In October 2006 I was convinced I was done with Oasis. Relentless ubiquity had combined with diminishing creative returns to sour my original attachment long before then. Even the British tabloids had grown weary of a circus they had once been keen to perpetuate. The moment had passed.
And then the band released something that both reminded me why I’d liked them at the start and helped me accept their contribution on its own terms. Not everything, after all, has to be tied to a definable cultural moment for it to be good.
What Oasis put out that month wasn’t a new single but a freshly commissioned music video. This was for The Masterplan, a track from Noel Gallagher’s songwriting peak that he had always regretted relegating to the B-side of Wonderwall in 1995. Intended to promote a best-of collection called Stop the Clocks, the new video premiered on TOTP2 on BBC Two, and it was instantly obvious that it was gorgeous. It moved me then and it moves me even more when I watch it now.
This doesn’t happen often. For a music video, of all things, to prompt a reappraisal of a band, any band, as deep into the life of the medium as this, it would have to be a piece of art.
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What The Masterplan video actually comprises is multiple works of art painstakingly adapted and modified into a new one. This is a painterly, spellbinding five minutes of hand-drawn animation completed in six weeks by the Irish company Brown Bag Films.
“Little known fact. We got the opportunity to work on a music video for Oasis back in 2006,” Brown Bag proudly posted on its social-media channels soon after the Manchester band announced the dates for their Live ’25 tour.
About 6,500 individual drawings were produced for the video, which was directed by the duo of Ben Jones and Greg Fay, then of a London-based production company called Partizan, with all the animation overseen by Darragh O’Connell of Brown Bag.
Its opening seconds let us know precisely where we are. Amid the wilting melancholy of the song’s strings, four of the band emerge from the doors of terraced houses, the animated version of Liam Gallagher leading the way with his trademark swagger. It’s clear to anyone familiar with the artist LS Lowry, loved in Britain for his paintings of industrial Greater Manchester landscapes, that it’s his world Oasis are in.
There are other references, from a Beatles-echoing zebra crossing to the music shop where Noel and Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs bought their first guitars. Images of Maine Road, the former ground of Manchester City FC, are recognisable both as elements of the Oasis story and the scene of Lowry paintings.
His art had an outside-looking-in quality. The matchstick figures he depicted often seem isolated within a crowd, or caught somehow by the daily mechanics of their lives. There’s no overt sentimentality, which is what makes people respond with sentiment of their own.
For a working-class band from Manchester who realised their ambitions only to be confronted with the detachment of fame, the fantastical re-creation of Lowry’s streetscapes feels beyond apt.
My favourite part of the video, however, is when it breaks away from this inspiration to show an animated Noel taking centre stage before a tent of blank faces, while Liam has a lonely sit down, hilariously banging his tambourine as if his soul depends upon it.
At the end they return to the terrace, the two brothers entering the same house as the guitars ebb away. It’s acutely nostalgic, but the nostalgia derives more from the age of the song – already 11 years old by this point – than it does from Lowry’s mid-20th-century vision. The Oasis of The Masterplan no longer existed by 2006.
Even Noel liked the finished product. As supercuts of his scathing DVD commentary on the band’s other music videos reveal, he wasn’t a fan of most of them, nor did he enjoy getting up early to walk in slow motion for the benefit of video directors who “think they’re f**king making Apocalypse Now”.
Animation was the ideal path, both for him and for anyone riled by the Gallagher brothers’ crasser statements. Their hand-drawn equivalents don’t snarl or feud or insult anyone. Instead, when used to visualise a mercifully underexposed song, they underline its poignancy.
Oasis were never known for lyrical profundity, but The Masterplan is a song about getting older and learning there’s no masterplan to life, which makes it wiser than the rest of them put together. No wonder Noel has spent 30 years trying to give it its due.
At Croke Park, where the band will play this weekend, the set list is poised to feature five B-sides in total, but only one has been given pride of place in the encore. I’ll be listening to it with unjaded ears.
