This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

How do you get to be the biggest band in the world? There’s a revealing story — just an aside really — in Street-Level Superstar, the new biography of cult music icon Lawrence by the writer Will Hodgkinson. Lawrence was the leader of the band Felt, who were signed to indie label Creation in the eighties.

Creation, founded by impresario Alan McGee, was the home of the British underground scene: fuzzy (and sometimes druggy) acts like Primal Scream, the Jesus and Mary Chain, and My Bloody Valentine. These bands did well, but they didn’t go mainstream. They prized cool over PR. Then, in the nineties, McGee found a new band led by two brothers: Oasis.

“McGee said that after a decade of dealing with truculent indie bands, he knew Oasis were going to be huge the moment they walked into the offices of Creation Records and announced they would do whatever he asked of them, whenever he wanted them to,” writes Hodgkinson. “An interview with some tiny fanzine nobody heard of? Tell us where to go. A slot on an unstylish mainstream television programme? Let’s have it.”

For someone like Lawrence, this was a reality check. “When Oasis turned up, me and a few other people from Creation thought, ‘We’ve got it all wrong,’” Lawrence tells Hodgkinson in the book. “We wanted to be big, but on our own terms. For example, we wouldn’t do videos. How stupid. We could have been on MTV.”

And so we come to 2024. Oasis — after a 15-year hiatus — have announced their reunion tour, and sold out all 17 dates inside 24 hours. Lawrence, whose current project is the band Mozart Estate, remains very much a niche interest: beloved, but little known, despite his undying ambition to have a number one record.

You could reasonably ask how much Lawrence really wanted this, given his reluctance to do all the things Oasis signed up for. But for guitar bands, at least since punk, there’s been a tension between credibility and success.

Think of the Sex Pistols. In theory, they were the embodiment of free expression and anti-corporate aggression — and despite a radio ban, they got a number one record (or they would have done if the sales hadn’t been rigged).

In practice, much of their success was the product of cynical manoeuvring by their manager Malcolm McLaren, and he loved to play an exaggerated version of the Svengali for the public. But the joke (if it was a joke for McLaren) devoured the real.

In the dismal 1980 film The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, McClaren cast himself as a character called the Embezzler, who invented and then exploited the band (only the latter part was true). Meanwhile off screen, the band imploded.

Bands wanted the myth of the Pistols — raw authenticity forcing itself into the public consciousness by sheer will — without the compromises that generated the myth. It meant that anyone on the business side would forever be a suspect figure in the world of guitar music: a caricature patriarch who should be defied rather than obeyed.

As the manager of an indie label, this left you in a fix. Only the wildest fantasist would go into such an enterprise expecting to get rich. This was an occupation for musical true believers: people who wanted to help the acts they loved to reach an audience, rather than the major label ethos of (broadly) finding acts that already fitted mass-market tastes.

The trouble was, the acts didn’t always return the faith. Lawrence’s desire for success was at odds with his capacity for being difficult. He prepared for a prestigious slot on a label showcase by dropping acid; the gig disintegrated with him asking the crowd “why are you all looking at me?” whilst the back wall started to melt away.

This is gentle stuff compared to Oasis’ famously explosive live shows, which regularly erupted into brawling between the Gallagher brothers. A 1994 gig in Los Angeles ended with Liam hitting Noel over the head with a tambourine; a 2000 fist fight in Barcelona led to Noel temporarily quitting the band; the band limped through the rest of the European tour without him.

At the time, this was all fantastic for the rock ’n’ roll mythology of Oasis, and good for the music press too. In the 1990s, stories of their hedonism and hotel trashing provided endless entertaining copy, as did the Gallagher-on-Gallagher antagonism.

One enterprising small label even issued a 7-inch called “Wibbling Rivalry”, containing a recording of an interview with Noel and Liam that degenerated into bickering. “That’s why we’ll be the best band in the world, because I fuckin’ hate that twat there,” said Liam on the tape.

But revisiting all these stories after the announcement of the new shows, what stuck with me wasn’t the blow-ups: it was the fact that the shows continued despite them. However much bad blood there was, the band somehow remained just about professional.

Oasis, for all their rebel swagger, wanted success. Real success — the kind that involves platinum records, breaking America and (now) selling 1.4 million tickets for a tour within a matter of hours. And to get that success, they were willing to do whatever the man told them to. Under the belligerence, Oasis might be the ultimate good boys of music.