A black-and-white profile in Bourton, then a number 12
In November 2008 the director W.I.Z. took Liam Gallagher to Bourton-on-the-Water and filmed him in black and white. Liam is the only member of Oasis in the clip. The last shot is a close profile, him lying down. It copies the pose on the back cover of John Lennon’s Imagine, and it also sits close to the cover of Mind Games. The single this film was selling had already been finished at Abbey Road.
Liam wrote I’m Outta Time. He told Rolling Stone he had the verses and the music about three years before Dig Out Your Soul, demoed in the band’s own studio, and that the chorus took years to finish. Noel Gallagher told NME he parked this piano ballad in the middle of the album on purpose, to split two sides that otherwise stay loud from the first track to the last. He called it the John Lennon plod, and he was clear that Liam had written it. Gem Archer, in Q that October, said the melancholy was Liam showing himself. Dave Sardy produced the track at Abbey Road. The sleeve lists Liam on vocal and acoustic guitar, Noel on electric and acoustic guitars, Mellotron and keyboards, Gem on piano and guitars, Andy Bell on bass, and Zak Starkey on drums.
The outro does not end on a guitar solo. A short piece of John Lennon runs under the loop, taken from a BBC interview in 1980. Lennon says that, as Churchill said, it is every Englishman’s right to live where the hell he likes, and he asks whether the place is going to vanish before he gets back. Liam said they went through old interviews and kept the first clip that sat on the fade. Big Brother released Dig Out Your Soul on 6 October 2008. I’m Outta Time followed The Shock of the Lightning as the second single, on 1 December. The album version runs 4:10. The radio edit is 3:49.
It’s not a tribute to John Lennon because if you sat down and tried to write a tribute to John Lennon it’d be fucking rubbish, but it’s kind of a nod.
(Liam Gallagher, Rolling Stone)
On the chart dated 13 December 2008 the single entered at number 12 in Britain. That was the first Oasis single to miss the top ten since Shakermaker in 1994, and it ended a run of 22 consecutive top tens. It spent two weeks in the top 75, the shortest stay of any Oasis single. Scotland and the UK indie chart both placed it at number one. In France it peaked at 48 and stayed for 28 weeks, the longest chart run an Oasis single had managed there. The 7-inch paired the album version with a Neon Neon remix of Gem Archer’s To Be Where There’s Life.
Liam told Q in October 2011 that this was the song that made him think the writing was worth keeping. A lot of his tracks, he said, repeat a verse and never grow the big anthem chords. This one did. The band split in Paris in August 2009. By then the single that had stopped the top-ten run was already a back-catalogue ballad: piano in the middle of Dig Out Your Soul, and Lennon talking over the fade.
