Liam on a Surrey bus, Noel on bass
In November 1999, Nick Egan filmed Oasis in a field in Surrey. Liam Gallagher sings the opening of Go Let It Out from the top deck of a bus, then steps down and walks into the shot. Noel is on bass, Gem Archer is on lead guitar, and Alan White is at the drums. The single they were pushing had already been finished that summer.
Noel wrote it. He produced it with Mark “Spike” Stent. The sessions for Standing on the Shoulder of Giants ran from April to August 1999 at Wheeler End, at Olympic Studios, at Noel’s house studio in Supernova Heights, and at the château of La Colle Noire, near Nice, the old Christian Dior house the band had taken for some quiet. Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs and Paul “Guigsy” McGuigan had already left. On this track the band is Liam on the vocal, Noel on guitars, bass and keyboards, and Alan White on drums.
The drums are not only White’s kit. The record uses a sample of Johnny Jenkins playing Dr. John’s I Walk on Gilded Splinters. Just before the bass comes in, Noel can be heard telling the room to pick it up. He later ranked the song with the best things he had written in that stretch, and he had a specific comparison in mind.
The closest we came to sounding like a modern-day Beatles.
(Noel Gallagher, Lock the Box interview, Stop the Clocks DVD, 2006)
Big Brother, the label Oasis started after leaving Creation, released the single in Britain on 7 February 2000, on 7-inch, CD and cassette. The B-sides were Let’s All Make Believe and (As Long as They’ve Got) Cigarettes in Hell. A 12-inch followed on 14 February. Go Let It Out entered the UK singles chart at number one. It was the band’s fifth chart-topper, after Some Might Say, Don’t Look Back in Anger, D’You Know What I Mean? and All Around the World. It stayed there for one week. All Saints replaced it with Pure Shores. Standing on the Shoulder of Giants came out on 28 February.
The video shows a lineup the tape does not quite match. Gem is in the field on lead guitar while Noel plays bass. The recording is still the reduced band: two Gallaghers, White, and a sampled New Orleans drummer under them. Ireland, Italy and Spain also sent the single to number one. The job of the song was simple. It put that thinner Oasis on the radio before the album arrived, on a label that finally belonged to them. Epic had already sent the song to American rock radio on 18 January 2000. The album title itself was Noel’s version of the line on the new £2 coin, shoulder instead of shoulders. None of that changed the single. It was a number one with a sampled drummer and a bass player who was also the songwriter.
