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This interview is taken from the NME in May 1994. The band are on their first ever headline tour of the UK and Simon Williams catches them in extremely high spirits. The interview gave Oasis their first magazine cover and highlights the mood within the band at the time. Within six months the band reached number one in the UK album charts and the rest is history.

It Is common knowledge that hotels are utterly brilliant places.

Let's face it, if you get smashed off your nuts in the confines of your own home and gleefully decide to trash your living room prior to catching a bit of shut-eye, are the cleaning pixies likely to rearrange the furniture into some kind of social order while your hangover works itself into a midday frenzy? Nope, you'd just wake up to discover that, somehow, World War III had kicked off during the night and your house is in a state of blitz.

But, hotels being hotels, when Oasis shamble into the bar the following lunchtime - apart from the occasional dark stare from the receptionists - life is back to normal. Stunningly overpriced pots of tea are being drained. Liam and Noel are comparing wounds and laughing about their fight. The swimming pool has been cleared of chairs and Boneheads. And everyone logically decides it was the hotel's fault, anyway.

"It's a stupid place to put a pool, innit?" frowns Liam. "It was just asking for trouble putting us in this hotel." "It's true," nods Noel, wisely. "Those plate glass windows are just saying, 'THROW A CHAIR THROUGH ME!'" In fact, were it not for a bar bill totalling £150, the odd bruised band member and some suspicious chinking noises emanating from a large black bag being heaved through the foyer out to the van, you could almost convince yourself that nothing had happened. Really.

"Still, we don't need a rider tonight," sneers Liam, waving carelessly at the departing baggage. "We can just go in and say 'Newport - you can stick your rider UP YER ARSE!""

THIS IS life On The Road, Oasis style. You may not think it's big, or indeed clever. But it is rock'n'roll bastard bonkers. This becomes screamingly apparent when, lounging around the hotel lobby preparing for the drive to Newport, white most sane people are dreaming of a world with no spirits and a nice weekend on a country health farm lest their livers quit and their brains implode, Bonehead studies the tour itinerary and suddenly yells, "F—ing brilliant! The curfew at the venue tonight is half past one!" Oh good.

Our task is to follow Oasis around the country for three nights, from Portsmouth Wedgewood Rooms to Derby Wherehouse via Newport TJs and all blurred points in between. In this time various people will threaten to leave the band to set up haberdasheries, the band will threaten to leave, several people and several senses will most certainly leave everyone.

Liam, Noel, Guigsy, Bonehead and drummer Tony McCarroll fuelled by little more than raging testosterone, Big Macs, gin and tonics and whatever powders they can dust their nasal passages with - will play three splendid sold out gigs, abuse more hotel staff and talk utter brilliant bollocks. Like about the time they stunned half of Manchester by appearing on The Word a full month before the 'Supersonic' single was released: here, Paula Yates was "up for a bit of sorting out", according to the ever- charming Liam, and Oasis once again made friends in their own inimitable style.

"Bonehead had his arm around Hufty," recalls Noel with a sad shake of his head. "He was shouting in her ear, 'What are you into birds for, anyway?' Then he started ticking her head, right in the middle of the bar..."

It's hard to tell when the on-the-road psychosis actually kicks in, such is the all-pervading air of insanity from day one. This is the second nationwide jaunt by Oasis, the first being a co- headline with Whiteout. And beneath the manic Manc exterior, the swaggering, crowd-shagging arrogance that dictates that they think they really, really are the best band in the entire galaxy, Oasis are freaked. Totally.

"I had to climb onto the PA to escape," he winces. "And someone's trying to untie my laces and someone else is grabbing hold of my trouserleg. I get to the dressing room just as the crowd is spilling onto the stage. Three-quarters of an hour later, the rest of the band appear and they look as though they've been in a fight! They were mobbed - the crowd wouldn't let them go! tt was f—ing hysterical, like Beatlemania or something?"

"We expected the gigs to be full," he admits, warily, "so we could be really arrogant and say, 'Oh yeah'. But I tell you man, we're more shocked than anyone! It's like, we've only had one record out - what's it gonnabe like when we get an album out?"

There's a great - probably entirely mythical - story which sums up Oasis perfectly. After all the band (bar Noel) were arrested on the ferry to Amsterdam a couple of months back, Creation President Alan McGee took the group's press officer to one side and said: "F—ing hell, man, I've been trying to make Teenage Fanclub sound interesting for five years! Look what you've landed here!"

Fact is. Oasis are a dream come true. They fight! They flirt! They go f--king mental! And they make music that creeps through your intestines, squeezes your kidneys and proposes to your heart. Probably. They are so OBVIOUS that the more manipulative record company sorts should be leaping off their high rise ledges in droves, because Oasis - with their housing estate backgrounds, their working class clumsiness and semi-genius pop sensibility - could never be invented in a million units. Put simply, as The Stone Roses once said, Oasis are what the world has been waiting for.

Which, funnily enough, takes us to Newport, where Noel is comforting yet another G&T in a pub around the corner from the hotel. The fact that this particular hostelry has so many games it resembles a boozer's indoor sports centre, and thus leads to all manner of theories, vis a vis whether people in Newport actually talk to each other, is marginally interesting. What is fascinating, however, is that the posters advertising tonight's gig proclaim Oasis plus Very Special Guests. With The Stone Roses supposedly recording a few miles up the road in Rockfteld it doesn't take a Nobel Prize winner to hazard a wild guess that the Manchester of yesterday is going to make an appearance next to the Manchester of today.

Noel laughs off the idea that the Roses intend to play, although subsequent rumour-mongers insist that Geffen had phoned TJs a few days before to book the slot for lan Brown's bunch. Yet you can't rid yourself of the feeling that, in the absence of the Roses and Happy Mondays, there is a massive demand for a cocky, rocking, PC-shocking Mane band. And that band is Oasis.

"It's like, you get a band like Suede," ponders Noel, "and they write pretty decent music and all that, but Brett Anderson's lyrics are basically a cross between Bowie and Morrissey and I don't think some 16-year-old on the dole is going to understand what he means by 'Animal Nitrate' or whatever.

"The thing about The Smiths is that Johnny Marr was a lad and you knew he was a rock'n'roller that's why I got into them. And think a lot of kids find Suede too intellectual, while with Blur they don't understand all that stuff about sugary tea. But with Oasis, like the Roses and the Mondays, it's the bottom line: here's a guitar, here's the songs, you have them. We're not preaching about ye olde Englande or how it was in the '60s. We're not preaching about our sexuality, we're not telling kids how to act.

"You want to write about shagging and taking drugs and being in a band. You don't wanna write about going down the supermarket or anything like that - I know it's terrible, so I'm not gonna write about it. I met a girl another night and I felt really sorry for her because she came up to me and said really quietly) 'I've got 'Supersonic' and I'm, er, really into your lyrics and, er, I've been through a lot as well'. And I went, 'What do you mean?

"Supersonic' is about some f—i'ng nine stone geezer who got Charlie'd off his nut one night... it's not about anything! It's just about a feeling, you just get up and play it. All I know is the gigs are selling out and we're probably gonna get in loads more trouble on this tour..."

FACT: OASIS talk a lot of bulls--t. After the Portsmouth gig Liam insists that he's going to "sort out" East 17 because, he alleges, they've "ripped off 'Imagine'". Half an hour later, the singer is insisting that all he wants to do is sit down with East 17, neck a few beers and sort out how they can "topple Take That".

Source: NME May 1994

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