November 2014, and Noel ranked it himself
In November 2014, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds put Do the Damage out as the B-side of In the Heat of the Moment, after a year in which it had been lined up to open the next album. NME streamed it on 13 November. The download and the limited 7-inch followed on 17 November, on Gallagher’s own Sour Mash label. The A-side was the first public taste of Chasing Yesterday. The flip was the song he had already talked himself out of using as track one.
Chasing Yesterday was written and produced by Gallagher and recorded between 2012 and 2014 at Strangeways and Abbey Road in London. It came out on 2 March 2015 and went straight to number one in the UK. On the debut album he had sent the mixes to Dave Sardy in Los Angeles. This time he ran the sessions himself. Announcing the record in October 2014, he said managing a room full of people asking what they were doing that day had been the hardest part, and that he was making it up as he went along. Do the Damage lived inside that process, then slipped off the standard tracklist. A deluxe edition later parked it as a bonus track. The release that matters is the 2014 B-side, not the reissue slot.
On the record it is a straight rocker: drums forward, a chorus that keeps landing on “We’ll do the damage, kid”, and a verse about rent, a setting sun, and a dream that has already gone. He did not sell it as a manifesto. A performance video followed in December 2014, a month after the clip for In the Heat of the Moment. That A-side entered the UK singles chart at number 26. Listeners kept calling the flip the better song, which is an old B-side problem. Gallagher had already given it a ranking of his own.
Do The Damage? It might be the 23rd best song I ever wrote. It was, for about a year, gonna be the opening track on the album, until the 22nd best song I ever wrote appeared.
(Noel Gallagher, NME premiere, November 2014)
He never named the song that pushed it aside. The album that arrived in March opened somewhere else. Ballad of the Mighty I, with Johnny Marr on guitar, came later as a single. Riverman and The Dying of the Light carried the slower half. Do the Damage stayed the one that had lost an argument with its writer. Sour Mash pressed the 7-inch in a limited coloured run and a plain vinyl, both with this on the back. That is the release: a B-side with a number attached by the man who wrote it.
Put it next to whatever he eventually chose as the opener and the ranking sounds like a joke that is also stocktaking. He had a pile of songs, a studio he was running himself, and a habit of demoting anything that felt too obvious. Do the Damage survived as the flip of the first single from Chasing Yesterday. Twenty-third, by his count. Still the song people argue should have been first.
