Oasis was formed by Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs, Paul McGuigan, Tony McCarroll and Liam Gallagher in Manchester in 1991. The early version played as Rain before Liam’s brother Noel – returning from a roadie job with the Inspiral Carpets – joined in 1991 and the band became Oasis. Their first gig under the Oasis name was at the Boardwalk on Little Peter Street in Manchester in August 1991. Within four years they were the biggest band in Britain and possibly the world.
Cranbourne Avenue, Burnage
The Gallagher family home on Cranbourne Avenue in Burnage is a standard south Manchester semi-detached. The street looks exactly like every other street for a mile in any direction – the very ordinariness of it is the point. Oasis’s mythology is entirely working-class south Manchester: the chip on shoulder, the belief that you could be as big as The Beatles, the refusal to be modest about your own talent, all of it comes from growing up in a place where ambition of that kind was unusual.
Sifters Records
Sifters Records on Fog Lane in Burnage is where Noel Gallagher spent significant amounts of his pre-fame time. He has cited it as a formative influence – the place where he developed his record collection and therefore the references that appear throughout Oasis’s music. Beatles, T.Rex, Sex Pistols, Neil Young: all of them audible in what Oasis did with them. Sifters is still open and still independent.
The Boardwalk and the Early Gigs
The Boardwalk on Little Peter Street (now demolished and replaced with development) was the venue where Oasis developed. Their early gigs there drew tiny crowds; within two years they were supporting the Inspiral Carpets. Creation Records saw them at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow in 1993 and signed them immediately. Definitely Maybe (1994) became the fastest-selling debut album in British chart history at the time.
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