Jammed onstage while that American tour came apart
It’s Gettin’ Better (Man!!) is track 11 on Be Here Now. It runs seven minutes. After it, the album does not start another song. It plays a two-minute reprise of All Around the World and stops. Liam Gallagher sings the track. Noel wrote it by jamming with the band onstage during the American tour, then cut a demo of that sketch in Mustique in June 1996 with producer Owen Morris, a drum machine and an eight-track. The demo is about six and a half minutes. The version on the album is the longer one. Creation released Be Here Now on 21 August 1997.
The album sessions ran from 7 October 1996 into March 1997, at Abbey Road, Ridge Farm in Surrey, AIR, Orinoco and Master Rock. Noel and Morris produced. Alan White, in the band since 1995, played drums. Noel has described the method in plain terms: stack guitars until the record feels colossal. The same approach sits on this track. A straight backbeat, a bright guitar figure that does not change its mind, Liam pushed forward, and a chorus that keeps saying the weather has turned. The title brushes the Beatles song Getting Better. In the Q interview that came out with the album, Noel said he had tried to write a Rolling Stones song instead, because Oasis were being compared with the Beatles every week.
He pictured Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood with cigarettes in their mouths. You can hear the attempt in the groove, which stays on one rock figure instead of sliding into a Beatles descent. The words do not describe the tour they came from. By 1996 the group was already fighting in public, onstage and off. Noel called this a happy tune written while that was going on. The record that holds it was cut afterwards, from October, with the same producer, and without the year off that Morris later said they should have taken. Morris has also said the Mustique demos were the last good recordings he made with Noel, and that the album would have been better if they had kept those guitars and only replaced the drums and the vocal.
I actually wrote this jamming on stage with the band during the last American tour. A really happy tune even though there was a lot of shit going down. Because we get connected with The Beatles all the time I thought I’d write a Rolling Stones song instead. You can almost see Keith and Ronnie with fags in their mouths, giving it some.
(Noel Gallagher, Q, September 1997)
On the finished album the song does what the title claims and then keeps playing. Seven minutes is a long time for a chorus that simple. It is still shorter than All Around the World, the nine-minute singalong placed just before it. The pair closes Be Here Now the way the record was built: more guitars, more bars, Liam still the voice. The Mustique demo stayed off the 1997 release. What came out that August is the album cut, track 11, Creation, Morris and Noel on the production credit, White on the drums.
Noel spent later years calling the album too long and too loud. This track is a fair sample of that method, and of the mood he claimed for the writing. A happy tune, taken from a tour that was not happy, pointed at the Stones because the Beatles comparison had become a habit. The reprise after it is the record running out of new songs and repeating one. It’s Gettin’ Better (Man!!) is the last thing on Be Here Now that is still trying to be a new song.
