Andy Bell wrote it. Noel put it on the album the day he heard it
On 30 May 2005, the day Don’t Believe the Truth came out, Noel Gallagher went through the track list on XFM. Track 9 was not his. Andy Bell wrote Keep the Dream Alive. Liam Gallagher sings it. It runs 5:45.
The demo was recorded in Sweden. Noel said it faded on dialogue from Stardust, the 1974 film with David Essex, a scrap about why you get up on a stage and why you do not want to. He had wanted that ending to close the album. The disc Big Brother released does not work that way. Let There Be Love, written by Noel, is the last song. Keep the Dream Alive sits two places before it. Noel said the chorus sounded to him like a song about the band. The line-up around it is the 2005 one: Liam up front, Gem Archer and Andy Bell on guitars, Zak Starkey on drums, Noel often on bass when the song needed it.
The master was recorded at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles and mixed by Dave Sardy at The Village, also in Los Angeles. Sardy produced it. Noel told XFM he played bass on this track and Bell played guitar. The song had already escaped before the street date. In April 2005 four tracks leaked from a promo disc: The Meaning of Soul, Mucky Fingers, Keep the Dream Alive and Let There Be Love. On 3 May, Apple put the whole album up early on the German iTunes store. The official date stayed 30 May.
As soon as I heard it, it was going on the record.
(Noel Gallagher, Sunday Times DVD, 2005)
It was not a single. The singles from the album were Lyla, The Importance of Being Idle and Let There Be Love. Keep the Dream Alive stayed an album track, Liam pushed up over a slow build that does not hurry the five and a half minutes. A full tour never really took it. One of the few filmed versions is a Channel 4 session from 2005, shot around the album’s release, with the band running through the new songs for the cameras. The chorus Noel had heard as a song about Oasis is the part that sits highest.
Don’t Believe the Truth went to number one in Britain. Bell had come into Oasis in 1999 from Ride, hired on bass after Paul McGuigan left. On this album he writes two songs. Turn Up the Sun, the opener, was recorded at Olympic in London. Keep the Dream Alive is the Los Angeles one, and the longer of the two. It is also the song Noel said he booked on first listen. The film dialogue he had liked on the Swedish demo did not make the master. What made the record is the Capitol take: Starkey, Sardy, Liam, and a chorus that was never issued on its own.
