I Think.....
26 December

Now that it appears that the music buying public has tired of oasis the question has to be not what will be 'the next big thing' but surely how long it is going to be before we get so tired of the manufactured blandness of the teeny bands that we start to long for the good old days of britpop again. Sure, as a phenomenon it was a bit of a manufactured circus itself, but for every ten dodgy albums by sleeper or cast there was at least one genuine quality act slipping through. Bands such as ocean colour scene and the bluetones ARE genuinely talented acts but such was the pressure put on them by record companies that the became caricatures of themselves by continually walking round and round in their own footprints.

Sadly for oasis fans, noel gallagher did exactly the same thing. But where oasis were different was in that they didn't stop writing quality songs, they just forgot how to produce them. Be here now is not the awful album which heralded the end of the guitar band explosion, it was merely longwinded for the sake of it. Put neatly it is an album full of digsy's dinners that noel attempted to turn into champagne supernovas. Champagne supernova and the masterplan are songs which deserve epic treatment - they wouldn't work otherwise - but to try and turn songs like all around the world into the timeless classics that went before is to do an injustice to a decent melody.

So don't let anyone tell you that guitar music has gone away, even if westlife do get another number one on sunday, it hasn't - it's just a matter of taking the leads out of the effects pedals and getting back to basics - good tunes by great bands.

by: Ian Reid