Oasis - Take Me Away (Noel lead vocal, acoustic. Studio track, live during an interview, Oasis gig in Manchester, 1994)

[highplainsdem]

And then some info about this. It was the B side of their first single, Supersonic.

Studio track:

Noel singing this during an interview in Portland, during their 1994 tour. Lovely interaction with Liam, though only 5 days later they had the disastrous performance in LA after being given crystal meth they'd been told was cocaine. The Portland show was September 24, and that month they'd already done shows and lots of interviews in Stockholm, Dublin, Belfast, Manchester, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Tokyo (4 shows), Osaka, Nagoya, and Seattle, and after Portland it was San Francisco and Sacramento, and then LA and the Whiskey A Go Go. But before those drugs they didn't know they'd been given caused such a disastrous performance that Noel left the band for a while, you can see how he usually got along with Liam on this video.

Audio of their concert at Manchester Academy, December 1994:

From the Wikipedia article on the recording of the Supersonic single and this B side in December 1993:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersonic_(Oasis_song)

Instead, after unsuccessful attempts to record "I Will Believe",[19] Noel wrote a new song, "Take Me Away", in less than five minutes,[21] and recorded it acoustically in 15 minutes.[17] Noel played an Epiphone acoustic guitar with a half-pint glass, creating a slide guitar sound that Coyle overdubbed through a Roland Space Echo before Scott mixing the track in another five minutes.[19]

Under 30 minutes to write, record and mix this song, which is a very nice little B side. Written just before Noel wrote Supersonic in the studio, which they'd gone into a couple of days earlier planning to record Bring It On Down as their debut single, before giving up on that because their drummer was having trouble with it.

I knew Supersonic had been written and recorded quickly. I didn't know, till today, just how much more quickly this B side was written and recorded.

[highplainsdem]

1. kick

[speak easy]

2. That vid of Liam and Noel is adorable ...

calm before the LA storm

Watch Oasis’ Infamous 1994 L.A. Show with Special Guest Crystal Meth

By the time they took the stage at the Whiskey, the group had been up for days and were gacked out of their minds on crystal meth. Unsurprisingly, the show was a disaster from the start, especially since a roadie accidentally placed the wrong setlist in front of Noel. “They were all playing different songs at the same time,” said guitar tech Jason Rhodes. “I was like, ‘Wow, what is going on here?'”

They attempted to open with “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” but it was such a train wreck they had to stop the show and try it a second time. Tensions grew throughout the night until Liam threw a tambourine at Noel in frustration. “I could see Liam going down to one of the amps throughout the gig,” said guitarist Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs, “and he was just snorting lines of crystal meth onstage.”

It was their biggest U.S. show up until that point, and they totally blew it. Noel was so mortified by the experience that he pulled the plug on their next nine shows. It gave them time to finally get some sleep, lay off the meth, and regroup. The tour resumed October 14 at the Uptown Bar in Minneapolis. They managed to get through that one without any instrument-throwing or onstage drug use.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/out-crystal-meth-tour-1994-1235088975/

A roadie accidentally placed the wrong setlist in front of Noel. “They were all playing different songs at the same time,”

That's going to set things off as much as the drugs.

[highplainsdem]

3. And they thought the crystal meth was cocaine - had been told it was cocaine. Earlier paragraph

from that article:

At this point, the group had been touring without break for well over a year. In that month alone they’d been all across Japan and mainland Europe. To keep up with the relentless pace, they turned to hard drugs. “Someone had discovered the joys of crystal meth, which is effectively like ninja speed,” Noel Gallagher says in the 2016 documentary Supersonic. “It’s not even fun. It’s a fucking horrible drug.” For once, Liam Gallagher fully agrees with his brother. “I don’t know who fuckin’ got it, but it was there,” he says in the movie. “And we all thought it was coke. We were doing big fuckin’ lines of it.”

Here's video of the complete concert they did in July 1994 in New York, to show how good they were when not wrecked by crystal meth:

And here's the catastrophic Whiskey A Go Go gig, wrecked by crystal meth, which you'll have to watch on YouTube:

Both videos are in that Rolling Stone article (there's a link to the complete Whiskey A Go Go show there), but I'm posting them here for anyone who hits a paywall (you should clear your browser cache) and doesn't get to the videos.

That vid of Liam and Noel is adorable ...

Yes. And it's important for people to be aware of how good their relationship was much of the time.


Thanks for posting that Rolling Stone article!