Morning,
Our Recommender edition is this week on sudden compassionate leave, unfortunately. Apologies. Next week’s edition will be double in size to compensate. But don’t turn away…
Instead, I’d like to take this opportunity to promote a party (or two) we’re putting on to launch the book that I, Ted, have written with Hamish MacBain called A Sound So Very Loud: The Inside Story Every Song Oasis Recorded.
On the day of publication, July 3, which is the night before Oasis begin their reunion tour in Cardiff - see you there - we’re putting on a big bash in the basement of The Social, Central London, between 7 and 11pm. Here’s a flyer our design guru (not a salaried position) Dan Knight made for the event.
There will be live music, there will be recorded music, there will be singing, there will be dancing, there will be readings, there will be very, very special guests, there will be prizes, there will be Terri White asking the difficult and daft questions of Hamish and myself. We’ve decided to put a limited number of tickets on sale for £5 from thenewcue.co.uk. to dilute the stench of superstar liggers. Please join us. It’s Oasis Eve, after all. Where else would you rather be on this most special night of the year?
There will be books for sale too, which we’d be happy to sign. I don’t mean to brag, I don’t mean to boast (we’re like hot butter on breakfast toast), but we’re getting some lovely critical feedback already. MOJO magazine have awarded it a rare five out of five, describing it as “the one Oasis book to reach for.” Today, I read it described as “the best Oasis book ever written” - not my words, Carol, the words of Record Collector’s The A-Z of Oasis - and perhaps most gratifying has been the review from the highly respected and influential fan site, Stop Crying Your Heart Out, whose owner, the redoubtable Louise, told me she worried the book “was going to be a bit shit like some of the others”, but who was won over in the end, deciding it “the best Oasis book in years”, the one that “won’t be £2 in Fopp by Christmas”, as you can read here.
So, come to our launch on July 3. But also come a few days earlier, too, to a special Oasis-themed quiz we’re putting on with smooth operators The Rock & Roll Book Club at Signature Brew in Blackhorse Road, Walthamstow, E17 on June 30. We will sign books here, tell jokes and play a lot of Oasis very loudly. Start the week with a good book and a banging hangover. Info here.
OK, public service broadcast over. After the jump we’ll extract the story behind one song from the book, a nice concise tale. Let’s keep it snappy. It’s a song about Liam Gallagher’s teeth, Ain’t Got Nothin’.
See you back here for normal service on Monday,
Ted and Niall
Book Extract: A Sound So Very Loud
‘Ain’t Got Nothin’’
It was 2 December, the last night, as it turned out, of Oasis’s German tour of 2002. Liam Gallagher, Alan White, tour DJ Phil Smith and Liam’s security detail were enjoying some drinks in the lively bar of their fancy Munich hotel, Bayerischer Hof.
Details thereafter are hazy. ‘We were sitting at a table under a balcony and Steve [Allen, Liam’s security] has just pulled me by my neck under a table,’ Liam told me in 2016, still raging about the incident. ‘Next minute, some geezer on the balcony has dropped a massive table over the balcony on us. That’s when it went off.’
There had, perhaps, been words exchanged earlier with some Italian and German ‘businessmen’ who were also in the hotel bar, about attention being paid to one of their female companions. ‘I don’t know what’s gone down,’ Liam said. ‘Everyone was a bit pissed, but nothing to do with me. I was just having a lager and next thing I know I’m covered in Steve and glass and it is kicking off like you would not believe. That table would have killed us if it had hit anyone.’
According to Liam, this was a somewhat more hectic and violent incident than a typical barroom brawl. ‘People were getting smacked with table legs, metal bars, all sorts.’
The fight moved out of the bar area and that’s when dozens of police arrived. ‘I might have kicked a copper at some point in the lobby,’ Liam admitted. After that, he was knocked unconscious and awoke in a police cell minus his two front teeth. Liam is sure ‘the police pulled them out with pliers’.
The police, meanwhile, maintain that he was running, tripped on the stairs and knocked himself and his teeth out. Liam remains unconvinced. ‘I didn’t have a fat or cut lip, which I definitely would’ve if I’d fallen on my face, but I just had these perfectly removed teeth! I woke up in a prison cell, handcuffed, no teeth and no other marks on me. What’s that about?’
We may never know the truth of what really went down that night in Munich. But we do know that Liam was eventually fined €5,000 two years later, with the threat of jail hanging over him until then. In the interim, he wrote ‘Ain’t Got Nothin’’, a song that furiously pleads his innocence. ‘I wrote it,’ he said, ‘because everyone – the police and even people I thought were on my side – said we started it, and we fucking did not!’
Despite Liam telling the press that ‘Ain’t Got Nothin’’ was ‘gonna be a hit’ and it featuring on demos for Don’t Believe the Truth, it lay dormant for five years until finding its rowdy way onto Dig Out Your Soul.
Liam’s new teeth reportedly cost him between £9k and £20k, but he didn’t forget the part his old front pairing had played in his heartthrob status. A week after the Munich incident, Oasis played in Cardiff and Liam dedicated ‘Live Forever’ to his former front teeth.
A Sound So Very Loud: The Inside Story Of Every Song Oasis Recorded is published by Pan Macmillan on July 3, available to order as hardback and audiobook here and many other places too.