Can they do it again with the new album? Only if sales–the CD debuts Feb. 28–are a lot better than the reviews. “Standing on the Shoulder of Giants” is a big, brash rock-and-roll record of the sort that had been unhip for years before Oasis came along. But it’s a 20th-century rock-and-roll record. Word had it that they’d planned to update their music by incorporating cutting-edge dance sounds, but it’s hard to spot any. The first single, “Go Let It Out,” went straight to No. 1, but critics were lukewarm about its ’60s-style pop. It’s not-baddish, but hardly the tower of power the music biz was hoping for. “The music business really wants to see Oasis and British guitar music return to the top of the world,” says Stephen Jones of the trade magazine Music Week. “The problem is that this isn’t the album they should be coming back with.”
That’s bad news for British pop. It’s in the doldrums again. Still one of the country’s big industries, raking in £3.1 billion annually, it can’t seem to produce significant new talent. Since Oasis’s last album, in 1997–“Be Here Now”–no young U.K. act has made it big outside the country, while within Britain the charts are dominated by foreigners: America’s Britney Spears and Canada’s Shania Twain outsold every homegrown artist in 1999. Meanwhile, a proposed merger between Time Warner and the last major Brit-owned record company, EMI, which will create the world’s largest record company, has insiders predicting that underperforming British acts could get the boot from the superlabel.
What’s the problem? Some blame lack of investment in new music, others the trend for bland “boy bands” like Dublin’s Boy-zone. The Gallagher brothers were certainly not bland back in 1994, when they helped change Britain’s social climate. Jubilantly boozy, without a shred of political correctness, they arrived just as the so-called New Lad cultural movement was making it hip for men to revert to adolescent loutishness.
The earthy Gallaghers personified the mood, and if the brothers rarely seemed to go a day without one or the other’s threatening to quit, it only added to their yobbish allure. And their swaggering lifestyles (actress wives, country mansions) symbolized the country’s emergence from the recession of the early ’90s.
Now they’re being written off as “middleweight rockers mired in music’s middle ages,” as the rock journal Select sniffed. Indeed, there are signs that the Gallaghers are evolving from new lads into new men. The haunting “Gas Panic!” concerns Noel’s “bad anxiety attacks.” Liam’s “Little James” is dedicated to his wife, the actress Patsy Kensit, and his stepson. Oasis has not only aged but lost two guitarists, Paul McGuigan and Paul (Bonehead) Arthurs. In addition, Alan McGee, who discovered Oasis playing in a Glasgow bar, folded Creation, their record label, to concentrate on Internet ventures. So it was not all that surprising that retailers ordered only 450,000 copies of “Shoulder”–compared with the 850,000 ship-out of “Be Here Now.” Oasis is still a “catalyst artist,” says Gennaro Castaldo of the United Kingdom’s largest record-shop chain, HMV. “They bring people into stores.” And if the numbers plummet? Well, as Isaac Newton might have put it, what goes up must come down.
