The album’s escape story runs out of sand
(Stranded on) the Wrong Beach is track nine on Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, the debut Sour Mash released on 17 October 2011, and Noel told NME it was where the album’s escape story gave up. The record opens with Everybody’s on the Run, a song about leaving town to see if the grass is greener. By track nine the narrator is in the place he thought he wanted, and it is the wrong beach. The parentheses, he said, were a habit. He did not have a better reason. He is prone to brackets. That is the whole explanation.
Gallagher wrote it. He and Dave Sardy produced it. Jeremy Stacey plays drums. The same 2010 to 2011 chain as the rest of the album applies: State of the Ark in Twickenham and the other London rooms, mixes at Hillside Manor in Los Angeles, mastering by Ian Cooper at Metropolis. It was not a single. It runs just over four minutes, mid-tempo, with drums and bass pushed up and a chorus that keeps pouring one for the road. The last line asks to be rescued. On an album that also holds Stop the Clocks as the closer, this is the argument before the farewell. Gallagher told NME the whole record carried a narrative of escape, hope and love, and that he had three songs that felt like endings, including Everybody’s on the Run, (I Wanna Live in a Dream in My) Record Machine and Stop the Clocks, so he had to split them up. Track nine is the one that admits the trip failed.
The debut went to number one in the UK. This track did not get its own video or its own chart entry. It turned up live instead. The first show, Olympia Theatre in Dublin on 23 October 2011, was a twenty-song set with nine Oasis songs and the new album threaded through it. On 26 February 2012 the band played the O2 Arena in London. Dick Carruthers directed the film, with Jeremy Azis producing, and Sour Mash released International Magic Live at the O2 on 15 October 2012. (Stranded on) the Wrong Beach sits late in that set, after Half the World Away and before the Oasis songs that closed the night. A demo is on the bonus CD of that package, next to demos of the rest of the album.
The album starts off with Everybody’s on the Run and a sense of having to leave where you are to go and find paradise, find out if the grass is greener on the other side. But you end up stranded on the wrong beach, where you end up in paradise thinking, this isn’t really what I wanted. I should be where I come from. I should be where I belong.
(Noel Gallagher, NME, October 2011)
On the standard running order it sits between AKA… Broken Arrow and Stop the Clocks. The lyric is plain: falling, a rebound, a drink for the road, dry land sinking, come and rescue me. He also told NME he must have been thinking about all of this without planning it. Coming two years after he walked out of Oasis in August 2009, the line about belonging where you come from does not need a decoder. The brackets are a Gallagher tic. The beach is the point of the tracklist.
It is not the song the debut is remembered for. If I Had a Gun… and AKA… What a Life! took the singles, the videos and the radio. This one does the job inside the album: it tells you the paradise in song one was a bad address. Play the opener, then this, then Stop the Clocks, and the 2011 record has a shape that is not just a stack of choruses. The grass was not greener. He wrote that down and left the parentheses in.
