Rock history is a repository of strange tales and bizarre practices: The Beatles smoking pot in Buckingham Palace, The Rolling Stones doing weird things with a Mars bar, and Led Zep doing even weirder things with a halibut. Oasis have given rock music more than its fair share of bad behaviour, but as they prepare for the release of their fourth album, Standing on the Shoulder of Giants, it looks like the river of rock 'n' roll excess has been well and truly dammed.
The ultimate lad band appears to have finally grown up, forced into premature maturity by such things as fatherhood, health concerns and the sudden departure of two members. The Oasis which will hit the road in summer 2000, playing places such as Wembley Stadium and Lansdowne Road, is a new, improved, older and wiser Oasis, who realise that their time in the sun is coming to a close, and that they can no longer rely on the same old rock 'n' roll cliches to get by.
Not that Oasis have completely divested themselves of cliche and embraced a new, pioneering pop philosophy. Driving away from the madness of London and towards the quiet, ordered countryside of Buckinghamshire, the new album blasting out of the speakers, we are suddenly blown right back into 1996, when Oasis were at their peak of popularity, when their every hand gesture, bodily function and ill-considered remark made front page news, when a quarter of a million fans at Knebworth bowed before the undisputed Lords of Britpop.
Heady days, and, for the band, also a headwreck. Oasis may have changed inside, but on the audible surface it all sounds depressingly familiar. Standing on the Shoulder of Giants (the title comes from a Sir Isaac Newton quote on the new sterling £2 coin) may not be as bloated and bombastic as Be Here Now, but on first listen, it still sounds a pretty limp and turgid effort.
In the past couple of years, since Be Here Now dropped like a great thundering leviathan, crushing pop music beneath a ton of ennui and unfulfilled expectations, Oasis have been one character flaw away from becoming a four-letter word. Meanwhile, other icons have strutted in and grabbed the leftover glory: The Verve, Stereophonics, and Travis all took the basic riff/tune/ chorus formula and wrote it large on the public consciousness. Robbie Williams took the Oasis blueprint, added some showbiz panache, and became the biggest British male solo artist since George Michael. Meanwhile, Liam and Patsey had a baby which they unimaginatively named Lennon, Noel and Meg moved to a house, a very big house in the country, and as we arrive at the band's studio in nearby Wheeler End, Mrs Noel Gallagher is expecting her own Britpop baby.
The studio is situated in a converted farmhouse which used to be owned by Alvin Lee from Ten Years After. Noel is sitting by the mixing desk, and around the doorway behind him hang a dozen yellow submarines - the Oasis equivalent of your granny's flying ducks. He's wearing a tight-fitting, leather jacket, tight, blue jeans with flowers embroidered in the faded denim, and a tight, moptop haircut. He's looking tanned and thin, the antithesis of the bloated pop star. If you didn't know better, you could swear he was a young, wired-up and hungry hopeful, here to talk up his debut EP and brag about how his band is gonna be bigger than Oasis. Perhaps it's the country air, but, even with a hangover - Noel had been on the batter with Q magazine the previous night - the elder Gallagher brother is looking healthy and relaxed.
"Yeah, well, I can come out here anytime I like. It's really handy. I had to leave London because it was just getting too much, fans and press and all that shit. It was great to get away - I've had the house out here for three years but we'd just come out at weekends, and I'd go back to London for the week. And then the weekends turned into like, four or five days, and all of a sudden we just said f*** it, let's sell the house.
"Down here, no one gives a f*** who I am. I mean, I don't really mix with a lot of people much round here. I try to keep meself to meself. I haven't seen the neighbours that I've got for about two years."
Contrast Noel's idyllic, country existence with life in London, where he had to deal with a constant stream of hangers-on, social climbers and plain ordinary spongers.
"Well, you just find that all the relationships that you had with people were based on complete and utter bullshit that you'd speak at seven o'clock in the morning, about aliens and pyramids. It was great while it lasted, but there just comes a point where I wanted summat more out of life. And I wasn't devoting enough time to meself or me wife or the thing which I do best, which is all the music and that. Everything just revolved around getting out of it, really. It was just a phase I was going through, but it was brilliant at the time, but you just want to change, because it's f***ing boring then."
New house, new millennium, new album, new record label, and a completely new Oasis: Plus ca change. When guitarist Paul "Bonehead" Arthurs and Paul "Guigsy" McGuigan announced their departure from the band last year, the music press had a bit of fun playing "guess the replacement". Names such as Andy Rourke from The Smiths and John Squire from The Stone Roses were bandied about, but in the end, the two most coveted jobs in Britpop went to Gem Archer from Heavy Stereo and Andy Bell, from Ride and Hurricane €1. Neither of the two new members played on the current album, but Noel is already looking forward to making the next one, and is more than ready to share the song-writing duties.
"I suppose this record will be the last Oasis record of its kind, 'cos it'll be the last one that I wrote 99 per cent of. The next one will be more of a band, really, because six months ago there was only one songwriter in Oasis, and now there's four."
Bonehead and Guigsy's departure may have been a blessing in disguise, because it may force Oasis into a much-needed musical realignment. Both Bell and Archer are accomplished musicians and songwriters in their own right, and could do much to clear the creative blockage which make Be Here Now all but indigestible.
"It was just a lack of inspiration," explains Noel about the constipated sound of their third album. "We'd got off the Morning Glory tour at the end of '96, and I wanted to leave the group, because I'd hated how big it had become. And I got talked out of leaving the band by Liam. He said, let's just go and do one more album and call it a day, 'cos none of us are really happy anyway. When you've got no sense of purpose or direction, and you're straddled with a big cash cow on your back, and it's like, if I make an album then I'll make another five million quid, obviously you'd be a mug not to do it. But it wasn't really a pleasurable experience. I listen back to it now and I just think, the lyrics are f***ing embarrassing. I wrote a bunch of music and a load of melodies and it was like, right, what rhymes with bus? It was f***ing shit really."
It's all very well to disdain your last, underwhelming effort when you've made up for it with a masterpiece, but Standing on the Shoulder of Giants is still saddled with many of the same things that dragged down Be Here Now.
It opens with a military march, heralding the band's first instrumental, Fuckin' In The Bushes, and then plays out the rock 'n' roll pied piper routine with predictable lack of imagination. The new single, Go Let It Out, doesn't even bother to phone ahead the chord changes - it sends them by carrier pigeon, only the pigeon stops off at the pub for a few pints along the way, then takes a wrong turn and ends up stoned in a strawberry field.
Who Feels Love is also a direct homage to The Beatles, taking the baton from Dear Prudence, then beating the tune to a pulp. Put Yer Money Where Yer Mouth Is pays lip service to The Doors's Roadhouse Blues, while Little James, the first Oasis track penned by Liam Gallagher, could give Paul McCartney a run for his money in the mawkish ditty stakes. Greedy old Noel Gallagher has kept the best tune for himself, and its lyrics allude to a world which Noel has left behind: the swinging London of cocaine, champagne, New Labour luvvies and bed-tossing Turner prizewinners. The title - Where Did It All Go Wrong? - may not sound particularly suited to the biggest-selling Britpop band of the 1990s, but in the light of the band's spectacular fall from fashionability, it's deliciously appropriate.
Noel admits he felt tempted to radically rearrange the Oasis sound, but soon realised that change was not that clear-cut. Like the lyrics say in Supersonic, Noel had to be himself, he just couldn't be no one else.