Rome wasn’t built in a day, but Oasis’ 1994 debut single “Supersonic” was.
On Dec. 19, 1993, the band gathered at Pink Museum Studio in Liverpool where work was getting underway on Oasis’ first album, Definitely Maybe. At some point, a dinner break was called, though Noel Gallagher took the opportunity to do something other than eat dinner.
“Someone had sent out for Chinese or fish and chips or something – or Chinese fish and chips,” he recalled in the 2016 documentary Oasis: Supersonic (via Rolling Stone). “I went in the back room, and as bizarre as it sounds, wrote ‘Supersonic’ in about however long it takes six guys to eat a Chinese meal.”
His bandmate, guitarist Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs, also remembered the whole thing happening awfully fast.
“Noel’s just sat there with the guitar and he just wrote the music, that will do,” he said for the 2021 book Supersonic: The Complete, Authorized and Uncut Interviews, “and then he wrote the words, any old f—ing words and he came back in the room with us, with his guitar and he said, ‘Look, I’ve just written another song.’ He started singing it and we nailed it and mixed it that night, rapid, because that’s what we’d been doing every night in the Boardwalk [ a Manchester music venue], you know, and it sounded massive, absolutely massive.”
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The speed at which “Supersonic” was written had at least a little to do with Gallagher’s state of mind in those days, to put it gently.
“Before 1997, I hadn’t written a song without the aid of the old Colombian marching gear,” he told Spin magazine in 2008, using a bit of slang for cocaine (via The Quietus). “Don’t forget, I was on drugs before I was even in a band. The whole of the first three albums were written on drugs. I remember being off my nut and going into the back room and setting the goal of writing a song in 10 minutes – that was ‘Supersonic.'”
Some of that influence can be heard in the song’s peculiar lyricism: yellow submarines, Alka-Seltzer sniffing and living underneath waterfalls.
Watch Oasis’ Music Video for ‘Supersonic’
That day in the studio, Oasis had been attempting to record a number of other songs, chiefly “Bring It On Down,” “I Will Believe” and “Take Me Away,” but nothing was really panning out as hoped. The arrival then of a more or less fully grown song, was quite welcome.
Gallagher’s freshly-written words were used on top of what had started out as a loose jam in the studio. After all, there wasn’t much to lose.
“Tony [McCarroll, Oasis’ drummer] spoke to the band and [producer Mark] Coyle and we decided to try it,” engineer Dave Scott later recalled. “It was a risk because I had no more spare tape and it would mean erasing at least one take of ‘I Will Believe.’
“Lyrics finished, Liam [Gallagher] read them, listened to Noels’ guide vocal melody, did the recording in one take with a drop in for a mistake in the middle. Amazing! Then Tony Griffiths [from British rock band the Real People] did the ‘Aaah’ backing vocals in about five layers. He really is the master at that stuff and quite instantaneous. After that we did a tambourine and a couple of tracks of hand claps.”
And that was that. All in, from writing to mixing, “Supersonic” took approximately 11 hours to make. “Bring It On Down” was supposed to have been Oasis’ debut single, but instead, “Supersonic” took that title.
The Super Success of ‘Supersonic’
Whatever doubts the band and their employees might have had were swiftly eradicated when, upon the release of “Supersonic” on April 11, 1994, the single went to No. 31 on the U.K. singles chart, and also became Oasis’ first single to chart in America.
Three decades later, Liam named it as one of his Top 5 Oasis songs, though when he was asked about it being written and recorded in one day, his memory was less clear.
“Yeah, maybe. I’m not sure,” he said to Absolute Radio. “It was done in Liverpool, I know that. That’s what Noel reckons…it probably was, it could have been, because he was amazing back then.”
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One Chinese takeaway break was all it took for Oasis to arrive in the minds of many listeners, and even years later, Noel Gallagher found this wildly exciting.
“We’d done gigs before that and there were people coming along because they’d read about us in the press, but nobody knew any of the songs,” he said in 2016. “On the day that ‘Supersonic’ came out – bang, the crowd were right there. And I remember people singing the lyrics to ‘Supersonic.’ They’re singing your words back that you’d nonsensically wrote down at f—ing three in the morning.”
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Gallery Credit: Allison Rapp
