Don't Look Back in Anger
I'm looking up old flames, settling old scores, thinking things are just the same as how they were before/Fighting ancient battles, re-writing ancient lines, confused crusading warrior from some forgotten time/Don't Look back in anger, don't look back in anger, don't look back, don't look back, don't look back in anger.
I'm raging against enemies who are dead or old or gone/Giving history lessons to the indifferent and the young/They ask me why I'm bitter, I shake and raise my fist, “I'm angry with the one like you who don't see it like it is”/Don't Look back in anger, don't look back in anger, don't look back, don't look back, don't look back in anger.
My song writing notebooks go from 1979 to 1985. For a brief period I kept song ideas in my head or wrote them down here or there without the discipline of my notebooks. Around this time I wrote a song called 'Don't Look Back in Anger'. Some years later there was a hit song with the same title. I was never a fan of Oasis, they were really a band for a new generation, not for us raised on the pop of the 60's, 70's and 80's. Strange in a way though that Noel Gallagher would write a song with this title. To be clear there's no bitterness here, his song was nothing like mine, and mine wasn't even that great, I didn't even bother to write it down it seems, but I remember it because I quite liked the first verse. For me Oasis were too much wrapped up with the cool Britannia hype, New Labour and all that, and having seen many 'New Beatles' in the previous 25 years this smacked of marketing hype. I'm not a pop nerd (I'd admit it if I was) but I do have a good memory for groups and songs, really for a specific period, 60's, 70's and 80's chart music. I remember thinking that even the name Oasis was not original, there was a group of that name in the 1980's with a folk singer called Mary Hopkin, who had some memorable solo hit in the 1970's, Peter Skellern and Julian Lloyd Webber, both well known in their own genres. Of course Oasis is a pretty generic name for all kinds of things.
In retrospect I have thought that my coolness to Oasis was not envy but familiarity; The Beatles, Football, sibling rivalry, that was my own life, whereas someone like Bob Dylan had a mystique for me (and many others).
The film Don't Look Back was the 1967 documentary by D.A. Pennebaker of the young Bob Dylan's tour of the UK in 1965. The title has has a reference to Greek mythology as well as the Dylanesque themes of 'keep on keeping on', or being out on your own 'like a rolling stone' from subsequent songs.
For me the second part of the title is from my reaction to seeing the 1959 film of John Osborne's groundbreaking play 'Look Back in Anger', starring Richard Burton as the chippy Jimmy Porter the working class anti-hero. As the child of West Indian immigrants, (Gallagher is the son of immigrants too), I've always thought that we've never really understood the British class system, but Burton's portrayal appealed to me his erudition and sarcasm, the sense that you could handle yourself in an argument. Maybe (definitely maybe) I wanted it both ways, to look back but not to be haunted by the past, having it both ways, triangulation, a bit New Labour perhaps.