As you read this, at least 1000 buskers will be strumming ‘Wonderwall’ on city high streets across the UK, 500 acne-ridden teenage boys will be learning ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ on their brother's acoustic guitar for the first time, 250 middle-aged men will be eyeing Pretty Green jackets online, 35 hipsters will be rubbishing ‘Slide Away’ publicly while secretly thinking it’s the best song of the 90s, and five major media publications will be penning think pieces on the likelihood of an Oasis reunion in 2024. Not bad for a band that peaked with their second album. 

Ubiquity can rub the shine from any band, but the best of Oasis’ songs still emanate a confident swagger that even Liam’s constant bellendery can’t dull. Before the cracks started to show with Be Here Now's overblown drudge, Noel Gallagher had more great tunes under his belt than his albums could handle. The B-sides from that era could go toe-to-toe with any track on Definitely Maybe or What’s The Story Morning Glory?, running the gamut of sad-lad-strummers to balls-to-the-wall bangers, and even the B-sides from later years gave Noel the space to experiment with different sounds that, while still in thrall to 1960s rock ‘n’ roll, were freed from the restraints of a band increasingly stymied by the conservative demands of their fanbase. And they gave Liam the chance to knock out some (admittedly dreadful) tunes away from the spotlight of a studio album. 

It says a lot that this Friday's rerelease of their 1998 B-sides collection The Masterplan has come with the kind of fanfare usually reserved for a new studio album. To mark the occasion, we're digging into the wellspring of Oasis’ B-sides to find songs that ‘Shiiiiinnnnneeeee’ and a few we’d consign to the Britpop sin bin. 

Know what they mean? 

Opening The Masterplan with a bang is ‘Acquiesce’, a glam-stomp that snarls through its four-minute runtime with the swagger of Oasis’ best material. Prefiguring the call and response gimmick of The Libertines by a decade, it gives Liam a few barnstorming verses to plough through while Noel takes on chorus duties, his nasal intonation of ‘we need each other’ adding a sweet edge to the usually combative stage presence of the Brothers Gallagher. Proof that there’s a syrupy taste hidden beneath Liam and Noel’s macho posturing. 

In a different vein entirely is ‘Talk Tonight’, which has entered the pantheon of ‘first song I learned on guitar’ for countless teenagers alongside ‘Wonderwall’ and ‘Little By Little’. Apparently inspired by a woman Noel shacked up with after going AWOL while on tour in the US, its simple hand-clapped rhythm and artfully strummed chords feel intimate and, in a rarity for Noel’s usually affectless vocals, genuinely soulful. 

Then there’s ‘The Swamp Song’, an outlier in the Oasis back catalogue which detaches itself from any notion of structure in favour of a wild jam session featuring wailing harmonicas, thrashing drums and a guitar solo that worships at the altar of 1970s indulgence. It’s the band in attack mode, unmoored from sense and unafraid of garishness, mixing light psychedelia with a groove that almost seems like a precursor to Noel’s less melody-focused work in the High Flying Birds. 

The deep cuts

The fractious working relationship between experimental psych-duo Amorphous Androgynous and Noel Gallagher has become something of a legend in Oasis lore – they called him ‘too afraid to be weird’, he responded by claiming their collaboration was ‘underwhelming’ and ‘a bit shit’ before burning all the master tapes of their recording sessions. But before all that, the Androgynous lads produced one the best remixes to appear on an Oasis B-side. Overwhelmingly titled ‘Falling Down (A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble Exploding In Your Mind)’, it turns the Dig Out Your Soul single ‘Falling Down’ into a 20-minute epic which combines psychedelia, Indian folk, ambient jazz, soul singing and prog, while Noel’s vocals wash in and out of the mix like a Mancunian Pritt Stick holding the chaos together. It’s only available on YouTube nowadays, but this self-described ‘cosmic oozescape’ is the most leftfield piece of work Noel’s ever attached the Oasis brand to. It was also the final official release from the band before their acrimonious split – what a way to bow out.

Still in Noel territory is ‘Sad Song’, which finds the eternally vague lyricist sounding more hopeless by the minute – ‘Where we're living in this town/The sun is coming up and it's going down/But it's all just the same at the end of the day’. Listen carefully and you’ll hear the influence of Johnny Mar’s arpeggiated guitar sound creep in, shorn of its inherent romance to evoke the downbeat drizzle of Manchester’s skies. This forlorn acoustic number backs up the theory that Oasis’ early material would be wholly depressing without Liam’s youthful exuberance swiping through the melancholy. 

While his often mocked lyrics were never good in any traditional sense, Noel was always able to evoke the hopelessness of small-town living and the fear that life might be passing him by. He marries both those ideas with ‘Rockin’ Chair’, an existential indie banger which finds Liam rasping ‘I’m older than I’d wish to be/this town holds no more for me’ with an atypical defeatism. The words might not mean a great deal on paper, but Arkid's youthful sincerity in its prime could make a rendition of ‘itsy Bitsy Little Spider’ sound heartfelt. 

Blunderwalls

Ever wonder what John Lennon’s Imagine album would sound like if it was played at the wrong speed setting on a turntable? Then chuck on ‘The Quiet Ones’, in which Liam’s Lennon-worship enters its cringiest phase. This was back when his voice had lost its lustre, making his strained delivery sounding like a frog being slowly strangled over an uninspired guitar line. It’s no wonder this aimless drone was relegated to the B-side of ‘The Importance Of Being Idle’. 

Nabbing a gold in the Crap Beatles Olympics is ‘Those Swollen Hand Blues’, an attempt at the Fab Four’s Revolver era psychedelia that sounds like an unauthorised Beatles tribute act blasting out of a Poundland tannoy. The idea that Oasis’ best material sounded like The Beatles has always been a fallacy (they were closer in sound to T-Rex and Slade than McCartney and Lennon) but the results are truly ear-bleeding when they lean into the comparison.  

Oasis: The Masterplan is re-released by Big Brother Recordings on Friday 3 November; Liam Gallagher will tour Definitely Maybe next summer.