Don’t look back in anger

Younger Oasis fans are discovering the much-maligned later albums and loving them. Maybe it’s time the older, more cynical observers follow their lead, says Hamish MacBain

- Hamish MacBain

Born in Busan, South Korea, just several days after Oasis’s Be Here Now became the fastest selling UK album of all time, Jeon Jung-Kook of the K-Pop supergroup BTS notched a similarly impressive statistic 25 years later in July 2023 when his debut solo single became the fastest song in history to surpass 1 billion streams on Spotify. (To give an idea of just how enormous an accomplishment this is, Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” took almost 10 years to achieve the same milestone.)

Soon after, as part of his promotional tour for “Seven”, Jung Kook stopped off at Radio 1 to perform in the live lounge where, as is customary, he performed his new single along with a cover of his choice. When it was trailed that the latter would be an Oasis song, most people tuning in likely would have presumed it would be one of their heavy hitters: “Don’t Look Back In Anger” or “Wonderwall” or maybe at a push “Stop Crying Your Heart Out”, which Leona Lewis covered in 2009 and turned into an X Factor audition standard (see: a then-unknown Harry Styles). But no. Jung Kook’s song of choice? The 2005 track “Let There Be Love”.

It was, to say the least, an esoteric choice. The long-running, somewhat sniffy, and fairly unanimous critical narrative surrounding Oasis is that the brothers made two good albums in Definitely Maybe and (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? then nothing of value after that. So how on earth was the biggest pop star in the world - not yet born when said albums came out - aware of this relative obscurity?

The answer lies in the success of the