Song 2: Wonderwall

Wonderwall - Oasis

Really? Oasis? Wonderwall? And i've even posted a link to it in case you can't remember what it sounds like ... how helpful of me.
But don't run a mile. If I can recapture a little of the impact this song had when it came out and what it has turned into, then it'll be worth writing, if not reading.
This is a big song. A tipping point. A game changer. An epic win. A shot heard around the world. After all.

I was 4 Blur. Of course I was. My big musical awakening came in 1994/5 and it was The Jam first but very closely followed by 'End of a Century' and hearing Blur liked the Jam and Madness and seeing Damon on The O-Zone talking about books and thinking it was unfair that people were pillorying him for being posh - hell, I was posh and he didn't sound anything like me.
So, I was for Blur, hence anti-Oasis, and Blur won the Battle of Britpop of course, in the summer of 1995, and Oasis has been shown up, cos they'd released Some Might Say (deeply average) then Roll With It (appalling) and they were a busted flush. [Why Oasis did release Roll With It is one of the great mysteries of the 90s - surely they weren't that tactically aware that they knew they were keeping their powder dry and that victory would inevitably be there in the long haul].

Autumn 1995 then: specifically the half term of the first term of my last year at school. Two week half term. Two weeks, ridiculous. And a seminal two weeks for your young writer. First week - the Greek trip. A group of young classicists descend on the ancient and historic land, given licence by our two teachers to drink beer (how bold) and generally be "adults". It was a memorable trip, though rather spiky and bad-tempered - it proved to be, I'd say in retrospect, the death knell for my long held friendship with a boy called Mark Hudson, sadly (entirely due to my general prickishness) but also solidified two very important friendships of mine, with Wieland Hoban and Alex Frith. It was also, dammit, the first time I smoked a cigarette, on a beach, with Wieland and Max Baird-Smith (another close friendship of the time which sadly has not been maintained). And what did we talk about ... above all? Sophocles vs Aeschylus? Plato vs Aristotle? Greeks vs Trojans? Delphi vs Mycenae? Souvlaki vs Tsatsiki? Blur vs Oasis of course.

Even the teachers got involved. 'The Great Escape' had come out to great acclaim a month before, but 'What's the Story' was only a week or two old, and there were Blur camps and Oasis camps arguing their point (education, background, aspiration, geography, hair, everything came into play), but i think the Oasis album began to gain more prominence and dominance of the coach's airwaves as the week progressed. And I fought it, really I did, but gradually it began to nag at me. This ain't bad. Nor this one. Really not bad. Better than 'Roll With It' anyway.

Then we came home, frazzled and a little bit grown up. But the second week of that half-term for me was even more important. It was university-picking time and I can't remember the exact order things went in, whether I'd already dismissed the idea of Oxbridge (out of laziness and fear of unjust rejection - which i felt had dogged my school career, ha! - more than anything), I think so, and I was basically down to two options, Edinburgh (a place I already knew well) and St Andrews (where I'd never been before).

I travelled up to St Andrews with my friend Stephen Bovey to have a look at the faculties and get a feel for the town [At that stage Stephen, not expecting to get into Cambridge, thought he'd go to St Andrews too]. As luck would have it, a fine coterie of older friends were already there, and we had a rare old time in that bizarre, magical, windy old town, which convinced me that this was the place for me to spend four years of my life.

Besides McEwans 80/ and a curry waiter in a cassock, my main memory of those few days in St Andrews was that 'Wonderwall' was everywhere - on the radio, in the pubs, hell, people were even singing it to each other in the streets. And it was special. It seemed to mean something.

And I remember my excitement whenever I heard its opening bars on the radio (which, you could pretty much guarantee, would be every hour) and then it was released as a single. At which point one realised that the so-called Battle of Britpop had been a phony war. Here now were both teams bringing out their big guns.

Blur's next gambit was 'The Universal' - a glorious song with a glorious video, a graceful tour de force. And it flopped. Well, Number 5 then out of the Top 10. Whereas Wonderwall went Number 2 - for weeks and weeks, denied the top spot by Simply Red and then Coolio, but it didn't really matter. 'What's the Story' massively outsold 'The Great Escape', massively outsold everything. And it was 'Wonderwall' that did it.

I thoroughly gave in come Christmas time, asking to be given 'What's the Story' and 'Pet Sounds' for Christmas, which I spent in a snowy Edinburgh. And it was Oasis rather than the Beach Boys I demanded my family endure on the car stereo, and my mother, insightful as ever, though not knowing her Pulp from her Elbow, instantly said "Well, it does just sound like an exact copy of the Beatles, doesn't it?"

And do you remember The Mike Flowers Pop cover of Wonderwall, which also went to Number 2 that Christmas? It somehow confirmed the majesty of the song, that some people really did think the Oasis version was a cover of an old classic. It took less than a few weeks for a song to become a standard. And then (much later) there's the Ryan Adams cover, which Noel Gallagher himself loves. I love Ryan Adams, I love Wonderwall, put the two together and I'm a little bit ... meh, not quite, to be honest.

'Wonderwall' was the song that united everybody, from the indie kid to the rugby boy to the Spanish hippy to the middle-aged couple who hate modern music grudgingly getting up onto the floor at the student disco to hobble along out of time. I know that cos I saw it. And so did you.

The alpha males loved it - as i finally began to emerge from social purgatory and got invites to 18th birthday parties of the nicer "jocks" of my school year, and sat in agony as they danced to Take That and East 17 and R Kelly's 'She Got That Vibe' - is there a worse song in the world? * - and said to myself if they only played Wonderwall, then I'd dance, and then they did play Wonderwall, and of course I didn't dance, but the lads did, and they put their arms around each other and sang along, and I asked myself "What, what, can be mine, just mine, in this world?".

* and yet, postscript, there was I, 15 years later, at the indier than indie All Tomorrow's Parties, throwing all my best shapes on a packed dancefloor to Kelly's 'Ignition (Remix)' only for the DJ to then spoil it by following that with 'Bump'n'Grind' - there are limits to the r'n'b us indie folk can love "ironically"]

Everyone heard something different in it - their wedding song, their last chance, their imaginary friend, their boozy chorus, a song like songs used to be, a beautiful chord progression, a threat. Even years later, Matt Ross, one of the nicer of those alpha males, used it nvery adroitly in a facebook status when facebook statuses still had to follow "is". ... He wrote ... "is, after all, your wonderwall." [my first year on facebook statuses was all about trying to incorporate song lyrics as neatly as that]. Rory Kinnear said people loved it cos of the way Liam sang the words "WIEENDING" and "BLIEENDING". For me, though, it was all about the way he sang the first word "Today" and then the way he sang "Maybe".

This was, of course, the second time Oasis had put "Maybe" at the centre of a heart-tugging song. Somehow or other I'd missed 'Live Forever' the previous year and didn't realise that Oasis were already capable of such straightforward beauty as 'Wonderwall' contained. Sadly, after those two, they became a band which were no longer "maybe" and very much "definitely" and that's rather been their downfall.

But, right at that moment, Noel and Liam Gallagher put all their eggs in one basket, released all the quality they has stored up inside them in their bid for world domination - the B-sides were, of course, outstanding too [Round Are Way, The Masterplan, such a hot streak, just think if they'd stored some of these songs up], and the "battle" of the next singles after those two, well that was a write-off. Oasis further upped the epic quotient with 'Don't Look Back in Anger' and Blur released the horrible 'Stereotypes', the very worst example of their art, and it was Oasis now that seemed to have the strength in depth. True, to an extent. 'What's the Story' still had 'Cast No Shadow', it had the title track, 'She's Electric' and 'Champagne Supernova', 'The Great Escape' was overlong and had a few stinkers (though there are three more Blur crackers on it, I'd say, namely 'He Thought of Cars', 'Yuko and Hiro', and my very favourite, 'Best Days').

And what since? Well, Oasis were never that good again, there's no denying. A few decent singles, but the chemistry between the two brothers became corrosive and obstructive and I think they're better off apart for now. And Blur - well, they've all gone on to a variety of delights and also put a few more excellent albums and ultimately, perhaps, the triumph is Damon Albarn's - the full range of what he's achieved since then beggars belief, and he can look at it all and say, you know what, Wonderwall may have kicked The Universal out of the park back in 1995, but on a glorious August evening in 2012, they were both being sung back by 60,000 people in separate locations in London town. And Blur were the chosen band of the people, playing the Olympics closing concert across the city in Hyde Park. And there was Liam Gallagher in the Olympic Stadium, not a fearsome firebrand but just another 40-plus establishment celebrity, without his brother, the song's creator (who'd turned the gig down), starting out rather nervous and a little bit flat, before turning it around and getting the singalong the song deserved.

Because, after all, what is a Wonderwall, except a 1968 film soundtracked by George Harrison?

Well, it's a beautiful song in a minor key which actually has excellent lyrics and lovely strings, and it's one of the few songs which has had that effect on me in my life, and yes, it's a little embarrassing to say that now, because it's such a cliche, and it's Oasis, and they were lumpy and got dull quickly, but hey, it still stops me in my tracks if it catches me in the right mood now.