NME at the gate

From New Coke to Blockbuster’s return as a streaming service, brand reboots don’t always work out, but when a relaunch does, it’s often simply down to luck. 

For example, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the vinyl revival began, but once it was established that 12-inch records were cool again, an intersection occurred between middle-aged dads rediscovering album collections stashed in lofts and hipster teens encountering the medium for the first time. Vinyl’s new appeal, especially amongst its youngest consumers, had less to do with the music than ‘collectability’. As heartening as it was to see teens buying Rumours, London Calling or The Dark Side Of The Moon via £30 reissues bought from the few HMV stores that remain, it was their Instagram appeal and opportunities to post iconic sleeves on ubiquitous ‘Now Playing’ plinths.

Consider, then, the associated revival of the NME. I say “revival” but in truth the venerable organ, launched in 1952, never went away. It just ceased, in 2018, to be printed. But as of yesterday the once august weekly newspaper has returned in physical form, relaunched by the brand’s latest owners as a bi-monthly, limited edition magazine, and openly inspired by the resurgence of vinyl and even cassettes.

That’s the marketing pitch, but the NME’s print relaunch isn’t without a modern twist: you won’t be buying it from a newsagent, at least not straight away. NME Networks - part of the Caldecott Music Group (which also publishes Uncut) - will only be producing the new NME in very limited quantities, making them available through the Dawsons chain, which it owns. It’s a deliberate ploy to create exclusivity in much the same way as Nike creates hype (and the occasional riot) with “drops” of limited edition trainers. 

Thus last night at exactly 7.52pm (the original NME was launched in 1952…) those sitting in one of those dreaded online waiting rooms so hated by Taylor Swift fans were given their chance to get their hands on the new NME. Naturally, it sold out straight away.

No details have been given on the size of this NME’s print run, but with a £10 cover price and a promise of a thick, glossy, coffee table-friendly Vogue-like design, presumably they’ve done their homework on how to cover costs. What those of us unsuccessful in getting hold of a copy can’t yet gauge is whether it is any good. Moreover, how this NME stacks up to the NME’s 71-year-legacy.  

Having begun in March 1952 following the purchase, for the princely sum of £1000, of The Accordion Times and Musical Express by music promoter Maurice Kinn, the New Musical Express quickly established itself as the UK’s primary journal of record for contemporary music. Later that year it created the first British singles chart (copying the American magazine Billboard) with Al Martino’s Here In My Heart becoming the first ever British Number 1. 

By the 1960s the NME was selling 300,000 copies a week as the Beat Boom took off, with The Beatles, Rolling Stones and their ilk regularly featured on the cover and at the annual televised NME Poll Winners’ Concert, the Brit Awards of its day. 

In the ’70s the NME took on more of an underground approach to its journalism, with seminal writers like Nick Kent and Charles Shaar Murray joining the staff, with the magazine championing the broadening post-Beatles pop and rock revolution. With punk came further evolution, with cover features on the Sex Pistols and The Clash, and Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill making their names as a new generation of ‘angry young writers’, to use the hackneyed description. Many will consider this the start of a golden age for the NME and music journalism - as carefree and opinionated as punk itself.

The NME wasn’t alone: along with its closest (and, sometimes, bitterest) rival Melody Maker, plus the more heavy rock-orientated Sounds, they vied for the pocket money of spotty youths up and down the country. In 1978 another challenger appeared, Smash Hits, beginning as a poster magazine (and created by ex-NME editor Nick Logan), which would eventually go on to sell a staggering four million copies a fortnight. Around this time a new editor, Neil Spencer was promoted, overseeing a redesign of the NME and shifting the broadsheet further towards post-punk and New Wave, bringing in new blood like Danny Baker (a former NME receptionist and writer for the punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue), along with the spiky likes of Paul Morley and Ian Penman.

As I began to develop my own interest in music at the start of the 1980s, the NME broadened further, reflecting wider youth interests in the Thatcher era, taking on a notably left-leaning complexion in the process. This chimed with the politics of many of the musicians it covered who, themselves, were capturing the dystopian gloom of young life in Britain in the first half of the decade, a period signified by inner city rioting, CND marches and a decidedly socialist strand to pop. Which, thinking about it now, makes my own debut in the NME more incongruous.

In 1984, my first year of Sixth Form, I decided that my future lay in music journalism. The NME, Melody Maker and, particularly, Smash Hits, had become bibles to me. At the same time, Gary Crowley’s evening show on Capital Radio was essential listening. Deciding that if my ambitions were to be taken seriously I’d need a portfolio of writing samples that weren’t solely made up of reports for the school magazine, I brazenly asked Gary for an interview. Incredibly, he agreed and I went up to the old Capital studios on London’s Euston Road one Tuesday evening. After the interview he asked if I was serious about becoming a music hack, to which I said yes, prompting him to suggest getting in touch with one of his pals at the NME, which I did. 

And so, in early January 1985, aged 17, I went to see the NME’s then live reviews editor: “Er…are you going to see anyone in the coming weeks?” he asked. All I could think of was that I tickets for Phil Collins at the Royal Albert Hall a few weeks later. “OK, do a couple of hundred words on that,” he asked. As the clipping below attests, I managed to get possibly the first Phil Collins live review published in punk’s once-angriest of papers. And possibly the last.

That alone, though, was enough to get me in. The following year, after my A-levels, I got an actual staff job with a new magazine, who liked the cut of my jib. I had the NME to thank for that. Although I only did a handful of things for the NME (I was, supposedly, also trying to get through Sixth Form at the time), it was the start I needed. However, the mid-’80s were a perilous time for the paper. Smash Hits (whom I later did work for) was cannibalising the NME’s pop-minded readership, while the paper itself was struggling to find its editorial identity. Traditionalists on the staff wanted it to continue driving a rock agenda, while more progressive voices championed alternative genres, like hip-hop, all while the magazine continued evolving beyond just music magazine to become a broader cultural barometer.

Music didn’t leave its core, however. In the ’90s, Britpop provided a totemic platform not seen since the ’60s (reaching its zenith with the landmark Blur-vs-Oasis cover in August 1995 marking the simultaneous release of the former’s Country House and the latter’s Roll With It). Music was in rude health again, at least from an editorial perspective, leading to copious coverage in the NME of Madchester and the decade’s mainstreaming of Indie, along with the emergence of American grunge. Into the mix came a further influx to the writing corps, with Steve Lamacq, Stuart Maconie, Mary Anne Hobbs and Andrew Collins joining the roster and giving the paper a new sense of zeitgeist vibrancy.

With the new Millennium came further change, and not all good, either. In 2000 publisher IPC folded Melody Maker into the NME in what many saw as the first death throe of the printed music weekly. Not that there wasn’t plenty for the medium to cover, with new British bands like Kaiser Chiefs, Libertines and, later, Arctic Monkeys. The march of time, though, continued to prove an impossible foe, and by 2014 the NME’s weekly circulation had fallen to 15,000. This prompted the now Time Inc.-owned title to be relaunched as a free magazine in an attempt to boost readership and the advertising the comes with it. The experiment, if it can be called that, lasted just three years before the NME became a digital-only site. While that retained the old paper’s musical news focus, it lacked the journalistic essence that had built its reputation in the heyday of Kent, Shaar Murray, Burchill, Parsons and later, Dannys Baker and Kelly, and the Britpop scribes.

Holly Bishop
Picture: NME Networks

It’s unlikely that their editorial spirit will be revived under the new print venture, so the question is, how will it be relevant? “Although the written word will always play a part in our journalism,” NME Networks chief operating and commercial officer Holly Bishop told the trade magazine UK Press Gazette, “it’s no longer front and centre and it’s naïve to think any different”. 

The 2023 version of the NME will have to appeal to Gen Z, an audience more attuned to consuming content via social media. New music, Bishop maintains, will still be paramount. “An artist can have a meteoric rise on a single track on TikTok, for example. But is there longevity there? It remains to be seen. And actually, what we do know is an artist making music that’s authentic to them, that is good music. It will find a way through, particularly when brands like ours are actively seeking it.”

“NME obviously boasts an incredible print legacy,” Bishop told UKPG. “It’s one of the most recognised titles on Earth in print. We’ve had the biggest icons across pop culture appear on our cover.” But, she adds, the exercise is not without its challenges - “not just in terms of audience engagement, but also production; rising costs, particularly in this economic climate.”

“We aren’t looking to [create] hundreds of thousands of readers out of this print product,” Bishop added. “We know that our trajectory remains firmly rooted in being a digitally-led brand and we are successful in that space. NME.com has got more users than ever before and we obviously can monetise those in the traditional ways with advertising and partnerships.” For that, she says, they’re taking “an atypical, unconventional approach to distribution too. We’re not printing masses of copies because we really believe in the inherent value of scarcity.”

If all this sounds like marketingspeak, and a world away from the 1977-spirit-of-punk NME, it’s because the title is as much a brand these days as a single, identifiable newspaper. NME.com continues to attract some 17 million visitors each month, covering the broad scope of genres as well as television, film, games and other branches of pop culture. Its proprietors have even launched editions in Australia and Asia. The new magazine, however, will be global, “curating the very best of NME,” according to Bishop, “championing emerging artists and bands, and serving as the definitive voice in pop culture”.

That will commence with a first edition featuring on its cover 18-year-old self-taught American singer-songwriter d4vd (David Burke), first profiled by the NME online last September as the “multi-genre visionary turning TikTok attention into major chart success”. It’s a bold opening statement from the latest evolution of a magazine now in its eighth decade. In editions to come, we can expect more interviews with similar cutting edge musicians, culture features and reviews.

It remains to be seen whether the new NME will be able to recreate the urgency it once had, but you have to admire its publishers for giving it a go. The incontrovertible truth is that the world of media has become almost exclusively digital. 

Print journalism has been in terminal decline since the advent of the Internet. Last month The Guardian reported that, as a measure of the state of publishing in the UK, six of the country’s biggest selling physical-format magazines - Heat, Economist, Grazia, GQ, Vogue and Private Eye, along with newspaper supplements - are now all printed by just one single print company, Walstead. 

Between 2010 and 2022, the total number of actual magazines sold in Britain declined by 70% from around a billion copies a year to 309 million, with print publishing revenues dropping accordingly over the same period - from £1.4 billion to less than £500 million, according to Enders Analysis. Those magazines that remain in print form struggle to compete with digital distractions: compare the £6.50 you pay for Mojo, one of the few remaining stalwarts of magazine-based music journalism, with the £4.99 that Netflix’s new monthly, advertising-supported package will cost for all the entertainment distraction that offers. It’s an an apples-and-oranges comparison, of course, given that the handful of quality music magazines still in print continue to represent a tactile experience other mediums will never replicate. That, by the way, is the same experience that got me into the music press to begin with, first as a reader and then as a writer.

The NME’s conversion to digital-only five years ago was clearly part of the decline in print. The eyeballs of young consumers - those between 18 and 30 most coveted by advertisers - are simply elsewhere. British magazine websites last year accounted for less than 1% of the time this demographic spent on YouTube, 4.7% on TikTok and 7.4% on Instagram, according to The Guardian. And that is a problem for online magazine advertising. By 2025 the platforms of just Google, Meta and TikTok will earn more than £20 billion in digital advertising revenues. Compare that to, according to GroupM, the £378 million that magazines in the UK will earn by 2027.

All of which makes the decision to bring back the NME in print format even more precarious. But maybe its new owners might just succeed in appealing to the hipster strand that willingly eschews modernity (like vinyl, old-fashioned film cameras have made a return amongst the same youth demographic). This is probably the target audience for the new NME - consumers more likely to buy an expensive print magazine for its collectability, rather than the journalism inside. That, I have to say, is sad.

Noel Gallagher - with strings attached

If I was Noel Gallagher, I’d probably be happy to get through any media interaction without the subject of Oasis being brought up. It probably doesn’t help that his own brother doesn’t let the issue of the band reforming lie. Barely a week goes by without Liam firing off some salvo about his sibling via Twitter. Last week the elder Gallagher branded his junior a “coward” for not picking up the phone (rumours have been circling that the brothers are warming to the idea of getting together for, possibly, a one-off gig, perhaps symbolically at Knebworth to mark the 30th anniversary of Definitely Maybe next year).

This week, The Sun reported a further exchange of salvos in the spat, with Noel insisting that he’s too busy, and that “anyway, Liam is full of shit”, adding “He knows as well as I do that he doesn’t want it either - what he does like doing is making me look a cunt.” The bottom line, he insists, is that his phone has remained silent and nobody has been in contact about a reunion. So that is that.

For those desperate to recreate their ’90s youth, Blur’s reformation may provide an acute stimulation to the brothers. The key here is nostalgia, with such exercises serving the mutual needs of artist and audience alike: one party gets to exploit a lucrative trip down memory lane (viz reformations of the likes of Cream and The Police), while the other revisits their own a time gone by they might cherish. 

For the Gallaghers, however, to a greater or lesser degree, there really isn’t any need for either to recreate a past that was of its moment, either in musical terms or the publicity it generated. At least that has seemed to be the position of the elder sibling, whose new album with his High Flying Birds, Council Skies, is out today. It’s Noel’s fourth record in the 12 years since he acrimoniously left ‘his brother’s band’, and while Liam has largely stuck with the Oasis formula with his subsequent releases (the Lennonish vocals, choppy Indie-light guitars, slavish adhesion to Scally casualwear) Gallagher Snr. has always appeared more progressive.

Quite how Council Skies is more progressive than its predecessors, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, Chasing Yesterday and Who Built The Moon?, plus the bumper Record Store Day compilation Back The Way We Came, which included new material, is not easy to ascertain. That is not a criticism, by the way. Gallagher has a gift for edgy melodicism that makes his newest material seem familiar at the same time as requiring a keen listening ear to distinguish what’s different.

It’s that subtlety that makes Council Skies so utterly enjoyable, from start to finish. While it’s title (and title track) - inspired by a book by illustrator Pete McKee - might suggest a sombre sketch of northern despondency, like Richard Hawley’s Sheffield-inspired Standing At The Sky’s Edge, there is a reflective wistfulness to the 11 songs. Perhaps that’s due to the fact that string arrangements appear on at least half the tracks, giving them the inevitable cinematic expanse that orchestration does, accompanied more by acoustic guitars than Gallagher’s trademark electric chug of yore. That said, there are occasional bursts of amplification, such as the sumptuous radio hit Easy Now - a classic arm-waving, festival-friendly piece of singalong-a-Noel, which includes a brief “soaring” guitar solo that conjures up an image of Slash or Richie Sambora on a mountain top.

The title track - which has also benefited from decent radio airplay this year - is another string-soaked classic - and one whose arrangements underline the quality of co-producer Paul Stacey’s brilliance. Stacey has worked with Gallagher since Oasis’s Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants album, and has regularly given his client the room to expand his sound beyond the T-Rex-lite that established his former band.

Council Skies has an understated swagger about it, a confidence ultimately reflective of its creator’s own notable self-confidence (Noel remains one of the industry’s most entertaining interviewees). Open The Door, See What You Find is a good example of this, mixing tempos with chorused vocals that hook themselves into the brain. More follows on There She Blows!, with its Beatley chug and vocal harmonies that transport the listener back to the ’60s (with, dare I say it, a slight nod towards the Wall Of Sound).

Picture: Sharon Latham/noelgallagher.com

For many, Champagne Supernova will always be the gold standard of Gallagher’s sense of the epic. It’s something he seems capable of producing without even thinking about it. Trying To Find, here, goes down a similar path, but of all the tracks on the album most redolent of northern gloom, it is this one. My one complaint is that, at just over three minutes, it’s too short. There is more in this string-infused vein with We’re Gonna Get There In The End and Trying To Find A World That's Been And Gone, both tracks that appeared last year in what felt like demo form as direction of travel to this new collection. Other gems include Think Of A Number (not, to my knowledge, a hat-tip to Johnny Ball), and the soulful I’m Not Giving Up Tonight.

Arguably, though, the drop-dead highlight of this album is Dead To The World. Appearing early on in the running list, it builds from a slowburn opening on a bed of - yes - more strings - to give a woozy, Bacharach-like feel. It even prompted brother Liam to tweet: “How can such a mean spirited little man write such a beautiful song?”. Hardly a sign of a thaw in their relationship, but equally, a glimmer of light that the love between two brothers may not have been lost completely.

Brother beyond: why Oasis aren't reforming anytime soon

In a week of political rancour, from Helsinki to Westminster, from Brussels to Washington, one tweet yesterday bucked the trend with an apparent gesture of reconciliation: “Earth to noel ... I forgive you now let’s get the BIG O back together.” No, this wasn’t Boris presenting an olive branch to Theresa but Liam Gallagher reaching out to his estranged brother Noel, apparently genuinely interested in reforming Oasis. “I’m not desperate just think it’d be a nice thing to do,” the younger Gallagher added.

So far the brotherly love has not been reciprocated by Noel, and it’s unlikely that it will any time soon. Seeing him and his High Flying Birds recently in the wonderful setting of Greenwich's Old Naval College, Gallagher seemed perfectly at home in his solo skin, drawing on his three HFB albums and a smattering of crowd-pleasing Oasis standards, including Don’t Look Back In Anger, Wonderwall and Little By Little. He walked out on Oasis in August 2009 saying that he “simply could not go on working with Liam a day longer” and that has been the situation since. Indeed, Noel has said relatively little about either his younger brother or Oasis, whereas Liam has maintained a constant stream of invective towards his sibling, mostly via Twitter, including the somewhat comical barb of “Potato”. That said, he also wished his brother a happy Christmas in December last year, raising the prospect of a thaw in their relationship. However, the tweet was later dismissed as a “wind-up”.  And so the tweets have continued.

There’s every chance that yesterday’s supposed peace gesture is another joke by Liam, even if he has said in recent months: “I don’t want to be solo. I don’t want to do it on my own – I’m not a guitar player or a prolific songwriter.” The Gallagher brothers released two of 2017's strongest records in Liam’s As You Were and Noel’s Who Built The Moon?, arguably better albums than anything Oasis produced towards the end of the period with both Gallaghers as members. If - and it’s a big ‘if’ - Noel was to accept Liam’s offer and reform “the Big O”, they would certainly be putting together one of the biggest and most lucrative reunions since Sean Connery agreed to play Bond again in Never Say Never Again.

Simon Poulter © 2018

"He’s rude, arrogant, intimidating and lazy. He’s the angriest man you’ll ever meet. He’s like a man with a fork in a world of soup," Noel told Q magazine in April 2009, four months before their bust up at the Rock en Seine festival near Paris, in which Liam is alleged to have thrown a bowl of plums at his brother (“A plum from a plum”, quipped Noel later).

The issue is, perhaps, more deep-seated than typical inter-band creative tensions. Last year Noel revealed that the brothers’ feuding began when they were teenagers, still living at home, and when the senior sibling returned, drunk, from a night out and urinated on his brother’s brand new music centre. Though Oasis were, technically, Liam’s band to begin with, Noel’s joining set them on the path to become one of the biggest British rock bands in history, a trajectory that came with the Gallaghers' headline grabbing antics, from public fights to stage walkoffs and concert no-shows.

For the most part, this was all grist to the mill, generating unprecedented publicity and the resultant record and ticket sales. Post-Oasis, the feuding has, at times, become decidedly nasty. For Liam, in particular, there’s been no let up (”Lots of people say I need to chill out about Noel. Not until they stop Twitter,” he said in one memorable interview.) And so it has gone on.

Noel, for his part, has adopted a position of relative silence as the better part of valour. A resumption of hostilities over Noel’s absence from the concert for victims of the Manchester Arena bombing prompted Liam to comment on an apparently tearful Noel: “NG broke down in tears cmon,” he said in yet another tweet. “You seriously ain't buying that he doesn’t give a f**k. Don't buy into his PR stunt he doesn't give a f**k if the same thing had have gone of [sic] in Edinburgh he'd been up there like a shot ahem.” Noel responded a month later: “He needs to see a psychiatrist. I don’t say that as a joke. Because young Mancunians, young music fans, were slaughtered, and he, twice, takes it somewhere to be about him. He needs to see somebody.” Liam hit back: “As for seeing somebody I bet you and the mrs have got a few on the go you pair of chameleons.”

Frankly it has become tedious, even if occasionally quite entertaining. Liam, with blatant disregard for syntax, grammar or the use of a spellchecker, has made Twitter his medium for assaults on his brother. “I guess it was about him staying relevant,” commented Noel after Liam started the first of his “potato” taunts. “If you’re him, what else is there to tweet about?”. While Noel has recognised that the publicity garnered by the feud has been a boon to business (“As long as he keeps promoting my record, there’s a good boy”), he drew the line in a BBC Radio 4 Front Row interview in which he said “maybe [Liam] should stop tweeting [about me]” for the “ugly” things he’s said about Gallagher’s wife and children. “People come after them, and … it’s not very nice,” said Noel. “It only heightens my resolve that I’ll never walk the stage with that band again for that reason.” That, I believe, is your answer.

Definitely not Ed Sheeran: Liam Gallagher's As You Were

Let's establish the facts, as they stand: Oasis were good, Noel Gallagher's post-Oasis output has been good, Liam Gallagher's post-Oasis output less good/awful/should stick to selling menswear, and that the chances of an Oasis reunion are of a cold-day-in-Hell magnitude, based on Gallagher Junior's near-daily tirade of Twitter jibes about Gallagher Senior.

In spite of the often vituperative and mostly inventive barbs aimed at his brother, Liam has cut a relatively more avuncular figure in recent months, launching a charm offensive in preparation for today's release of his debut solo album, As You Were. This, arguably, began last year with an interview with Q magazine's Ted Kessler - conducted mostly in a north London pub over two August days - which I will put before the court as being one of the funniest, most engaging and open interviews I've read with a rock star, let alone one renown for being profane, playground bully-thuggish and generally hostile. Of the interview's many revelations, it was the fact that the previously Olympic-level caner was now getting up at 5am each morning to go for runs on Hampstead Heath and while not exactly now a paragon of lactose-free milk-drinking clean living, was - as he was entering his 44th year - a different character. Contemplative, even.

With both of his previous bands declared dead, and the odds of a fraternal Gallagher reconciliation zero, Gallagher revealed to Kessler that he'd picked up a guitar and was engaging in songwriting. To the uninitiated, this may have come as either a surprise or a worry. After all, wasn't Noel responsible for writing all of Oasis' songs, or at least the good ones? Well, no. Both Beady Eye albums - while not good - gave Liam the opportunity to develop his writing chops. And if you wanted an example of how good his writing could be, just listen to the final Oasis album, Dig Out Your Soul, and the Liam-written track I'm Outta Time, a track his brother branded "deceptively brilliant". I branded it a Bond-theme-in-waiting, and certainly better than Jack White and Alicia Keys' execrable Another Way To Die released the same year for Quantum Of Solace.

In the Q interview, however, Gallagher seemed reluctant to brand the new songs he'd been writing as the launch of a new direction. "I am not embarking on a solo 'career'. Everyone should know that," he told Kessler. "There are just 10, 11 songs I've written that are eligible to be recorded. They've got flair, attitude, the melodies are sick and the words are fucking funny. We'll record them this year and release it next year. It'll shock people. It's a record written by me, that's got all the right ingredients and sounds well tasty."

And it is. Very much so. OK, much of it is in the Oasis vein - a lot of guitar-based swagger topped by Gallagher's Lennonesque nasal vocal - but rather than simply being derivative, As You Were is a glorious continuation of what that outfit did best. Ask most people what they would like out of most of their favourite bands and they'll say "more of the same, please". It should be pointed out that the album isn't entirely Gallagher's own work: American producer and multi-instrumentalist Greg Kurtin is amongst a number of collaborators keeping As You Were on solid ground (and he brings to the party experience of working with Adele, Foo Fighters and others). But this assistance comes in terms of flourish. Thus, a track like Paper Crown (in which Gallagher sounds more like Cast's John Power) stands out, not only for its melodic strength but also for its open sound, something the tremendous single Wall Of Glass also benefits from, with its soulful, funky treatment. Likewise, Chinatown, with its Feeling Groovy guitar motif, finds Gallagher losening his trademark snarl, and delivering a dreamy, psychedelic wooze-out that stands apart from anything he's produced before, both melodically as well as in terms of his songwriting maturity.

As I'm Outta Time proved, Liam has a knack for the grandiose, stadium-swelling ballad. It's a gift that, if he was feeling generous, Noel would recognise he shares with his younger sibling. For What It's Worth fits this capability. Yes, you could probably sing All Around The World over it, but then such mashups were possible with much of the Oasis canon. Really, it doesn't matter, when the songs are this pleasing and this singalongable. I've already made one Beatles reference and it is, inevitably, impossible not to find another: When I'm In Need has Beatley choral elements, but is also slap-bang in the midst of what pop music should always be - big, bold and attitudinal, with the sort of melodic hook that won't leave you alone. What Oasis did to perfection.

I'm not surprised that As You Were is good, but I was surprised that across its 12 tracks it delivers consistently and delivers well. Whatever your view of Liam - git, enfant terrible, etc, etc - he has produced one of the stand-out entertaining albums of the year. Yes, with his brother's next album coming out next month we can expect more of the Gallagher rough-and-tumble; but with Noel also writing some of the best British pop-rock of our time, rather than wishing, pitifully, for an Oasis reunion, we should revel in the fact that we have two members of the same family capable of producing huge, epic records that stand the test of repeat listening, and which translate effortlessly to memorable live performance. For anyone despairing about the inexplicable dominance of Ed Sheeran on the charts, with his bland, indistinguishable autopop, it is genuinely heartwarming that someone is capable of producing a rock-based record of such enjoyability as Liam Gallagher has done with As You Were.

We're getting the band back together

One of pop's near certaintities is that as soon as a band splits or a member leaves, they will spend the rest of their days answering questions about a reunion. Even now, 46 years after The Beatles broke up, 36 years after John Lennon was murdered and 15 years after George Harrison passed away, Paul McCartney still - I don't hesitate to expect - gets asked if he'll ever reform the band with just Ringo. After all, their contemporaries The Who managed to lose both Keith Moon and John Entwhistle and still carried on, so why not the surviving Fabs?

Pink Floyd effectively came to an operational end when Roger Waters accrimoniously walked away after original Wall tour, threatening to take the band's name with him. David Gilmour, Rick Wright and Nick Mason soldiered on, but the Floyd really had run its course creatively. That, though, hasn't stopped Gilmour playing their songs on his solo tours (which, until his death from cancer in 2008, included Wright on keyboards). To some, this is milking the canon, but to others it's keeping the flame alive. There would, no doubt, be a combination of the two should Led Zeppelin ever reform. That, however, is currently unlikely. Robert Plant maintains a somewhat icy distance from overtures from both Jimmy Page and promoters offering lucrative sums to get getting Zeppelin back on the road. "I'm not part of a jukebox," Plant frostily declared to Rolling Stone in 2014, preferring to stick to his own course, which has, for the last few years, involved touring with his Sensational Shape Shifters band, playing some Zeppelin songs, albeit with a world music twist.

Unless there's unfinished business - and there rarely is - the only reason for these old bands to reform would be to fleece mugs like me out of their hard-earned. And here, one must absorb the fact that we're no longer just talking about rock's pioneers getting back together. The '90s are catching up, too. The Spice Girls (and I clearly don't need to point out that this is not in the same oeuvre as the mighty Led Zeppelin...) have returned to the studio, though minus Sporty and Posh, and thus wish to be known as "Spice Girls GEM" (Geri, Emma and Mel - geddit?). "There's a lot to be said for bowing out on a high note," Mel Chisholm has said, and she is probably the only Spice Girl who could actually hit a high note. At least she regognises, to borrow from ABC, that was then and this is now. They had their moment, why try and recreate it?

Which brings me to Oasis. Last night's premiere of Supersonic, the warts-and-all documentary about the band that arguably were Britpop, provided a platform for Liam Gallagher to opine that his band (the one that effectively broke up via a basket of fruit being flung across a Paris dressing room, leading to Noel describing the incident as "a plum from a plum") should reform - and should never have split to begin with.

"If it happens tomorrow, I'm ready, my bags are packed. If it happens in a year, I'm still ready, if it happens in 10 years, I'm still ready," he told Sky News, but adding that he would not be begging Noel to make it happen. "There'll be no cap in the hand and no banjo, you know what I mean? If it happens, it happens, if it doesn't, it fucking doesn't, we move on."

Given that the brothers G have engaged in fraternal skirmishes via the media (and, in the case of Liam, Twitter) since the 2009 split, with the barbs as cruel and as harsh as they are, actually, quite funny (the junior Gallagher has taken to calling the elder "Potato" in tweets), it would be hard to imagine them coming together. Noel was notably absent from the twin Supersonic premieres in London and Manchester, despite being a co-executive producer with his brother. "He won't be here," explained Liam acidly. "He's in one of his really, really, really, big houses, probably eating tofu, while having a fucking face peel. Ain't that right, man of the people?".

Beneath the acrimony, there might be a glimmer of brotherly love, but not much. "For someone to ruin my Oasis career to further his own, we have got to get past that a little bit," he told Sky. In a wildly entertaining interview in the October issue of Q, Gallagher went further: "If the guy doesn't want me back in our band then I don't want to either. I don't want to be in a band with someone who doesn't want me."

The conundrum, then, is what if Oasis did reform? Arguably, their albums since Be Here Now in 1996 delivered ever-decreasing rates of return on originality and, it should be said, quality. Noel's High Flying Birds project has produced two very good albums, whereas Liam's Beedy Eye outfit patently didn't. Shortly before their split there was something of a return to form by Oasis with Dig Out Your Soul, but the truth of the matter was that they were constantly retreading old ground. Definitely Maybe and What's The Story, Morning Glory? were genuinely era-defining: the whole schtick of a band of Mancunian scallies fronted by two cocky, lary and amusing brothers (you can find a guide to some of Liam's greatest pearls on my former blog), playing simple, self-written guitar-songs was a tremendous reminder that, as Simon Cowell and his evil empire pervaded the charts, Britain could still produce memorable headlining guitar bands.

But is any of this enough to warrant a reunion? Seeing the Stone Roses three years ago at the quaint Le Cigale theatre in Paris was a reminder of the good and the bad of revisting the bands who made your younger self. While it was fun to pogo amongst an audience of similarly adidas-clad fortysomething Brits, nothing could recreate the energy of the Roses the first time around.

The danger of an Oasis reforming would be the same. There would have to be something new. Something good. Very good, in fact. Noel and, surprisingly perhaps, Liam are both good songwriters, but if - and this is an epic, planet-sized 'if' - they were persuaded to get back together, it couldn't be to become a latterday Status Quo. Noel gave ample demonstration of his ability to find a new writing voice for both his High Flying Birds albums, but any return by Oasis would have to tap into what they were good at in their '90s prime, and radically jettison all that diminished their musical credibility in the albums that followed.

Supersonic, a collection of home movies, live footage archive and new interviews, will resurrect that original period, charting the brothers' rapid rise from Burnage council house to the landmark Knebworth show in 1996. Directed by Mat Whitecross, who was responsibe for the Ian Dury documentary Sex & Drugs & Rock And Roll, Supersonic is also backed by the production talent behind the Senna and Amy biopics, including Asif Kapadia who directed both (here as an executive producer). As with those productions, the audience gets to make its own mind up about the underlying characters of the Gallaghers itself, rather than ensure a narrative about the wider contemporary context of Britpop, Cool Brittania or the pre-Iraq Blair era. The film picks at the fraternal chemstry, and the wild early days of Oasis fuelled by booze and drugs and a rock'n'roll hedonism not seen since the period of music history they've been accused of copying so faithfully.

Being released in this, the week I've returned to Britain, having left in 1999, Supersonic revives memories of a period when the country appeared to be enjoying itself, with a hitherto creatively moribund music industry dusting off the verve - if you can excuse the pun - that made it a world leader in the mid-60s. The irony was that Oasis were the Stones to Blur's Beatles, despite their obvious obsession with the Fab Four. The emphasis here is on "were". While neither Gallagher has given an outright refusal to get the band back together, they're a long distance apart for now. And maybe, that's the way it should be left.

No Stairway? Denied!

Like finding the source of the Nile, identifying the true origins of pop music is not straightforward. We all know - or should know - that much of what we listen to today shares genetic code with the blues and its derivatives including jazz, rock and roll, country, gospel, R'n'B, soul, hip-hop and, of course, rock.

Identifying how these genres evolved would require a forensic examination of notes, scales, chord structures and all the things absolutely nobody is bothered with as teenagers posing in front of the bedroom mirror with a tennis racquet. What we do know, however, is that with every new iteration of the form as it developed out of spirituals sung in southern cotton fields to become the most important culture of the 20th century, and every teen transplanting his racquet for making an actual racket, that what came before has been infused in what came after.

All this said, it still baffles me how, given that there are only so many notes, octaves, chords and time signatures, we still get lawsuits by one songwriter claiming another has nicked their work. As early as 1954, Johnny Cash was forced to pay Gordon Jenkins $75,000 for the use of lyrics and even melody from Jenkins' Crescent City Blues which it was claimed found its way into Cash's Folsom Prison Blues.

Some cases are less obvious than others, some more so. For example, Jeff Lynne once tried to sue Paul Weller for allegedly stealing the descending guitar riff from ELO's 10538 Overture for Changin' Man. There's little doubt that the riffs in question are almost identical, but does that mean Weller went out of his way to steal from a band you would hardly charge him with as being an overt fan?

I'm no lawyer, but at what point do you prove a deliberate act of wanton plagiarism? Plus, while we're at it, you could argue that Lynne leaned heavily on The Beatles' Dear Prudence, given that the descending guitar motif is the same, just in a different tempo.

There are many, many more I could cite, and it's perhaps not surprising how often The Beatles would figure in such a list. Actually, I would argue that bands as varied as Oasis, The Chemical Brothers and Tears For Fears all dabbing their brushes at the Fab palette could be held guilty of musical pilferage, but then where does homage stop and petty larceny begin? After all, The Beatles themselves were once taken to task by rock'n'roll's pioneer, Chuck Berry, after his publishing company sued that Come Together contained elements of Berry's 1956 song You Can't Catch Me.

It's this assumption that playing the same set of notes, in the same or similar order, no matter how briefly, constitutes plagiarism. I've heard Sam Smith's Stay (not willingly, you'll understand) and not once did I think: "The scoundrel's gone and ripped off Tom Petty's I Won't Back Down" (co-written by Lynne, it should be mentioned). And, yet, Petty and Lynne have now been credited as co-writers of Smith's song because Petty's publishing company noticed "a likeness" between the songs. Even Petty himself didn't believed that Smith had ripped off his song willingly. The matter ended quite amicably, with Petty brushing the issue of as "these things happen". For their trouble, Petty and Lynne are now entitled to 12.5% of Stay's royalties. Not a bad result for one of the best-selling and most-played singles of the last couple of years.

There are, inevitably, examples of too much similarity going on for mere coincidence. Rod Stewart even held his hand up freely when Brazilian musician Jorge Ben took to the courts over a very distinct similarity between the chorus of If Ya Think I'm Sexy and his rootsy 1976 song Taj Mahal. While Stewart stressed that it hadn't been a cynical lift, he said: "Clearly the melody had lodged itself in my memory and then resurfaced. Unconscious plagiarism, plain and simple." Oasis may have fallen into the same trap when The New Seekers' noticed how similar Shakermaker was to their hippy-dippy Coke advertising I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing, a song from Noel Gallagher (and my) childhood. For that, they trousered $500,000.

But then we get to a case of blurred lines - literally. In March last year a California jury concluded that Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines was too close - and therefore unlawfully close - to Marvin Gaye's Got To Give It Up, which resulted in the duo handing over $7.4 million to Gaye's family. At stake was the argument over whether Willams and Thicke copied Got To Give It Up notationally, or whether the production, vocals and overall vibe of the track were suitably similar to warrant the charge. Even now, it is still one that can be contested.

So step up Led Zeppelin and Stairway To Heaven, or specifically the distinctive notes picked out of an A Minor chord that, 45 years ago, Jimmy Page turned into the one of the most played riffs in guitar shops on Saturday afternoons the world over (alongside Smoke On The Water, of course). A US judge has ruled that Page and Zeppelin's Robert Plant will have to face a US jury trial over a claim that Stairway's opening chords were stolen from Taurus, a 1967 instrumental by the band Spirit, who toured with the British group at the end of the 1960s, when - it is alleged - they were exposed to the song.

The claim first surfaced in 1997 when Spirit's guitarist Randy California complained about the similarities in an interview, shortly before he drowned while attempting to rescue his son from difficulties in the sea off a Hawaii beach. His trustee Michael Skidmore decided to take up the case against Led Zeppelin, arguing California deserved a credit. Lengthily, this has now led to US District Judge Gary Klausner ruling that a jury could find "substantial" similarity between the sequences of Stairway and Taurus in question, which he called "arguably the most recognizable and important segments" of the songs.

Led Zeppelin have argued that the chords used were so "clichéd" that they did not deserve copyright protection, no doubt drawing on the oft-heard argument that it would be like copyrighting air. However, the judge, showing a certain degree of musical knowledge, ruled that: "While it is true that a descending chromatic four-chord progression is a common convention that abounds in the music industry, the similarities here transcend this core structure. What remains is a subjective assessment of the 'concept and feel' of two works ... a task no more suitable for a judge than for a jury."

And so Case No. 15-03462, "Skidmore v Led Zeppelin et al, U.S. District Court, Central District of California" will open on May 10 with a jury of 12 asked to make thedecision. You can judge for yourself, below: certainly there's a tonal similarity between the songs, and the contested guitar sequences do share the same notes, but that to me would be like arguing that any song in the key of D Minor ("the saddest key of all"), is the same as another. In fact, if anything the Spirit sequence sounds more like Is There Anybody Out There? from Pink Floyd's The Wall (interestingly, many of Roger Waters' songs have been written on an acoustic guitar in this same key).

The issue, then, is always going to be one of subjectivity. The Pharell/Thicke case did at least examine the mechanics of the songs in question, while others have held up their hands to admit to the subconscious at work. But in the case of Stairway? I think the mighty Zeppelin have a very strong case for dismissal on their hands.