A Manchester flat, then a number 7 he did not want out
Noel Gallagher wrote Cigarettes & Alcohol in his flat in Manchester, on an electric guitar, with the amp in the room. He has said a neighbour on the stairs, a man who may have crewed at the Haçienda, told him the riff was rubbish. Noel told him it would be fine when it came out. In rehearsal he played it to the band and announced the title. Bonehead, who Noel calls the tut-tutter, heard the figure and said they could not do that, it was T. Rex. Noel told him he did not care whose it was, because nobody was going to hear it anyway. The figure is Get It On, moved just far enough to be a new song and not far enough to hide the debt. Noel has never pretended otherwise.
The song that came out of that riff is track eight on Definitely Maybe. Liam sings. The words are a working week and the things you can actually afford: cigarettes, alcohol, a white line, and the idea of being a rock and roll star, which the lyric treats as something other people get. Creation had already taken Supersonic, Shakermaker and Live Forever off the album as singles. Noel did not want a fourth from the same record. The label did. The track had been recorded at Clear Studios in Manchester, with Oasis, Mark Coyle and Owen Morris producing, the same loud vocal and stacked guitars as the rest of the debut. Tony McCarroll on drums, Guigsy on bass, Bonehead on the rhythm guitar that carries the T. Rex figure, Noel on the lead that answers it.
The single came out on 10 October 1994. The extra tracks were a live I Am the Walrus from the Glasgow Cathouse, plus Listen Up and Fade Away. It peaked at number 7, their second UK top ten after Live Forever, and it kept returning to the chart for years. Noel has said they were in Detroit when the call came that it was the biggest-selling single they had had. He put the phone down and decided there was no going back. Mark Szaszy’s video puts the band in a crowded room with champagne and a party that looks like the life the lyric says you cannot have. The record is simpler than the party: a glam riff, a straight beat, Liam out front.
I don’t give a shit who it is, no-one’s gonna hear it anyway.
(Noel Gallagher, to Bonehead, on the T. Rex riff, Louder, 2024)
He later called it a proper youth anthem, the song that still set a crowd off at the last Oasis shows, because it mentions drugs, sex, drink and records in the same breath. That is his summary, not a review. On Definitely Maybe, released 29 August 1994, the track sits after Bring It On Down and before Digsy’s Dinner. The single, six weeks after the album, was the one he had argued against pulling. The chart did the argument for the label. Number 7, from a riff a neighbour had already dismissed on a staircase, and that Bonehead had identified in one bar.
The neighbour was wrong about the riff being useless, and Bonehead was right about where it came from. Noel kept it. Number 7 was the answer to “nobody is going to hear it.” The song stayed in the set for the rest of the band’s life, longer than several of the singles he had been happier to release. You can still hear the T. Rex debt in the first bar. That was the point of leaving it there.
