10 Reasons Oasis Never Caught On in the United States

10 Reasons Oasis Never Caught On
in the United States
by Ian Wigley

The sign of a great British band is one who can be hugely successful in their own country, sell millions of records to a captive British audience and then trip across to America and be hugely successful there too. Many from here have conquered our fine shores, many have tried to break America, and almost as many have failed. Stand up Manic Street Preachers, Suede, Cast, Blur, James, Happy Mondays, The Stone Roses, Primal Scream, New Order, Joy Division and a whole host of others currently playing small venues around the world, because they’ve never broken America.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the last ten years for us music-mad folk was this – Oasis never cracked America. Re-read that last line – Oasis never cracked America. If you’d have been in England in 1996, you would have quickly realised that Oasis could have recorded an album full of Swiss yodelling tunes and still shifted ten million copies of it over here alone, they could have packed out huge concert venues to the rafters, and they would have appeared on every single music show each week on our TV for months on end.

But as for breaking America, I mean being hugely successful and regularly selling out Giants Stadium-like venues, Oasis never managed it. Here’s why…

1. Liam Gallagher is an arrogant loud-mouthed hooligan

I was at university when Oasis were moving mountains all across the globe (except America, that is) and I used to hang out with lots of Americans. Each time our late-night drunken conversations strayed towards the brothers Gallagher and Oasis, just about every American would allude to the fact that Liam Gallagher was a loudmouthed idiot with little respect for his fan base.

Let’s extrapolate that viewpoint. Yes, Liam Gallagher is a loud-mouthed idiot—he wears that badge with a certain amount of pride, he’s never hidden this. He’s a football hooligan that got lucky. Having said this, Liam Gallagher adores the people who buy his albums (well, they're Noel’s albums), he always tries to dictate that ticket-prices stay low – all Oasis shows could sell for £50 a ticket, but even at their highest points Oasis still only charged £25ish to see their shows, tops. To add to this, Liam and Oasis always play their beloved Manchester when they tour the UK.

2. The Stone Roses never cracked the US

It’s the progression thing…you had The Beatles, then you had Led Zeppelin, then The Smiths, then The Stone Roses, then Oasis. The Beatles cracked America, Led Zeppelin did so with some ease, The Smiths broke America to a certain extent (Morrissey alone, for certain) but The Stone Roses failed. After the Roses came Oasis. I think if The Stone Roses would have been massive in America, Oasis (who rode on their coat-tails) would have done so too. The influence of Ian Brown and The Stone Roses is well-documented in the UK and Europe, if they’d have broken America there would have been plenty of culture references to the Roses which Oasis would have used to their best advantage, because basically after The Stone Roses there was only Oasis…forget about Blur!

3. They were looked upon as a poor man’s Beatles

C, A, G, E, D, F, E-minor, A-minor, references to fools on hills, Imagine-like intros, basin-head haircuts, constant adoration for John Lennon. All of these things, to mention a few, made Oasis the Beatles for the 1990s. Liam and Noel Gallagher never hid the fact that they wanted to be in The Beatles, no, be The Beatles. Their songs were peppered with Beatles references, their chord progressions identical in some songs, and their look was near-on the same. The US hated this. There was only one Beatles, and two of them are dead now. “Don’t bring us a second-best!”, America cried. Oasis were never second-best to The Beatles, only to The Smiths and The Stone Roses.

4. Britpop was meant for, well, Britain

Britpop was made in Manchester and London around the early to mid-nineties by The Charlatans, The Bluetones, Cast, Pulp, Oasis, Suede and a whole host of others. It could only ever be played out in Britain because it was a really ‘British’ thing. To throw things on their head, and to illustrate a point, look at it this way – take the California punk-pop scene – Rancid, Green Day, The Offspring, Transplants, Rocket From The Crypt and all those other small-time bands, and bring that over here. Would you expect those guys to have the great-scene same effect on a rainy day in Manchester? It just doesn’t work. Green Day and The Offspring sound like they do because they come from places like Berkeley and Orange County, they captured the spirit of Cali-punk, and it doesn’t work in a location abroad as well as it works where they hail from. It’s the same reason Oasis and Britpop generally sound great in London, but not at Park West, Chicago. See also The Beastie Boys and Public Enemy as part of the east coast rap-scene.

5. The Americans have their music

The Americans have their music, and they’re happy with it. The Americans are glad to pay Michael Stipe and company $50 a pop to see them roll out the same old four chords and 20 year-old bass-lines, so why pay $40 to watch Liam and company do their thing? Why bark when you’ve got a dog to do it for you? Same goes for Prince (we never understood his phenomenon; he had one good album – 1999), Phish, Green Day, RHCP, Metallica, Beastie Boys. The Americans as a nation are happy with their lot. They won't be bothered by five blokes in big coats playing Beatles-esque tunes.

6. The Airport Incident

This is the most important reason Oasis never cracked America. Mid-1990s, after Oasis had played their biggest shows to date, sold silly amounts of records everywhere, and had the world’s press eating out of their scruffy little Manchester hands, they were due to play shows Stateside off of their Be Here Now album. The deal was sealed in England, Oasis could sell-out anywhere nine times over even if Be Here Now was a flop, but they still hadn’t cracked the US.

Oasis were scheduled to play a number of American shows, and Noel and company flew to the States without Liam. Liam was to fly later and join them there. Liam, being the loud-mouthed hooligan he is, threw a strop and decided he ‘needed to find somewhere to live’ because he was living in hotels with Patsy Kensit. So he wasn’t going to fly to the US to cement his band’s status as a worldwide phenomenon. Give most bands outside of the US the chance to crack America in a tour and they’ll be out there like a ferret up a drainpipe. Not Liam Gallagher and his band, though. No, Liam’ll stay home and house search.

In one fell-swoop, Oasis missed the opportunity of fame and fortune of U2-like proportions in the USA. Noel played a couple of shows in the States as guitar-player-come-singer, but it wasn’t right. He wasn’t Liam, and the American audience felt cheated because they didn’t have a full outfit in front of them each night. Noel Gallagher flew back to Britain days later. On walking through Heathrow Airport on his return (I’ll never ever forget it), he was surrounded by about 200 journalists yelling at him for comment and pushing flash-bulbs in his face. His record company, his lawyers and an army of solicitors had briefed him prior to touchdown, and said that under no circumstances whatsoever should he open his trap and talk about the incident. For someone who has a trap as big as Noel Gallagher’s, this must have been incredibly difficult. Oasis had killed their dreams of being The Rolling Stones, and all because Liam had had a bad day and wanted to get on the property ladder.

7. Paranoia

Musical McCarthyism. The US has their fair share of megastars, why rock the boat and invite a bunch of hooligans from Manchester to spoil things. The United States (from an outsider’s point of view) is very insular. It enjoys what it produces, and it holds onto its strong values and products. When there’s a chance that someone could rock the status-quo, it becomes defensive. It’s a primeval thing, something that can be traced back to caveman times, and in music it’s the same thing.

You have a bunch of loud-mouthed cocky upstarts from a working-class Lancashire council estate shouting to the world that they are "the best there is, the best there was, the best there ever will be" and some people will become defensive. On this occasion, it was the world’s biggest superpower, namely the United States. I believe America was shy to Oasis because Oasis would have blown REM, Prince, Madonna, Bruce Springsteen and any other colossus of modern rock you’d care to mention, straight out of the water.

8. The Americans have bad music tastes

Well, they don’t really, but this plays a part. Why have Oasis when you can have Garth Brooks? Why have Oasis when you can have Britney Spears, or Christina Aguilera, or Maroon 5, or Korn, or Slipknot, or Linkin Park, or Ricky Martin, or REM, or Scissor Sisters? It doesn’t make sense. Why were The Bee-Gees such a smash in the US? If anyone has any clue whatsoever, there’s a comment function at the bottom of this page, and my email address.

9. Lollapalooza

I think Perry Farrell, and Bill Graham to a certain extent, would have loved Oasis to roll up to Soldier Field in Chicago and rock out in front of 80,000 people who had seen nineteen bands earlier that afternoon, and then go out and do it again twenty times more over the summer in equally bad venues that lack intimacy. Oasis look, sound and perform better in dingy little venues where sweat drips from the roof and where the crowd are straight up against the stage, where you can catch Noel’s left hand switching from a B-chord to an F without having to see it on a big screen stage left.

Although I appreciate there are some tremendous small venues across the US (Java Joe’s, CBGB, The Whiskey), the bulk of big American bands veer towards stadium territory. I know it’s unfeasible to expect REM to play at The Barrymore in Madison, Wisconsin, but spare a thought for us purists, who would much rather hear a guitar twang ten yards from the guitar-player instead of hearing it fly over our heads in the wind at Giants Stadium.

If Oasis would have suited a big venue they’d have been far more successful in the US, because Perry Farrell would have signed them for Lollapalooza from the get-go. If Noel and Liam and Bonehead and Guigsy and Alan White could have lived with themselves, Pepsi would have bought an Oasis tour that covered every big Lollapalooza-type festival venue and put Oasis on every TV screen in the US in the summer of 1997. But they’re not like that, that lot, Oasis were made for the small venue scene. On their tenth-anniversary tour, after selling out Knebworth Park twice (125,000 people watching each night, 2.6 million ticket applications for 250,000 tickets – pre-internet booking days – and the promoters said they could have sold the venue out seven more times, easy) not six years before, Oasis went back to playing 1500 capacity venues…after shifting about 50 million albums in this country alone.

10. It’s just one of those things

It just is. It’s as funny as why your toast always ends up buttered side down when you drop it, as funny as England’s reluctance to accept baseball as a spectator sport, and as funny as David Beckham ending up with that thick girl who sang badly in The Spice Girls. Precisely why Oasis were never the biggest thing from here to cross the Atlantic and rock out in the US is a mystery. To this day, and until the day Noel Gallagher finally puts that Fender Telecaster of his down for the last time, we’ll never ever understand it, we’ll never understand why Oasis didn’t manage to make America theirs and consequently why they weren’t U2 for the Britpop generation…I bet Noel’s wondering why too. He should probably check out this article, and look at No. 6 above.

Finding somewhere to live – yeah, right. You silly, silly boy.

Ian can be reached at ian@babblog.com.