They never got that guitar sound back
Roll It Over closes Standing on the Shoulder of Giants. It runs 6 minutes 31, Liam Gallagher sings it, and Noel Gallagher wrote it. It was not a single. Oasis never played it. The guitar solo in the middle is not Noel’s, and he said so before the album was even out.
The record was made between April and August 1999, the same run as the rest of the album: Wheeler End, Olympic Studios, Supernova Heights, and the château at La Colle Noire. Mark “Spike” Stent produced with Noel. On this track Paul “Strangeboy” Stacey, the engineer who had also cut the demos with Noel, plays bass. Linda Lewis and P.P. Arnold sing the backing vocals, the same pair heard on Fuckin’ in the Bushes and Put Yer Money Where Yer Mouth Is.
The solo came earlier, at Supernova Heights, while they were still on the demo. Noel reached the break, could not play what he wanted, and handed it to Stacey. They liked what they heard and meant to replace it when the proper recording started. The sound never came back. The demo part stayed on the finished album. Noel told NME he could play it. He just had not got that particular take again.
We were doing the demo for Roll It Over in the studio at Supernova Heights and it got to the bit for the solo and I couldn’t play it. So he did. We listened back, it was good, and left it on the demo and we were going to re-do it when we came to record it. But as luck would have it, we never got the sound back that matched that so we just left it. But I can play it, honest. I can.
(Noel Gallagher, NME, 23 February 2000)
The song sat at the end of the album when Standing on the Shoulder of Giants came out on 28 February 2000, on Big Brother. Bonehead and Guigsy were gone. The closer is one of the places where the hired hands are easiest to hear: Stacey’s bass and solo, Lewis and Arnold answering Liam. Noel had used the same shape before, a long last track with a guest guitar, but here the guest was the man engineering the record, not a famous friend brought in for the day.
Oasis left it in the studio. No lineup of the band played Roll It Over on a stage. Liam Gallagher waited until 2 June 2022, the opening night of his solo tour at the Etihad in Manchester, and told the crowd it was for the old Oasis fans, and that they ought to remember it. He played it again at Knebworth two days later. The official live film from those shows is the first time most people saw the song performed at all. Howie Weinberg mastered the album in New York. The closer did not need a chart position. It needed the solo they had failed to beat.
