Oasis – (I Got) The Fever

Behind Stand by Me, and left off the album

(I Got) The Fever is not on Be Here Now. The album, twelve tracks, came out on Creation on 21 August 1997. This song arrived a month later, on 22 September, as a B-side of Stand by Me, the second single from that record. Creation put it on the 7-inch and the cassette with the A-side, and on the 12-inch and the CD with My Sister Lover. The CD also carried Going Nowhere. Stand by Me entered the UK chart at number two. Elton John’s Candle in the Wind 1997 was the record in front of it.

Noel Gallagher wrote (I Got) The Fever. He and Owen Morris produced it, the same credit as the album. Liam sings. The track runs 5:15, shorter than the seven-minute songs around it on the parent record, and it moves like a straight rock song rather than one of the album’s long endings. It was not a leftover Noel had been saving since Definitely Maybe. A year later, talking through the B-sides collected on The Masterplan, he named this song and My Sister Lover as the ones he liked least. He said that was the moment they realised they had to write B-sides, and that the tracks were bashed together: a couple of chords and a chord change.

He called that selling yourself short, and unfair on the people who buy the records. He did not say that about Going Nowhere, the other extra on the Stand by Me CD. He rated that one higher, called it an older song from his Burt Bacharach period, and kept it for The Masterplan in 1998. (I Got) The Fever stayed off that compilation. It stayed a Creation B-side from September 1997. Liam sings it, it runs about five minutes, and it had no video of its own. It sat behind a single that could not get past a Princess Diana tribute.