Some Might Say - Oasis (1995)

Released in April 1995, "Some Might Say" was the first Oasis single to top the UK charts, arriving like a battered chariot at the gates of what would soon be called Britpop's high noon. Written by Noel Gallagher and powered by Liam's nasal sneer, it bottled a particular British contradiction — gutter-level imagery braided with stadium-sized optimism — and let the country sing it back to itself. Thirty-one years on, it remains the sound of working-class lottery dreams cresting against the last days of analogue Britain.

Hook

There is a peculiar alchemy in the opening seconds of "Some Might Say." A churning, almost gospel-inflected guitar figure rolls in like weather, Liam Gallagher's voice cracks the door open, and within twenty seconds you understand that something is being claimed rather than merely sung. The track was not built to be liked; it was built to win an argument no one had started. It charted at number one in the United Kingdom on the week ending May 6, 1995 — the same week Tony Blair's New Labour was steadily eating into Conservative polling, the same season the country was being told, half-seriously, that things could only get better.

The hook is not a single melodic line but a posture. Noel Gallagher constructed the song around a riff that owes a clear debt to T. Rex and the rolling boogie of mid-period Rolling Stones, then loaded it with a chorus that paraphrases proverbs into a kind of secular sermon. The genius is in the unresolved tension: the verses describe domestic squalor — sinks full of fishes, dogs in the hallway — while the chorus insists that some might say better days are arriving. It is hope rendered as a dare. Either you believe it, or you do not, and the band could not care less which side of the room you sit on.

Background

By the time "Some Might Say" was recorded at Loco Studios in Wales and Rockfield in Monmouthshire during late 1994, Oasis were no longer the curio that had emerged from Manchester's Boardwalk a year earlier. Their debut, Definitely Maybe, had been certified gold within weeks of release in August 1994, and the band's interpersonal turbulence — Noel walking out during the American tour in Los Angeles after a particularly unpleasant gig at the Whisky a Go Go — had already begun to fold into the mythology rather than damage it. The single was scheduled as the lead release from what would become (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, the album that would later be argued about for decades as either the high water mark of British guitar music or the precise moment it began to ossify.

Crucially, "Some Might Say" was the last Oasis recording to feature original drummer Tony McCarroll. The footage of him gamely keeping time during the song's Top of the Pops appearance has a strange poignancy in retrospect, a man playing on a chart-topping single while management was already arranging his exit. Within weeks of release he was replaced by Alan White, brother of Paul Weller's drummer Steve, and Oasis took the form most casual listeners now remember. The song therefore sits at a hinge: it is the closing statement of the scrappier, looser early band, and the launching pad of the imperial-phase machine.

Owen Morris, who co-produced and mixed the track alongside Noel Gallagher, has spoken in subsequent interviews about the deliberate decision to push the levels into red, to let the master tape distort, to make a record that sounded louder than the records around it on Radio 1's playlist. This was not subtle production. It was a record engineered for the specific acoustics of cheap car stereos, kitchen radios, and pub jukeboxes — the appliances of ordinary British life in the mid-1990s.

Real meaning

To call "Some Might Say" a song about optimism is to mistake its weather for its climate. The lyric, considered closely, is a catalogue of decay: a sink that exists for the purpose of washing dishes nobody is washing, a hallway dog who has not been walked, a sun that shines through a window onto a bed where nothing productive is happening. Noel Gallagher, who wrote the song while still drawing the dole and living in a small flat in Manchester's Whitworth Street area, was drafting from observation rather than imagination. The verses are a working-class still life.

What transforms the song from kitchen-sink realism into anthem is the chorus's refusal to draw a moral conclusion from its evidence. Most songwriters confronted with that grey domestic tableau would either lament it or romanticise it. Noel does neither. He simply asserts, in the third-person hedge of "some might say," that better days are coming — and then refuses to specify who is saying it or on what authority. The hedge is the trick. It allows the listener to inhabit the optimism without having to commit to it. You are not being told things will improve; you are being told that some people, somewhere, believe they will. That is enough.

This rhetorical move maps onto a specific moment in British public life. The mid-1990s in the United Kingdom were a strange interregnum: the long shadow of Thatcherism was lifting, John Major's Conservatives were exhausted and seedy with sleaze allegations, and a generation that had grown up under what felt like a permanent austerity was being told, by advertisers and politicians and the music press, that the country was waking up. Cool Britannia was being assembled in real time. Damien Hirst was making shark sculptures. Damon Albarn was sneering at the bourgeoisie. And Oasis, who had less interest in irony than any major band of their era, were offering a more straightforward proposition: things are bad now, and yet the chorus is in a major key, and the chorus is the part you remember.

There is also a subtler religious undertone that critics have occasionally noted. The song's structure — verses of catalogued suffering followed by a refrain of promised deliverance — is closer to a Methodist hymn than to a standard rock song. Noel Gallagher was raised Catholic in Burnage, Manchester, and while he has been consistently dismissive of organised religion in interviews, the cadence of his songwriting in this period draws openly from chapel music. "Some Might Say" is, in this reading, a secular gospel: belief without object, faith without theology, hope as a kind of stubborn aesthetic choice.

Cultural context

To understand why "Some Might Say" mattered in 1995, it helps to reconstruct the media ecology that carried it. This was the last full year before the internet became a meaningful distribution channel for music in Britain. The chart still meant something concrete: a number one single sold physical copies, mostly on CD single but also on cassette and seven-inch vinyl, mostly purchased on Saturday afternoons from Our Price, HMV, Virgin Megastore, or — for the more discerning — the Tower Records flagship on Piccadilly Circus, which had opened in 1986 and remained one of London's social anchors for music obsessives. The Rolling Stone archives from this period, accessible now through the magazine's digital back catalogue, capture an American press still puzzled by Britpop, still framing Oasis and Blur as a curiosity rather than a phenomenon. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in Cleveland, had opened its physical museum building only a few months earlier, in September 1995, and the institution's framing of rock history as something that could be canonised was beginning to reach across the Atlantic in ways that British bands either accepted or resisted with theatrical contempt.

Radio 1 was still the gatekeeper. Chris Evans was running the breakfast show, Steve Lamacq and Jo Whiley were holding The Evening Session, and the FM dial was the primary mechanism by which a new single travelled from studio to consciousness. The phrase "FM radio era" is now a piece of historical vocabulary, but in spring 1995 it was simply the air. A song became a hit because enough producers at enough stations decided, more or less simultaneously, that it should be one. "Some Might Say" arrived already pre-loaded with that consensus. The music weeklies — NME, Melody Maker, Vox — had been building Oasis as a generational story for eighteen months. The single's coronation at number one was less an event than a confirmation.

There was also the question of the b-sides. Oasis in this period were operating under the conviction, inherited from The Beatles and The Smiths, that the b-side was not a throwaway but a parallel canon. "Some Might Say" was released with "Talk Tonight," "Acquiesce," and "Headshrinker" — a constellation of songs that, taken together, contains some of Noel Gallagher's most enduring writing. "Acquiesce" in particular, with its rare lead vocal split between the brothers, has been argued by some critics to be a better song than the a-side it was buried beneath. The CD single, as a physical object purchased and unwrapped and slotted into a Sony Discman, was an event in a way that streaming has fundamentally dissolved.

The cultural context also included the social geography of Manchester itself. Oasis were not a London band, and their refusal to relocate or to soften their accents was, in the context of a British music industry still heavily centralised around the capital, a political act of sorts. The Haçienda was in its final years, the city was being slowly rebuilt after the IRA bombing of June 1996, and the relationship between Manchester guitar music and the city's wider economic recovery was being narrated, sometimes accurately, sometimes lazily, as a story of regional renewal. "Some Might Say," sung in a flat northern vowel, was part of that narration.

Why it resonates today

Three decades on, the song's afterlife is more interesting than its original moment. Younger listeners encounter "Some Might Say" not through the radio but through algorithmic playlists, through the synchronisation of certain riffs to football highlight reels, through the persistent meme economy that has lifted Liam Gallagher's solo career into an unlikely second imperial phase. The Oasis reunion tour announced in 2024 for a 2025 run — and extended through 2026 with dates that sold out faster than any concert series in British history — has dragged the band's mid-1990s catalogue back into the present tense with surprising force.

What persists is the song's specific rhetorical architecture: the refusal to argue for optimism, combined with the insistence on its existence somewhere. In an era saturated with explicit politics, with songs that signal their values within the first eight bars, "Some Might Say" remains stubbornly evasive about what, precisely, it believes. It offers belief as a posture, not a position. For listeners exhausted by the demand to have correct opinions about everything, that evasiveness reads as generous rather than evasive.

There is also the matter of class. The British conversation about working-class culture has, since 1995, become both more articulate and more anxious. Bands from northern industrial towns no longer dominate the charts. The pathway from a council estate to a number one single, which Noel Gallagher walked between 1991 and 1995, has been progressively narrowed by the collapse of regional venue circuits, the consolidation of major labels, and the economic precarity of music as a career for anyone without family money to absorb the early-years losses. "Some Might Say" sounds, in 2026, like a transmission from a country that no longer quite exists — one in which a Burnage kid could write a song about a dirty kitchen and have it become the official soundtrack of a national mood swing.

The song's continued power also has something to do with how it handles its own grandiosity. Unlike "Wonderwall," which has become so culturally over-determined that it is now functionally impossible to hear, "Some Might Say" has retained a slight edge of strangeness. It is not on every busker's setlist. It has not been parodied into oblivion. It still functions, when it appears on a pub playlist or in a film soundtrack, as a small surprise. That preservation is partly accident and partly the result of the song's refusal to deliver a clean emotional payoff. The chorus does not resolve. The promise is never collected. The dishes are never washed.

It is, in the end, a song about the persistence of hope without the requirement to justify it. That is a stranger and more difficult message than the brash arena-rock surface suggests. The Gallagher brothers have spent thirty years being interviewed about everything except the actual content of their early songs, and the songs themselves have been allowed to sit, slightly under-examined, as cultural furniture. "Some Might Say" rewards being taken down from the shelf and looked at again. There is more in it than there appeared to be in 1995, and what is in it has aged better than most of what surrounded it.

How to dive deeper

🎧 Listen

(What's the Story) Morning Glory? (Oasis) The 1995 album that "Some Might Say" launched, sitting at the centre of the Britpop canon and arguably the most commercially dominant guitar record of the decade in the UK. → Search

Parklife (Blur) The 1994 record that set the terms of the rivalry, offering a sharper, more arch English vision against which Oasis's earnestness defined itself. → Search

📚 Read

Supersonic: The Complete, Authorised and Uncut Interviews (Simon Halfon, ed.) The companion volume to the 2016 documentary, drawing on hundreds of hours of conversation with the Gallaghers, their mother, and the band's earliest collaborators. → Search

The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock (John Harris) The definitive cultural history of the mid-1990s British guitar scene, mapping the political and media context in which "Some Might Say" reached number one. → Search

🌍 Visit

Burnage, South Manchester The neighbourhood where the Gallagher brothers grew up, still residential, still ordinary, still useful for understanding the unromanticised geography behind the songs. → Search

Heaton Park, Manchester The site of the band's celebrated 2009 hometown shows and a returning venue for the 2025–26 reunion tour, a public park that has become an unofficial pilgrimage site. → Search

🎸 Experience yourself

Epiphone Riviera or Gibson ES-335 semi-hollow guitar The semi-hollow tone Noel Gallagher favoured in this period is central to the song's recognisable midrange chime; an affordable Epiphone is the most direct way to approximate it. → Search

A vintage CD single player or Sony Discman To hear "Some Might Say" as it was originally consumed — small, slightly compressed, defiantly physical — is to recover an ergonomics of listening that streaming has erased. → Search

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🎵 Listen on all platforms

🤖 Follow-up questions:

1. How did the departure of Tony McCarroll immediately after this single shape the sonic direction of (What's the Story) Morning Glory?
2. What does the rhetorical hedge of "some might say" reveal about Noel Gallagher's reluctance to make explicit political statements?
3. How does the 2025–26 Oasis reunion tour reframe the meaning of these mid-1990s songs for audiences encountering them live for the first time?