“When you hear the Monnow Valley stuff, it’s not got a swagger to it”: Noel Gallagher on the version of Definitely Maybe that Oasis binned

Next week, Oasis’ classic debut Definitely Maybe turns 30. It’s an album that sounds as fresh and exhilarating as it did upon release in 1994, a flash of attitude-heavy, anthemic rock’n’roll that changed the course of British guitar music. But for something that sounds so effortless, its creation was anything but. It took a few attempts for Oasis to replicate the heady thrills of their live show on tape and, in a new interview to promote the album’s 30th anniversary reissue, Noel Gallagher reflected on a version recorded at Monnow Valley Studios in Wales that they were forced to shelve.

“When I hear the Monnow Valley stuff, it wasn’t it,” Gallagher Sr tells interviewer John Robb. “I’m the songwriter and I’m thinking it sounds great and all the band are thinking it sounds great and thankfully there’s people who stood out the front and watched us and they’re saying, ‘That’s not it’. I couldn’t work out why.”

Gallagher explains that he hadn’t heard the Monnow Valley version until six months ago, when work began on compiling extras for the reissue. “It wasn’t like we referenced it and said, ‘This is what we don’t want to do’. It was canned and the tapes went off to Creation and that was it, we never seen them again. But we’ve uncovered it now and listening back to it and looking at some of the pictures, we didn’t have the equipment, we didn’t have the Marshalls, I had a Vox AC30 and a HH amp and by the time we were at Sawmills I had a Marshall and a fucking WEM Dominator. That’s the sound.”

It took some searching to track down the tapes, he explained, and some of the team considered it to be lost forever. “I was saying, ‘There’s no fucking way that’s gone missing, it must be somewhere’,” he said. “Turns out it was mislabelled, it doesn’t say Monnow Valley, it says something else. What I found listening to it was it’s not very loose, we were all in different rooms recording it. But the songs are still great. When you hear Up In The Sky from Monnow Valley, there’s loads of backing vocals on it and it sounds like The Beatles, and that’s not what we sounded like onstage. It’s just a first attempt and then not really knowing what you’re doing… it’s like having sex for the first time, you know you’ve gotta do it. It’s all there, it’s just missing that thing, and that thing was playing live together.”

The Monnow Valley takes, thinner and much less in-your-face than the finished album, are summed up by Noel perfectly when he says, “When you hear the Monnow Valley stuff, it’s not got a swagger to it”. When you pressed play on Definitely Maybe and Rock’n’Roll Star came roaring out of the speakers, it had ample swagger, enough swagger to go round the whole country. Watch the full interview below:

Niall Doherty is a writer and editor whose work can be found in Classic Rock, The Guardian, Music Week, FourFourTwo, on Apple Music and more. Formerly the Deputy Editor of Q magazine, he co-runs the music Substack letter The New Cue with fellow former Q colleagues Ted Kessler and Chris Catchpole. He is also Reviews Editor at Record Collector. Over the years, he’s interviewed some of the world’s biggest stars, including Elton John, Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys, Muse, Pearl Jam, Radiohead, Depeche Mode, Robert Plant and more. Radiohead was only for eight minutes but he still counts it.