Thirty years ago, on February 19, 1996, Creation Records released the fourth single from the album “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?”. The title is “Don’t Look Back in Anger” and, within a week, it was climbing the British charts to the top. It was Oasis’ second UK number one, the platinum record which sanctioned the absolute triumph of Britpop.
Born in a hotel room in Paris
The genesis of the song is a story in the middle of a tour. Noel Gallagher wrote it on 18 April 1995 in a hotel room in Paris, where Oasis were on tour with the Verve. Four days later, in Sheffield, he presented it live in an acoustic version, still without a definitive title and without the second verse. It is the first Oasis song in which Noel sings and not Liam, who preferred “Wonderwall” for that tour.
The shadow of Lennon and the Beatles
Musically, the piece is a declared homage. The piano intro recalls Lennon’s “Imagine,” and the line “I must start a revolution from my bed” is a direct quote from the Bed-In for Peace that Lennon and Yoko Ono organized in 1969. Noel himself described the song as “a cross between David Bowie’s All the Young Dudes and something the Beatles might have done.” Paul McCartney, for his part, was no exception and defined it as one of the most beautiful melodies of all time.
A deliberately open text
The meaning of the text was deliberately left open. At the time of release it was “simply” a song about a woman called Sally who looks back on her life without regrets. Noel gave a bare reading: “It’s about not being angry about things you may have said or done yesterday. It’s about looking forward rather than looking back.”
From rock song to collective anthem
The leap in scale occurred on May 22, 2017, after the attack at the Manchester Arena. After the minute’s silence at Manchester’s St. Ann’s Square, a woman named Lydia Bernsmeier-Rullow began singing it while holding a bouquet of flowers. A few joined in, timidly, but by the chorus almost the entire crowd was singing along with her. Lydia said: “I love Manchester, and Oasis are part of my childhood. Don’t Look Back in Anger – that’s what it’s about: we can’t look back at what’s happened, we have to look forward, to the future… We’ll all come together, we’ll move forward because that’s what Manchester is all about” as reported by the Guardian at the time.
We leave you with the official video clip of the song:
