Bonehead plays the Imagine piano, Noel sings
The day after Liam chose Wonderwall, Oasis cut Don’t Look Back in Anger in the same Rockfield room, and Noel Gallagher sang the lead. It was the first Oasis A-side with his voice up front. Until then he had kept the singles for his brother and sung the B-sides himself. Creation would not release this one until 19 February 1996, but the vocal was already on tape in May 1995, during the (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? sessions in Monmouth.
Engineer Nick Brine remembered the row about who sang what. Noel was going to sing Wonderwall, then Liam was going to sing Wonderwall, then Noel said he would take Don’t Look Back in Anger, and Liam wanted that one as well. Liam sang Wonderwall on the Wednesday. On the Thursday he was not required for the lead. The session ran longer than the day before because Noel kept adding guitars, and the string parts took the work into the night. Morris still built the track the same way: acoustic guide to a click, Alan White on the Gretsch kit, bass, then overdubs. Noel needed more passes on the vocal than Liam usually did. Morris was happy with what he got.
The opening piano is the part people still argue about. It is John Lennon’s Imagine, played by Bonehead, because Noel asked for it that way. Morris told Sound on Sound that the room laughed, that nobody really cared, and that Noel was quite happy to be compared with the Beatles. Noel has put the same joke in his own words since: half the piano is there to wind people up, and half of it is a signpost back to the song that suggested it. The rest of the record is a mid-tempo singalong, Noel on the melody, Liam in the gang vocal rather than the lead, the chorus built to be shouted back.
When Noel got Bonehead to play it like Imagine, it made us all laugh. No one really cared. It was just funny. And as for the whole thing about his work being derivative of the Beatles, Noel was quite happy to be compared to the Beatles.
(Owen Morris, Sound on Sound, 2012)
The single went to number one in the UK in February 1996, the band’s second chart-topper after Some Might Say. Nigel Dick directed the video, Noel walking a crowd through the song he had kept for himself. On the album, already out since October, it sat straight after Wonderwall, the two vocals split the way the brothers had split them in the studio. For a while that was the whole story: Noel could front a single, and the single could go to number one without Liam on the lead.
The song picked up a second public life in May 2017. The day after the bombing at Manchester Arena, a crowd in the city sang it back at a vigil. It was no longer only the Rockfield piano joke or the first time Noel took an A-side. It was the chorus people already knew how to sing together. That is what the Thursday take had been built for, even if nobody in the Coach House was thinking about a square in Manchester twenty-two years later.
