The Masterplan

Music industry has been revealing its secrets to me for some time now. In the country that I live in, music singles charts come from voting. In the 90s, when I first learned this truth, when someone wanted their favourite song to be on top of the charts one must of send a postcard or make a call to the radio station and vote. So actually there are no singles charts as the Brits, Americans, Germans know them.

Let's take my musical home country, Great Britain. Singles charts are composed of songs which sold the best each week. So actually there is voting, as mentioned before, but in slightly different way.

Anyway, what is single as such? Yeah, it's a small portion of music sold seperately from the album. It usually features the catchiest song coming from the album. It's called an A-side. Its aim is to promote the band/singer/composer and to make people buy the actual album. OK.

But then, why should I buy the song if I can buy the whole album with the song on it? Well, before the age of internet, singles had much more importance to them. Apart from the main song, they usually contained some more material. The so called B-sides could be some cover songs, some demo takes of the main songs or some new, original material. New songs! So that's why some people bothered to buy the singles! New songs!


What is the Masterplan mentioned in the title of this post then? Well, these new songs for most of the bands were/are just fillers or second-rate material. Sometimes remix. Nice bonus, nothing more really. But there were some bands which really cared about the quality. One was The Beatles. The songs they released as B-sides were sometimes more experimental (The Rain) or had more feeling and spirit (The Inner Light) than their album material.

There was also a band, whose B-sides were sometimes actually better than their album tracks or some A-sides. Especially at the early stage of their career, Noel Gallagher of Oasis could pen the best song of the decade and place it as the mere B-side. There's no place to list all the songs that this guy has taken out of the spotlight which they surely deserve. I want to present only one track. Debatably the best B-side of all times, a song called The Masterplan.




This song was first released as a B-side to the Wonderwall single. In my books it surpasses its more famous neighbour by a long mile. It was then placed on the B-sides collection called The Masterplan itself, which truly showcaised the genius of Noel, and on the best-of compilation Stop The Clocks.

When told by the boss of Oasis recording label, Alan McGee, that the song is too good to be the B-side Noel replied: "well, I don't write shit songs". The guy's got confidence, doesn't he?

And the last thing. The pictures at the top and bottom of this post come from the session to the album The Masterplan. Noel showing music professors how to write a song. A masterplan indeed.