Liam chose it on a Wednesday at Rockfield
On a Wednesday in May 1995, at Rockfield Studios outside Monmouth, Liam Gallagher picked Wonderwall and sang it the same day. Noel Gallagher had played him two new songs and asked which vocal he wanted. Liam took Wonderwall. Noel kept Don’t Look Back in Anger for himself. The album those songs belonged to, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, was still months from the shops.
Owen Morris was co-producing with Noel, and the week already had a method. They were in the Coach House at Rockfield, the smaller of the two rooms, with a Neve desk and two Studer multitracks that Morris mostly treated as one 24-track machine. Each morning Noel put down an acoustic guitar and a guide vocal to a click. Alan White, in the drum seat only weeks after Tony McCarroll had been fired, overdubbed a small Gretsch kit while Noel sat beside him and pointed at the fills. Noel usually played the bass as well. By early afternoon the song had a spine. On Wonderwall he then stacked three acoustic guitar parts. Liam sang four lead takes. Morris compiled them and nudged stray notes with an Eventide DSP4000 pitch shifter, the same tool he had used on Definitely Maybe. He said later that Noel loved that vocal.
Bonehead did not play his usual bar chords. Morris sat him at an old Mellotron, picked out the root notes, and had him hold the cello preset under the verse and into the chorus. That low hum is what people still call a cello. There is no session cellist on the tape. Morris told Sound on Sound they were basically finished by dinner. The only pieces missing were a short piano line Noel added weeks later, to stop the ending from dying, and the Kurzweil strings Morris parked on the mix. The title came from George Harrison’s Wonderwall Music, the 1968 film soundtrack, not from a wall outside the studio. Noel had talked about recording Liam in the open air. They dropped the idea and kept the vocal inside.
We were basically finished by dinner time. The only things that weren’t on there were the little piano line that comes in at the end, and the Kurzweil strings that I’d add during the mix.
(Owen Morris, Sound on Sound, 2012)
Creation released (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? on 2 October 1995. It went to number one in the UK and stayed there for ten weeks. Wonderwall came out as a single on 30 October, with Round Are Way, The Swamp Song and The Masterplan alongside it. The single peaked at number two at home. Morris later noted that it reached number eight in America, the band’s biggest US hit to that point. Noel told the NME in 1996 that the lyric was about Meg Matthews, his girlfriend then. After the marriage ended he changed the story: an imaginary friend who was going to come and save you from yourself. The tape does not settle it. What you hear is simpler than either explanation. Acoustic guitars, a slow backbeat from White, Liam out front, and Bonehead’s Mellotron doing the job a string section would have invoiced.
Nigel Dick directed the video. After the single fell off the chart the song did not. It became the Oasis number pub bands and open-mic nights could actually play, three chords and a chorus people already knew. Covers followed for years. The argument about who the words were for faded. The Wednesday take at Rockfield did not. Liam had chosen the song in the morning, sung it before dinner, and left Noel with the other one.
