‘Noel Gallagher had been writing these sort of one-man-and-his-guitar tunes for years...’
As I write this, it is the day after Oasis have just announced a second leg of their gigantic comeback tour to kick off in the summer of 2027. Judging by the feverish reaction on social media, the clamour to see the band is just as frenzied as it was in the run-up to their first set of dates in 2025. As a result of this, Oasis has become a kind of cottage industry with books, documentaries and merch popping up seemingly everywhere all the time. One of those books, A Sound So Very Loud by former NME writers Ted Kessler and Hamish McBain, does perhaps a better job of capturing the essence of the band than anything else released in the wake of their reunion…
Subtitled: ‘The Inside Story of Every Song Oasis Recorded’, McBain and Kessler’s sprawling rundown of everything Oasis is as entertaining as it is meticulously researched. As a massive Oasis fan myself, I expected to come away from reading this book having re-lived a bunch of stories I’d heard many times before with a few new nuggets of information to keep things interesting. Not so. Most of the information presented here was new to me, with the deep dives into those delirious first few albums just as insightful and fascinating as the dissection of their later, less celebrated work. What’s striking is Noel Gallagher’s maddening propensity to waste some of his best songs on B-sides, something that continued all the way to the band’s first break-up in 2009, while allowing some truly pedestrian stuff to take pride of place as album tracks. Which brings me to perhaps my only criticism of this expert’s guide to Oasis… It’s too kind. One of the things that makes Revolution in the Head, Ian McDonald’s essential song-by-song guide of The Beatles, so good is that if something is crap, he’s not afraid to say it’s crap. A Sound So Very Loud occasionally hints that something is not as successful as the band’s best work, but, and I say this as someone who loves the band, there is some proper rubbish on some of those later Oasis records and some more detailed analysis about why those songs didn’t work would have pushed this from being a great book into an all-timer.
If you’re looking to celebrate being one of the lucky few to bag Oasis tickets this time around, or if you’re drowning your sorrows at missing out, A Sound So Very Loud is the perfect companion for new and old fans alike. Now, what’s my Ticketmaster login again?