly into the studio microphone. Noel sticks around to hear that one take, and then he goes off and watches soccer. Maybe Liam bangs out another couple of takes. But that’s it. There’s the final, completed vocal. There’s “Champagne Supernova.” In the film, we can see Liam sing the song for the first time. It’s not quite the same, but it already sounds like “Champagne Supernova.”
Like many Oasis songs, “Champagne Supernova” is famously about nothing. Noel Gallagher has admitted as much, though that didn’t happen until years later. For a long time, Noel would say that it meant different things, depending on his mood. In a 2020 interview with SiriusXM, Noel finally said what everyone already knew: The song is nonsense. Noel said that he’d sometimes “drift off” while playing “Champagne Supernova” live, wondering if it ever actually meant anything. Here’s how he describes his epiphany:
You know, “Walking down the hall faster than a cannonball,” what the fuck is all that about? And I should know, ’cause I wrote it, and I haven’t got a clue. And it was somewhere in the north of England that I happened to glance up at the crowd. It was just a sea of teenagers, all young lads, all with their tops off on each other’s shoulders, singing the words of a nonsensical song by a band that were broke up when — they were two years old when the band fucking broke up. So I think to myself sometimes, you know, “That’s what it means.”
I think that’s beautiful. “Champagne Supernova” meant nothing in 1995, and it means nothing now, but it still makes you feel something. The line that Noel invokes in that quote is the one that people love to joke about because it comes off as a total paradox: “Slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball.” In a 1995 NME interview, Noel said that line was a reference to Brackett The Butler, a character from some old British kids’ shows. I guess the character walked really slowly, and then Noel couldn’t think of anything to rhyme with “hall” other than “cannonball.” Many, many other words rhyme with “hall,” but it was probably late at night when Noel wrote it, and he was, in his own words, “out of it.”
In 2020, the Guardian critic Alexis Petridis published a list of Oasis’ greatest songs, and he put “Champagne Supernova” at #1. In that article, Petridis offered an alternate explanation of that line, proposing that it’s “actually a pretty good description of someone treading gingerly to avoid attracting attention to their head-spinning state of chemical refreshment.” This resonates. You’re high as fuck, or maybe drunk, and you are worried that all the people around you can tell that you are completely incapacitated. You think they’re judging you. Maybe they are. So you try to walk around like you’re normal. You slowly and deliberately put one foot in front of another, even though the inside of your head feels like a raging ocean storm, water sloshing in every direction. I know that feeling, and I know that Noel Gallagher knows it, too.
Maybe Noel Gallagher knew that he captured that state of mind when he wrote about slowly walking down the hall faster than a cannonball, and maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was in that state when he wrote it. My guess is that Noel just arrived at that line through sheer stupid luck. He just fell ass-backwards into this dumb, evocative, memorable lyric, and now people are still discussing it and writing articles about it decades later. People might mock the line, but they remember it, which means it’s better than any lyric that does make sense but that’s utterly forgettable. That’s just the zone that Noel was in at the time.
In a 2018 radio interview, Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs talked about the first time he heard “Champagne Supernova.” Oasis were in the middle of a tour, and Noel Gallagher just sat and played it for his bandmates on an acoustic guitar: “I just burst into tears, like bottom lip going. Everyone was looking like, ‘You dick! What are you crying for?’ I was just like, ‘It’s too much! It’s beautiful!'” For me, that’s “Champagne Supernova” in a nutshell. It’s the song that can reduce a guy named Bonehead to a blubbering mess.
The fact that “Champagne Supernova” isn’t about anything is a feature, not a bug. Without doing anything too specific, “Champagne Supernova” captures a feeling. You’re tired and bleary, and you have subjected your brain to too many chemicals, and you’re wondering what’s left. Time keeps marching on. Friends come in and out of your life, and you wonder where they were while you were getting high. Special people change. Lives are living strange. A dreamer dreams she never dies. People believe that they’re gonna get away for the summer. But you and I, we live and die. The world’s still spinning ’round, we don’t know why. Why, why, why, why? Guitar solo!
Oasis brought in a ringer for that guitar solo. The Gallagher brothers were dismissive of plenty of their peers and elders, but there were a few people who they outright admired, and Paul Weller was one of them. Weller had been the frontman of the Jam and the Style Council, and he went solo in the early ’90s. On 1995’s Stanley Road, which turned out to be Weller’s biggest solo album, Noel Gallagher came in to play guitar on one song, a cover of “I Walk On Gilded Splinters.” Weller helped out on a couple of tracks from the (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? sessions. On “Champagne Supernova,” Weller sings backup vocals, and the guitar solos are his. (Paul Weller’s only Modern Rock hit, 1992’s “Uh Huh Oh Yeh,” peaked at #10. It’s a 7.)
Those Paul Weller guitar solos are so fucking good. But I’m getting ahead of myself because everything is so fucking good. “Champagne Supernova” opens with the sound of ocean waves, a pleasantly pretentious little touch, before a soft blanket of guitars comes in. There’s acoustic strumming, as there was on “Wonderwall,” and there’s some floridly rippling electric-guitar action that makes me think of Neil Young, who doesn’t get mentioned often as an Oasis touchpoint. When Liam Gallagher’s voice comes in, it’s got a bit of his usual nasal, sneering defiance, but he turns it into something convincingly soft and sensitive. I love it when a tough guy gets all misty-eyed. In a way, it works better when the words don’t necessarily mean anything. If “Champagne Supernova” was just about the things that really make Liam sad — if he was like, “Oi, me footie team lost the match four-nil” — it wouldn’t really hit the same. (It would probably still be pretty good, though. I would like to hear that.)
The “Champagne Supernova” line that hits the most plaintively is the most conversational one in there: “Where were you while we were getting high?” Liam could be telling you that you missed a good time, or he could be saying that he really needed some help and you weren’t there for him. Noel Gallagher claims that line was just something the Oasis guys said to each other all the time, which tracks. They were certainly getting high a lot. On that bit, you hear what sounds like a harmonica tootle. In the Nigel Dick-directed video, though, it’s Bonehead playing the melodica. (I generally think that video is pretty unremarkable, except that it’s the rare ’90s alt-rock video where the rockers dance with models. Oasis weren’t beholden to our American punk mores. Also, Liam looks just spectacularly hot in it. The beard/glasses/mock-turtleneck situation really worked for him.)
When the first “Champagne Supernova” chorus arrives, it’s soft and restrained, but it already sounds epic. It’s the kind of thing that practically demands a stadium-sized singalong. Just as that first chorus ends, the drums finally arrive, and the guitar-noodles get a little bit louder. The sneer in Liam’s voice become just a bit more pronounced. Then, just as the second hook is about to arrive, a tidal wave of shoegaze guitars crashes into the track and violently floods it. Those guitars stick around, but they don’t always do the wall-of-fuzz thing. We get glammy struts and wheedley leads. Some of the guitar parts make me think of Thin Lizzy. Some of the high, bendy notes also evoke the Allman Brothers? There is no way that the Gallagher brothers owned any damn Allman Brothers records. Maybe that’s a Paul Weller thing.
This is why power ballads exist, right? The power ballad is a fundamentallly silly thing, but when it’s executed perfectly, there’s nothing like it. “Champagne Supernova” is sentimental and bloated and show-offy, and it turns all of those qualities into strengths. It’s ridiculous to write a seven-minute radio-rock song, but Oasis did it, and they made all seven of those minutes absolutely crucial. (There was a 5:08 “Champagne Supernova” radio edit, but I don’t remember whether they played that one or the full-length version on my station. It was probably the radio edit, but five minutes is still pretty long for a radio song.)
When “Champagne Supernova” hits its instrumental climax, the song becomes such a fucking blast. It sounds like we’re hearing hundreds of guitars going to town all at once, all shredding with grand intentions. It’s the same kind of groovy fuzz that the Smashing Pumpkins employed so effectively, but it somehow doesn’t sound anything like the Smashing Pumpkins. The rhythm section remains fully locked-in, almost funky in the way that it channels the thunder. There’s that harmonica or melodica or whatever honking away in there. There are nasal-stereo-panning Beatle-style yeah-yeah-yeahs. When things start to ramp down, there’s a seagull sound-effect that somehow sounds like a laser-show synth. The ramp-down works so well. After absolutely raging out for a few minutes, Oasis bring their wild flight down to a smooth landing.
I can’t really listen to “Champagne Supernova” on repeat — not, at least, without taking a minute to breathe and collect myself. It’s that kind of song. It’s an experience. Oasis came up in Manchester when Manchester was the cauldron of acid house. Later in 1996, Noel Gallagher collaborated with the Chemical Brothers on the similarly epic “Setting Sun,” which was a #1 pop hit in the UK but which didn’t even appear on our Modern Rock chart. (The Chems’ highest-charting Modern Rock single is another Noel Gallagher collab, 1999’s “Let Forever Be,” which peaked at #29.) Even though Oasis never deployed any overt rave influence, “Champagne Supernova” plays with power-ballad dynamics in ways that remind me of the architecture of a great acid house track. It’s a song that reaches a true chemical peak and then brings you down with great care and intention.
“Champagne Supernova” never came out as a proper single in the US or the UK, but it’s a huge part of the Oasis legacy today. The same is true of another (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? ballad, “Don’t Look Back In Anger.” Noel sang lead on that one, and he saved a good one for himself. “Don’t Look Back In Anger” topped the UK pop chart, and it rivals “Wonderwall” as the band’s most enduring singalong today. (Over here, “Don’t Look Back In Anger” reached #10 on the alt-rock chart. It’s a 10.)
Almost immediately, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? became one of the biggest-selling albums in UK history. Oasis were also the only Britpop band to make any real commercial impact in the US, where the LP went quadruple platinum. The album cycle hit its climax with the Knebworth shows I keep talking about. When Oasis played “Champagne Supernova” as their first Knebworth encore, Paul Weller wasn’t there, but another of their heroes joined them onstage: Stone Roses guitarist John Squire. Knebworth, I’m just realizing now, was a bit like Spike Island, the Stone Roses’ landmark 1990 show, except about four times bigger. (Over here, the Stone Roses’ biggest Modern Rock hit is “Love Spreads,” which peaked at #2 in 1994. It’s an 8.)
But the (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? album cycle didn’t end with Knebworth, and Oasis almost broke up a bunch more times before it was finally over. Shortly after Knebworth, Liam Gallagher claimed he was too sick to do the band’s MTV Unplugged taping at Royal Albert Hall in London, so Noel sang lead while Liam got shitfaced and heckled from the balcony. Oasis played “Champagne Supernova” at the VMAs in September 1996, and Liam plainly thought this was a ridiculous thing to do. He sang about “a champagne supernova up your bum,” which is incredibly funny, and he made cryptic gestures at Noel during the guitar solo. That’s not me being delicate about him giving Noel the finger or anything. I genuinely don’t understand what he was doing. He made, like, a box with his hands? Maybe that’s an English thing.
The next Oasis album was obviously going to be a huge deal, and it pretty definitively ended the moment when the band was on top of the world. They released Be Here Now in summer 1997, and the record went down in history as a monument to coked-out excess. I think the coked-out excess is kind of fun, as with the strings and helicopter noises on lead single “D’You Know What I Mean?” But the record wasn’t an instant classic like Morning Glory, which meant that it was a disappointment. “D’You Know What I Mean?” peaked at #4 on the Modern Rock chart. (It’s a 7.) Another Be Here Now single, “Don’t Go Away,” made it to #5, and that was Oasis’ last top-10 Modern Rock hit, so I guess people did go away. (It’s another 7. One more Be Here Now single, “All Around The World,” peaked at #15 in 1998.)
Be Here Now was the inevitable crash after the high. It went platinum in the US, but it was a gigantic and obvious step down. The whole Britpop phenomenon more or less ended with Be Here Now, but Oasis just kept going for longer than anyone might’ve thought possible. Their next record wasn’t a studio album. It was The Masterplan, a 1998 B-sides collection, which was a smart thing for them to do. They’d always left plenty of great songs off of their albums, and their stomp-ass “Some Might Say” B-side “Acquiesce” made it to #24 on the alt-rock chart in 1998.
Even as they continued to crank out less-than-essential albums through the ’00s, Oasis never quite disappeared from American alt-rock radio. The band’s lineup kept shifting. Bonehead left. Guigsey left. Andy Bell, resident guitar hero for the great shoegaze band Ride, came aboard as Oasis’ new bass player even though he’d never played bass before. (Ride’s highest-charting Modern Rock single, 1992’s “Twisterella,” peaked at #12.) Later on, Zak Starkey, son of Ringo Starr, played drums for Oasis. I can’t decide whether that’s a cute twist of fate or whether it’s just mind-bogglingly obvious that a Beatle’s kid would join Oasis at some point. Despite all those changes, Oasis became a semi-stable unit, putting out just-OK new records and touring constantly even though they were famously never great live. The (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? fumes kept them running for more than a decade, but I don’t remember anyone being especially excited about new Oasis music when “Go Let It Out” reached #14 in 2000. That’s a good song, though.
Oasis scored a couple more Modern Rock hits before everything finally blew up. “Lyla” made it to #19 in 2005, and “The Shock Of The Lightning” reached #12 in 2008, right before the end. At a 2009 festival, Noel and Liam got into one last fight. Liam stormed out and did not return. In a statement, he said, “I simply could not go on working with Liam a day longer.” The other Oasis members all stuck with Liam, and they became a new band called Beady Eye, releasing a couple of records before Liam inevitably went solo. Noel started his own concern called Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds. Both of them kept touring, singing Oasis songs to crowds who wished they were seeing Oasis instead. (Beady Eye and solo Liam never reached the Modern Rock charts, but Noel’s High Flying Birds got to #25 with “If I Had A Gun…” in 2011.) In 2022, Liam even came back to Knebworth without Noel, singing a set of mostly Oasis songs to a gigantic crowd and kind of cheapening the mystique of those 1996 Knebworth gigs.
But the mystique is back, and so are Oasis. Last year, Liam and Noel Gallagher announced that they were finally back together, ready to tour the world as Oasis. The other details came later: the rest of the lineup, the opening acts, the specifications of exactly which stadiums they would play all around the world. That tour just ended, and it was a cultural phenomenon. People spoke of those shows with religious fervor, less because of the way the band played the exact same greatest-hits set every night, more because of the reportedly electric vibe in the audience. To hear some people tell it, it was the first great gathering of the people after the birth of the internet. When all the dominoes fall just right, a band can keep that Knebworth thing going forever. But to make that work, you’ve got to have a few songs on the level of “Champagne Supernova.” Almost nobody does.
GRADE: 10/10
BONUS BEATS: Here’s the half-serious, country-accented live “Champagne Supernova” cover that Ben Folds Five released as a 1997 B-side:
(The Ben Folds Five’s highest-charting Modern Rock single, 1998’s “Brick,” peaked at #6. It’s a 7.)
BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here’s Matt Pond PA’s not-great “Champagne Supernova” cover soundtracking a bunch of utterly confounding melodrama, including a recreation of the upside-down Spider-Man kiss, on a 2004 episode of The OC:
BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: Just a couple of weeks ago, “Champagne Supernova” got the clichéd ominous-remix treatment in the trailer for the Ryan Gosling astronaut joint Project Hail Mary, which is being positioned as one of next year’s big movies. See, that picture is about how the sun might become a supernova. Not a champagne one, though. Just a regular supernova. Here’s that:
(I just had to check whether Dead Man’s Bones ever made the Modern Rock chart. They did not.)
