Glasswerk Editorial – 1st November

• 1st Nov 2007

This is Rock n Roll

Well f**k me if it’s not Oasis – still the biggest band in the world. Why? Because you’re f**ked if you want to say Coldplay are the bigger and you can get f*ked if you think The Libertines or even their offshoots are privy to this accolade. They can get lost, its Oasis’s title and it will be until someone takes it from them and beware! They’re not ready to hand it away open palmed. On the contrary, they’re fighting to keep hold of it, despite how blazé or ‘don’t give a f**k’ they appear about your opinions.

‘Lord don’t slow me down’ is Oasis on the road, and it’s so achingly f**king cool. The DVD (released 29th October) documents the daily lives of Oasis which involves interviews, live shows, after parties and shopping trips. And it seems the former of these happens so frequently it’s a little embarrassing not to have our own original Gallagher quote for Glasswerk.co.uk.

Each a little older, wiser and a lot less volatile, the arguments between Liam and Noel that would have usually gotten out of hand ending in fist fights and walkouts are here handled with admirable maturity, though the air still turns blue with the language. It seems no one knows better than Oasis that we don’t live forever. One of the questions put to Noel is how long can Oasis last? Noel’s response is typically empiric, “we'll stop when Liam goes bald”.

‘Lord, don’t slow me down’ isn’t an issue of new music. In fact it’s just one track, the title track, but there is enough dressing room jamming, strumming and arsing about with ukuleles to fill almost two hours of black and white rockumentary.

By no means is this article an attempt to garner public opinion or hits. Far from it; four or five years ago maybe it could have worked. Now, lavishing praise on Britpop’s washed up bands is far from the norm of the mainstream music press. The moptop revival is far off in the future. It verges on the controversial to go there as we go up against the younger generation of neon uber-cool new wave of bands.

“I don’t like electronic music, I like rock n roll.” Liam Gallagher

It’s a buzz, it’s a drug, it hits you and it wears off after a while but it always stays with you and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, sorry, you’ve already missed it. If you listen carefully you can just about hear it; the fading feedback, the sound of Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song resonating into the distance, rolling out like a Union Jack carpet over the rest of the great globe in a thunderous wave of white, red and blue noise. So if your ears prick up, don’t worry, that was just the sound of rock ’n’ roll passing you by.

“Rock ‘n’ roll will never die,” Neil Young

…and no one exemplifies it more than Oasis.

AJJ
Editor