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Daily Mirror
16 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Truth about King Tut's Glasgow gig that got Oasis signed finally exposed
The boss of Glasgow venue King Tuts has explained that Oasis were not full of attitude the day they played and got signed by Alan McGee Oasis were polite and 'not very rock'n'roll' when they begged to get onstage the night they landed a record deal. The night the Gallagher brothers were signed to Creation Records by Alan McGee at King Tut's Wah Wah Hut is part of rock 'n' roll folklore, but the legend that they threatened to smash up the venue if they didn't get to play has been debunked by the venue's owner Geoff Ellis. The date was May 31, 1993 and Oasis turned up to the Glasgow live venue with fellow Manchester band Sister Lovers but had no place on the bill. The story goes that Liam and Noel Gallagher made it clear they would wreck the place if they didn't get to play and the promoters relented and their four-song set - which included Rock 'n' Roll Star - impressed the watching McGee so much that he told Noel he wanted to sign them on the spot. Now, Geoff - who is the CEO of DF Concerts which has owned and run King Tut's for 35 years - says that is a rock 'n' roll myth to make Oasis seem like a dangerous band and actually Liam and Noel politely asked if they could play too and accepted a few beers as a fee. Appearing on The Money Trench podcast, Geoff said: 'I got a call from our venue manager, Ali Murdoch who said, 'Look, there's an extra band turned up for tonight, they've turned up with Sister Lovers who are from Manchester as well. And they want to play as well. Are you okay with that?' "And I said, 'Well, yeah, I mean, you know, can our sound engineer cope with four acts? 'He said, 'Yeah … So it's no issue, we just need your acquiescence really.' No pun intended. So I just said, 'Well, yeah, you know, but we're not paying them by the way.' But I said, 'Give them some beers, look after them.' 'Then Andy Saunders - who I had been at Middlesex Poly with - who was Creation's press officer at the time, he came up with a good story of them threatening to do whatever to the venue if they didn't get on the bill, you know, but that made a great story because them politely asking, 'Is it OK if we go on?' didn't sound as rock and roll!" Geoff also defended the pricing of tickets for the Oasis Live 25 shows - some of the most expensive and sought after tickets for gigs this year. Geoff, who is promoting Oasis' shows in Scotland, insists the pricing was fair as demand was more for the Oasis then it was for Taylor Swift 's record-breaking Eras Tour. He said: "Demand wise there's been nothing like it. I was told that the demand for tickets massively exceeded Taylor Swift, which was phenomenal demand as well, you know. 'Artists need to earn money and should earn money, and that money goes into the ecosystem. With ticket prices, you know, they are higher across the board than there were a few years ago. But that money is staying within the industry. 'It's staying, the PRS are getting their share, HMRC is getting their share. And there's less leakage going to the secondary market and people clearing up there. So and that money, you know, trickles down to the rest of the ecosystem as well.' The promoter says the Oasis shows are going to be a music event like no other because you are going to see generations of music fans coming together to see the Gallagher brothers perform for the first time in 16 years. He said: 'What's exciting, I think, is all the new people who haven't seen Oasis, you know, they were either born after they split up or were too young to go. And to hear those kids be excited, you know, people are 18, I mean, my son's 22, daughter's 21, they've bought tickets to go and they're really excited. They've never seen Oasis. They've seen Liam, they've seen Noel, never seen Oasis. So, they're excited and that's great because that keeps people invigorated with live music.' Noel and Liam will walk on stage for the first time together in public, since the band split nearly two decades ago, on July 4 at Cardiff's Principality Stadium. There will also be dates in Manchester, London, Edinburgh and Dublin as part of the tour.
Telegraph
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The Radiohead album that spawned a generation of ‘bedwetter' bands
A wealth of barnstorming albums were released by UK guitar bands in 1995 as Britpop reached its commercial zenith. Oasis's swaggering (What's The Story) Morning Glory?, Pulp's career-high Different Class, Supergrass's scorching debut I Should Coco and Blur 's messily widescreen The Great Escape all hit the shelves that year. But the 1995 album that cast the longest musical shadow was Radiohead's The Bends, released 30 years ago this month. The Oxford quintet's second album may have lacked the headline-grabbing ker-pow of the Blur vs Oasis chart battle of August 1995, but The Bends spawned something far more consequential: decades of 'bedwetter' music. The pejorative term 'bedwetters' was coined by Creation label boss Alan McGee in a 2000 newspaper column to describe sensitive male falsetto vocals sung over strummed acoustic or angsty electric guitar. McGee was specifically referring to Coldplay but he could as easily have been talking about Travis, Keane, Snow Patrol, Starsailor or the slightly rockier Muse – bands who rose to prominence after Britpop's bloat finally exploded. And a key musical touchstone for these bands? Radiohead's powerful, strange, dark and delicate 48-minute classic, recorded in trying circumstances by a band desperate to escape record label and fan expectations following the unlikely transatlantic success of their debut single Creep. The Bends married glitch and gloom with watertight melodies and moments of frayed romance. Songs lurched from acoustic strums to full-on guitar assaults, with Thom Yorke's elliptical lyrics invariably rising to a higher register as verse became chorus. The Bends sanded the rough edges off US grunge while eschewing Britpop's parochialism to forge a new path for intelligent arena-friendly art-rock. Rather than fetishise the past, it nodded to an uncertain future on tracks like Planet Telex. It rocked ferociously in places but ballads like Street Spirit (Fade Out) were easy on the ear, and the album appealed to boys and girls alike. In its considerable slipstream swam the aforementioned bands. Dynamically and structurally, The Bends' songs such as Just, Black Star, High and Dry and Fake Plastic Trees were clear forebears for many of these groups' best-known tracks: Yellow, In My Place, Writing To Reach You, Driftwood, Plug in Baby, Run, Everybody's Changing, Muscle Museum…. McGee later said he regretted his bedwetters outburst 'a bit'. And it feels disrespectful to ally such a great album with a deliberately insulting comment. But The Bends gave Britain's post-Britpop band's permission to be serious but sensitive and commercial yet complex all at once. Musicians no longer had to walk with what Elbow's Guy Garvey memorably called 'that simian stroll': after years of football terrace laddism, geekiness was OK. Radiohead (and also Jeff Buckley's Grace the year before) made angst and vulnerability not only acceptable but accessible. Music's trickle-down influence has existed since centuries before the gramophone was invented. As Keith Richards said, 'There's only one song and Adam and Eve wrote it – the rest is a variation on a theme.' But all strands of this particular web of connective tissue seemed to acknowledge The Bends' influence. Coldplay's Chris Martin told Rolling Stone in 2008 that he sometimes felt like Radiohead 'cleared a path with a machete, and we came afterward and put up a strip mall'. The singer added that he'd give his 'left ball' to write anything as good as Radiohead's follow-up to The Bends, OK Computer. The Radiohead/Coldplay comparisons descended into farce a decade later. In 2017, Fox News host Greg Gutfeld claimed on air that 'Radiohead is a fine band but they stole everything from Coldplay', despite the fact that Radiohead had entered their electronic-Krautrock-free jazz Kid A phase by the time Coldplay released their very much non electronic-Krautrock-free jazz debut album. Responding to Gutfeld's assertion that Radiohead were a 'poor man's Coldplay', Martin and co. joked on Twitter: 'Finally somebody had the balls to say it!' Finally somebody had the balls to say it! 😂 PH — Coldplay (@coldplay) October 24, 2017 In 1999, Muse's Matt Bellamy was poked by NME about his band sounding like Radiohead. 'We take our influences from a lot of American bands like Nirvana,' Bellamy countered a touch spikily. 'And, yeah, Radiohead at the time of The Bends were doing new things with guitar music that it's not hard to be influenced by. If that's your opinion, fair enough. I just don't care.' But no one was more annoyed by the comparisons than Yorke himself. In a 2006 Pitchfork interview he expressed irritation at bands who'd taken their musical cues from The Bends-era Radiohead, particularly radio-friendly ballad High and Dry. 'It upset me a lot, yes. I was really, really upset about it, and I tried my absolute best not to be,' Yorke said. The same year, he was asked by Mojo if he had any time for Coldplay and Travis. He replied that it was like 'the choice between machine gun or pistol by, you know, execution'. However he added: 'They're fine. I mean, everybody's influenced by everybody else. We steal blatantly, and so why not? But I don't have their records in my house.' He is once said to have witheringly referred to Coldplay's oeuvre as 'lifestyle music'. Ouch. The Bends influence stands in contrast to its initial performance. It entered the UK charts at number six on March 19 1995 – the day that Elastica's angular self-titled debut went in at number one – but within seven weeks it had fallen out of the top 40. The Bends did the hokey-cokey with the chart's lower reaches for a year before re-entering the top 10 in February 1996. By this point, numerous things had happened. One of them was the Alicia Silverstone teen comedy Clueless. In the film, the sensitive ex-stepbrother of Silverstone's character Cher is played by Paul Rudd. Rudd's Josh is a CNN-watching indie kid in an Amnesty International t-shirt who, in one scene, listens to Radiohead's Fake Plastic Trees. 'Yuk!' exclaims popular-but-shallow Cher, 'The maudlin music of the university station. Wah-wah-wah. What is it about college and crybabies?' Josh, in reply, mocks her (strip) mall obsession and superficiality. Yorke said in 2000 that he was irked that his music was reduced to a joke at the time. But the soundtrack sold a million copies in the US and, hey, Josh and Cher end up together. REM also happened. Radiohead supported their musical heroes on their vast Monster stadium tour, gaining confidence, new fans and finely-honed performance chops. Brad Osborn, professor of music theory at the University of Kansas, wrote the book Everything in its Right Place: Analyzing Radiohead in 2017. Osborn tells me that The Bends lacks the 'timelessness' of OK Computer, Kid A or 2007's In Rainbows. By contrast 'it's easy to place The Bends in the 90s within just a few seconds of listening'. But this speaks to its influence at the time. 'I do ultimately think The Bends is a great – maybe the best – post-grunge record of the 1990s,' says Osborn. He has a slightly different take on the album's influence. 'Everybody talks about this generation of bands who wouldn't exist without Radiohead. In terms of immediate sound, Muse is the most on-the-nose inheritor of The Bends and, while I believe Coldplay's members when they say they were influenced and inspired by Radiohead (hard not to be), you'd be hard pressed to hear that in their music,' the academic says. 'But for my money, Radiohead's role in the Oasis vs Blur wars hasn't gotten enough attention. I don't think Blur would have put out their 1997 self-titled album, and especially the single Song 2, without The Bends. Before The Bends came out, Blur was a posh, jingly, Britpop band, and now all of a sudden they release this music video with explosions and garbage flying everywhere and the thickest distortion ever heard on MTV.' Over the decades, The Bends has spent 204 weeks in the UK top 100. Numerous events are planned to mark its 30 th birthday: listening parties; a British Library talk by co-producer John Leckie; and tribute acts playing in surprisingly large venues. Comedian Ricky Gervais often cites The Bends as his favourite album, while Today presenter Amol Rajan has taken to posting Instagram photos of himself recreating The Bends' 'head' album cover while out running (his 'regular imitation of the best album cover of possibly the best British album of the 1990s'). The Bends was the record on which Radiohead found their feet. OK Computer may be their all-time classic, but The Bends made it possible. It was their Revolver before their Sgt. Pepper's, their Off The Wall before their Thriller, their Out of Time before their Automatic for the People. It also marked the start of two enduring relationships. One was with co-producer Nigel Godrich, with whom they've worked on every album since (Godrich has also produced Travis – oh to be a fly on the wall when Yorke found that one out. The producer told Rolling Stone in 2017 that he once had to remind Yorke that he 'didn't invent' the concept of a man singing falsetto with an acoustic guitar). The other relationship was with artist Stanley Donwood, who's designed every Radiohead album cover since. When I interviewed Donwood in 2019 he spoke the thrill, and challenge, of being asked by his old Exeter University friend Yorke to design his first Radiohead sleeve, for The Bends' single My Iron Lung. 'I got the train to Oxford from Plymouth and we went to HMV in Oxford. There was just a whole wall of record covers. And we thought, 'OK, we've got to beat all of those.'' His eventual album sleeve, as Rajan would tell you, was of a CPR mannequin with an android-like face. 'When The Bends came out it was amazing because I had my artwork next to Peter Blake, who'd done Paul Weller's Stanley Road. I'm right next to Peter Blake!' Donwood said, still exhilarated years later. The University of Kansas's Brad Osborn – Instagram handle: @ obviously – says The Bends executed the 'quintessential 90s rock trope of sort verse/ loud chorus' in a more 'sophisticated and tasteful' way than anyone else. And this is why it was so influential. But in the end it was perhaps just too influential. Because five years later came the screeching musical handbrake turn of Kid A. It was a handbrake turn that Yorke suggested to Pitchfork was done in part to fling those limpet-like bedwetters off Radiohead's bonnet. 'When we put out Kid A, I specifically remember saying, 'Copy that you f---ing…'' Yorke said. Not for the first time, Radiohead's imitators were left high and dry.
