Bonehead cried on the bus before a note was recorded
Before Oasis taped a note of Champagne Supernova, Noel Gallagher played the whole song on acoustic guitar in the back of the tour bus, and Bonehead cried. Bonehead told Radio X it was about eight in the evening, the first of a batch of new songs, and that he ended up on the floor. Noel remembers looking at him and wondering whether the song was good or whether Bonehead had gone soft. The tape that closed (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? in October 1995 runs just over seven minutes. The bus version was one guitar and a lyric Noel was still happy to call meaningless.
The master was cut at Rockfield in May 1995, with Owen Morris, in the same fortnight as Wonderwall and Don’t Look Back in Anger. Liam sang it. Alan White played drums. The sessions nearly stopped the band. Photographer Michael Spencer Jones, who was at the studio, later called the row on the lawn a Victorian fistfight and said Oasis had effectively split in the middle of one of their biggest records. Most of the group left. They came back, paid for the damage, and finished the album. Champagne Supernova was still short one guitar.
That part was not cut at Rockfield. Paul Weller came to Orinoco Studios in south London with a white Gibson SG and an old Vox AC30, no pedals. He played four passes. Noel picked one. Weller also sang backing vocals. On the finished track his lead sits inside Noel’s own guitars rather than replacing them: the long solo section hands the phrase from one player to the other. Bonehead’s acoustic still opens the song. Liam carries the vocal, including the line that later annoyed a critic, “slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball.”
I don’t know. But are you telling me, when you’ve got 60,000 people singing it, they don’t know what it means? It means something different to every one of them.
(Noel Gallagher to The Sunday Times, 2009)
Noel had already told the NME, in September 1995, that some of the words were written when he was out of it, and that a line like being caught beneath a landslide felt like suffocation on a bad day and like nothing in particular on a good one. He never supplied a fixed story for the title. Creation did not put the song out as a UK single. In America it was a single in May 1996, with a Nigel Dick video, and it made the US top 20. On stage it became the set closer, the long one they could stretch, including the Knebworth shows in August 1996.
The Sunday Times question about the cannonball line is the argument in miniature. A writer told Noel the lyric was what stopped the song being a classic. Noel did not explain the image. He pointed at the crowd singing it. That is the useful way to hear the record: seven minutes, a wall of guitars, Weller’s SG in the middle, Liam in no hurry, and a chorus that does not require a glossary.
