Behind Stand by Me, and left off the album
(I Got) The Fever is not on Be Here Now. The album, twelve tracks, came out on Creation on 21 August 1997. This song arrived a month later, on 22 September, as a B-side of Stand by Me, the second single from that record. Creation put it on the 7-inch and the cassette with the A-side, and on the 12-inch and the CD with My Sister Lover. The CD also carried Going Nowhere. Stand by Me entered the UK chart at number two. Elton John’s Candle in the Wind 1997 was the record in front of it.
Noel Gallagher wrote (I Got) The Fever. He and Owen Morris produced it, the same credit as the album. Liam sings. The track runs 5:15, shorter than the seven-minute songs around it on the parent record, and it moves like a straight rocker rather than one of the album’s long codas. It was not a leftover Noel had been saving since Definitely Maybe. A year later, talking through the B-sides collected on The Masterplan, he named this song and My Sister Lover as the ones he liked least. He said that was the moment they realised they had to write B-sides, and that the tracks were bashed together: a couple of chords and a chord change.
He called that selling yourself short, and unfair on the people who buy the records. He did not say that about Going Nowhere, the other extra on the Stand by Me CD. He rated that one higher, called it an older song from his Burt Bacharach period, and kept it for The Masterplan in 1998. (I Got) The Fever stayed off that compilation. It stayed a Creation B-side from September 1997: Liam up front, five minutes, no video campaign of its own, filed behind a single that could not get past a Princess Diana tribute.
(I Got) The Fever and My Sister Lover, they’re the ones I like the least. That was when we were like, oh fuck, gotta write some B-sides. They were just fucking bashed together, couple of chords and a chord change. Which I hate doing, because it’s selling yourself short, really, and it’s not fair on the people who buy the records.
(Noel Gallagher, The Masterplan notes, 1998)
The useful fact is the date. Be Here Now was already in the shops when this single appeared. The B-sides were being written because a release needed them, not because a stack of 1994 demos had finally been emptied. Noel was blunt about the two he disliked, and he acted on it. Going Nowhere got a second life on the B-side album. (I Got) The Fever did not. Listeners who bought the CD still got it, between the single and My Sister Lover, five minutes of Liam over a chord change Noel later wished he had not rushed.
That ranking is clearer than the habit of treating every Oasis extra as a hidden A-side. Some B-sides from this band earned that story. This one, by the writer’s own account, was the job of filling a single in September 1997. The record is what that job sounds like: short for the album it sits beside, sung by Liam, produced by Morris and Noel, and left off both Be Here Now and The Masterplan.
