McGee wanted it first. The studio would not have it.
Bring It On Down is track seven on Definitely Maybe, between Supersonic and Cigarettes & Alcohol. Noel Gallagher wrote it. Liam sings it. It was supposed to be the first single. Alan McGee at Creation heard a fast, ugly riff and thought that was the introduction. In December 1993 the band booked the Pink Museum in Liverpool to get a debut on tape. The session did not produce this song as a releasable single. Engineer Dave Scott remembers the take that died in the room as I Will Believe. Noel came out of the back room with Supersonic instead. Bring It On Down waited.
Noel has been plain about the riff. In the 2004 documentary Definitely Maybe he said it sounded like the Sex Pistols, and that you could not put a love song on top of it. In liner notes for a later edition he called the track a tribute to the Stooges, the MC5 and punk rock. The words match the riff. An outcast, an underclass, an uninvited guest who stays until the end. He has also described that guest as a real type, the person who turns up at parties and will not leave. It is not a hymn. It is a shove. Liam sings it straight. There is no decoration on the line.
The version on the album is not the failed Pink Museum attempt. Definitely Maybe was rebuilt after an abandoned run at Monnow Valley. The record people bought was cut at Sawmills in Cornwall, with Owen Morris in the chair alongside Mark Coyle and the band. Tony McCarroll is still on drums. Guigsy on bass, Bonehead on rhythm, Noel on lead. The song is faster and drier than the singles around it. No string pad, no long coda, a backbeat that keeps pushing Liam. It was never lifted as a 7-inch. Supersonic, Shakermaker, Live Forever and Cigarettes & Alcohol took the single slots. This one stayed an album track the early sets used when they wanted the room to feel like a rehearsal that had got out of hand.
I had the riff, and it sounded like the Sex Pistols. But you couldn’t really write a love song over the top of that, could you?
(Noel Gallagher, Definitely Maybe: The Documentary, 2004)
On the finished debut, released 29 August 1994, the sequence makes the point. Supersonic, the song written because this one would not come out in Liverpool, sits immediately before it. Then Cigarettes & Alcohol, the T. Rex figure Noel would not drop. Bring It On Down is the piece in the middle that still sounds like the band McGee signed: little equipment, a lot of attitude, McCarroll hitting straight, Liam not decorating the melody. Morris’s album mix gives it the same loud vocal and stacked guitars as the rest of the record, without turning it into one of the singles. It does not need a chorus you can hum on the bus. It needs the riff to keep going.
It never had a chart position of its own. It did not need one to stay in the set. When Oasis played it live in 1994 and 1995 it did the job the riff was written for: a shove between the songs people had bought. The debut single went to Supersonic. Bring It On Down stayed track seven, the Pistols figure that lost the race and still opens the loud half of the album. McGee had heard the introduction. The studio gave him a different first record, and kept this one for the track list.
