There’s a sneering kind of superiority attached to “lad rock” – music made for and by predominantly white working-class men. Oasis, so the lore goes, were the bastions of the genre. Their “mad for it” braggadocio reflected the football terraces and Friday-night fisticuffs of tabloid myth; stories of Noel and Liam Gallagher tearing lumps out of each other became as famous as their music. “They looked like a firm of hoolies on an awayday,” as Creation Records’ Tim Abbott once graciously put it.
But Oasis always had a depth that belied their public image. Noel’s early lyrics were about possibility, escapism, and the power of collectivity, not oafish anthems of masculinity. Oasis may have invented laddism, but that culture was not the territory of men alone. As music journalist Sylvia Patterson says, in the 90s, “girls were out there drinking as hard, drugging as hard, having as great a laugh”.
But women have aways been excluded from the narrative of rock’n’roll: they are muses, groupies, girlfriends. Oasis undoubtedly had all three. Yet what they also had – unusually for a lad-rock band in a male-dominated industry – was a core of women behind the scenes. And not as spokespeople or invisible accessories, but strong women who played a pivotal role in their success.
It is a thread woven, albeit subtly, through the new Oasis documentary Supersonic, which follows the band’s rise to fame up until their Knebworth gigs in 1996. In many ways Peggy Gallagher, Noel and Liam’s mother, is the star of the film. The brothers adore her; rightly so given she brought them up single-handedly after walking out on their abusive dad: “I left him with a knife, fork and spoon,” she says in the film. “And even then I think I left him too much.”
“There’s a long section in the film on [the band members’ relationships with women],” director Mat Whitecross told the Virgin Breakfast show this week. “Most of them were products of single mums and they were often paired up with tour managers or photographers who were women, because they were the only people who could make them behave and who they were respectful to. If there was a man coming into the situation it would get volatile, but if it was a woman it’d be fine.”
A crude analysis would say that Oasis would later find a maternal figure in Maggie Mouzakitis, the band’s tour manager for 13 years. “We put her through hell,” says Noel – something of an understatement for a woman whose job it was to prevent him smashing his brother’s head in with a cricket bat. In 1994, Noel disappeared a week into their first US tour, leaving a note saying he’d quit the band. Maggie got hold of his phone records and tracked him down in San Francisco. He’d gone to meet a girl he’d had a fling with, and about whom he’d write the unabashedly fragile Talk Tonight: “I landed, stranded, hardly even knew your name,” he sings. He would rejoin the band a fortnight later.
Female tour managers such as Mouzakitis are few and far between even now, but in the 90s they were exceptional. As were female producers such as Anjali Dutt, who was one of the original producers of Definitely Maybe. The same goes for senior women at record labels, such as Emma Greengrass, who was hired by Creation Records in 1995 as Oasis’s marketing manager. When Creation folded in 2000, the band asked her to set up their own label, Big Brother, where she worked for over a decade.
Even Meg Matthews, who got a job at Creation because she was “Noel’s bird”, is widely credited as the brains behind Oasis’ elevation into high society, diverting the negative attention around the release of (What’s the Story) Morning Glory – after a Noel Gallagher outburst wishing Aids on Damon Albarn – by holding a brunch in Kensington where a string quartet played the album in full.
What these stories show is the juncture between perception and reality in rock’n’roll mythology – and how women are so often written out of it.
And then there are the fans. It’s true that in the band’s latter years, a procession of underwhelming albums and shifting lineups left Oasis with only a core of loyal supporters. The girls who once populated the front of their gigs were replaced by a crowd that was overwhelmingly male and prone to violence. I saw them at Wembley in 2000 – on the same tour that Edinburgh council complained about the amount of human excrement left after one gig. I was a teenager from a council estate, and mostly unfazed by a bit of ruckus, but it was an intimidating space for a girl.
Time has done little to mellow the perception of Oasis as the arbiters of lad rock – understandably, given Noel’s bizarre “no female artists” rule in his list of favourite bands. There is a sadness for women who love Oasis, who live and breath for music, in having to work out how much you are willing to ignore in the name of fandom. But Supersonic reminds us how Oasis’s cocksure invincibility was, underneath it all and despite its contradictions, a message of liberation.
- Supersonic is out now.
