Thirty years ago, Oasis released their debut album, “Definitely Maybe”. Jon Savage, who saw the band four times that year, remembers 1994, and a pivotal moment in British music, culture and politics
IT’S LATE JANUARY, 1994. Alerted by a friend, I go to see a new Manchester group, Oasis, at The Water Rats near King’s Cross in London. There’s a buzz: the smallish venue is packed, which makes it difficult to see what is happening on the low stage. A couple of numbers in, I get it: they’re good. The four musicians, dressed in scally/baggy/sportswear, erect an overdriven wall of sound, while the vocalist — wearing what looks like a Marks & Spencer’s pullover — commands the crowd with a definite attitude.
The frontman’s swaggering demeanour suggests confrontation but, at the same time, he embodies a curious precision: I’m going to stand just here, place the microphone just so, and sing the lyrics exactly this way. He elongates various vowels and phrases in an almost exact reproduction of John Lennon’s psychedelic sneer on “Rain”, a deal sealed by the group’s rather convincing cover of “I Am the Walrus” at the end of the set. They make it their own, and I’m impressed.
This isn’t Oasis’s first London show, but it’s a kind of showcase: full of journalists and fans, the curious and the competitive. The band carry it off with what many people will, soon enough, recognise as their customary blithe insouciance. On the way out, I’m accosted by an EMI press officer: why didn’t I go see Blur rather than this lot, she demands; I reply that if I wanted to go to see Blur then I would, and I don’t. Seems like unprofessional behaviour, but the needle is already there.
Nineteen-ninety-four was a good year for music. The dominant sound that I heard emanating from cars, shops, pubs and clubs in London was dance music and its myriad derivatives: the seemingly infinite and proliferating varieties of house, techno, rap, hardcore. I absolutely loved the multiple times of jungle — hyper-speed breakbeats jamming up against halfspeed reggae bass — and heard it at its best at that summer's Notting Hill Carnival, where the record of the year — Shy FX’s Sound of the Beast — sampled the Carnival song of 1976, Junior Murvin’s “Police and Thieves”.
At the beginning of 1994, the UK charts were the usual mix of contemporary dance music (Chaka Demus & Pliers’ great Latin/ragga cover of “Twist and Shout”), novelties (Doop), and boy-band pop (Take That). There wasn’t much sense of the rock style of the moment — grunge — and the great UK hope, Suede, were temporarily stalled after a banner year in 1993. There was a pre-echo of the future in February’s number one, “Things Can Only Get Better” by D:Ream, which would have an afterlife tha
