Before Oasis, Radio 1 were as likely to play a guitar band as they were a badger being strangled

I do remember the first time. Just not very well. It was in Glasgow, in December 1993 at the Plaza ballroom, when Oasis supported Saint Etienne. They had yet to release a record and they played early in the evening to a chilly, half-empty hall. I remember wondering what all the fuss was about. (And there was already some fuss.)

I remember the second time much more vividly, just six months later when they stole the show in the afternoon on the NME stage at Glastonbury. And the third time, in Dublin, September 1994, in a packed club. I can still recall Noel spraying echoing, delay-soaked stray notes all over the drawn-out ending to “Supersonic” while Liam just stood there staring the entire place out.

‘This lot could be big,’ I remember thinking. The following day Definitely Maybe entered the charts at number one, becoming the fastest-selling debut album in British history. And the fourth time? A sold-out Sheffield Arena in April 1995. From support slots to headlining arenas in 18 short months? How? Why?

And the bigger question: why not me for god’s sake?

Read more:

• The history of Oasis, through five iconic Big Issue interviews: ‘Liam’s an idiot… But he’s my idiot’
• Inside the grassroots music venue where Oasis, Pulp and Ed Sheeran cut their teeth
• Meet the man who captured Oasis as they went supersonic: ‘It went beyond my wildest dreams’

Full disclosure: I spent two-years at the tail end of the 1980s as the guitarist in an indie band. It was a world of pub backrooms, six cans of lager on the rider and, on a good night, three-to-a-room in a B&B.

Back then, indie guitar music was a very separate pond to the world of mainstream pop. Major label A&R men were still a few years away from hunting in packs around Camden, and you could get a half-page live review in the NME saying you were the best band in Britain yet remain untroubled by a single phone call from a record company.

Meanwhile, daytime BBC Radio 1 were about as likely to play a guitar band as they were a recording of a badger being strangled.

For me, the end came at the 1989 London Marathon, when, between four of us, we didn’t have enough money to buy an ice cream. Perhaps we should have held on a little longer. By the mid-90s the fringe had become the mainstream.

Sonically, what we’d been doing – the sound of Fender and Gibson guitars going through vintage amps – hadn’t been a million miles away from what would soon be making multi-platinum albums. Noel Gallagher and I were the same age, with broadly similar record collections and we had both spent much of the 1980s as disgruntled outsiders stuck in our bedrooms learning to play guitar.

I even had a younger brother who was taller, thinner and cooler than me. It was all so unfair. Well, to be honest, I could see there was a stumbling block. Well, two of them. Having a singer like Liam and the tiny matter of the songs…

When I first heard the demo of “Live Forever”, at a house party off Ladbroke Grove in the spring of 1994 (I was working in the music industry by this point: useless poacher turned incompetent gamekeeper) my friend and fellow indie-band survivor Martin Kelly grabbed me by the shoulders and screamed in my face: “EVERYTHING WE WANTED TO BE BUT WEREN’T!”

Oh boy he had a point. Here amid the soaring and yearning was something truly sui generis, something that was going to fly way, way beyond pub backrooms and six-lager riders and B&Bs. That was going to fill arenas with bodies and bathtubs with champagne and saturate the daylight hours on Radio 1.

We weren’t the only ones who recognised this. Noel did too. “We were just an indie band,” he said. “And then I wrote ‘Live Forever.'” 

There’s a bracing moment in the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. “Everyone asks where these songs come from,” Timothy Chalamet as Dylan says. “But then you watch their faces, and they’re not asking where the songs come from. They’re asking why the songs didn’t come to them.”

Too true Bob/Timothy. Too true. When Oasis stroll onto a UK stage this summer for the first time in 16 years (and a sobering 32 years since I first saw them do this, that cold December night in Glasgow) I’ll be down the front, still trying to figure that one out. 

The Fathers by John Niven is out on 17 July (Canongate). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

John Niven will be on tour with his book, The Fathers. His new play, The Battle, about Blur vs Oasis in 1995 tours the UK from February 2026.

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