It’s the stuff upon which Austin Powers franchises and Brit-themed pub-chains would later be built.įortuitously arriving at the mid-point of the '90s-and representing the peak of a Britpop narrative that took root with the retro-rock renaissance of the Stone Roses and the La’s five years previous- (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? is Oasis' absolute pinnacle. ( The Great Escape, meanwhile, languished in the lower reaches of the Top 200.) For all their unibrowed laddism and two-fingered paparazzi salutes, Oasis projected a glamorous image of Englishness that was potent enough to stoke the Cool Britannia fancies of those North American Anglophiles who make trips to specialty shoppes to load up on Dairy Milk bars, but (unlike Blur) not so colloquial as to alienate the heartland. But, just as significantly, it achieved a metric of popularity that had proven so elusive to Oasis' Britpop peers: bonafide American success, with the album reaching number 4 on the Billboard charts and selling 3.5 million copies Stateside. (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? would go on to sell more than twice as many copies in the UK as Blur’s contemporaneous The Great Escape, and, over the following two years, it served as the unofficial soundtrack to England's imminent changing of the guard. However, for a band never encumbered by humility, the decision to go with Morning Glory’s weakest song was, in retrospect, Oasis’ cockiest gesture yet: They were willing to take the first strike in the so-called Battle of Britpop because they knew it was only a matter time before they’d be delivering the knockout blow. It's a catchy enough tune, sure, but its shoulder-shrugged message of “you gotta roll with it” felt atypically blasé coming from a band that had previously endorsed self-deification, immortality, and shagging well-heeled medical professionals in helicopters.
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1 spot.Īs it should’ve: “Roll With It” is nobody’s favorite Oasis song and would be hard-pressed to crack a Top 20 list of the band’s all-time best. And in this case, it was Oasis who walked away licking their wounds-that week, “Country House” outsold “Roll With It” by more than 50,000 copies to take the No. A year’s worth of tabloid sniping between the two groups-which hit its peak/nadir when Oasis architect Noel Gallagher declared that Blur’s Damon Albarn and Alex James should “catch AIDS and die” -had effectively come down to the UK chart equivalent of an after-school fistfight. “Roll With It,” the teaser from Morning Glory, was released August 14, 1995-not coincidentally, the very same day as “Country House”, the jaunty new single from their bitter rivals in Blur (aka the London art-school yin to Oasis’ Mancunian street-tough yang). But in their first true test of post-success fortitude, Oasis could no longer claim the title of biggest rock band in the land. 1 on the UK albums chart, and sold several million copies worldwide. Sure, their 1994 debut album Definitely Maybe had gone straight to No. It’s hard to remember now, but when (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? was released in the fall of 1995, Oasis were losers.
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