You All Everybody

original Oasis photo by Freschwill http://www.flickr.com/photos/freschwill/I see from the entertainment pages of the popular web that Oasis have apparently split up.

My first reaction was "Oh I didn't realise they were still going". I don't think there's anything wrong with Oasis - I quite like the first album - but didn't think they were anything particularly special. No more or less a band than, say, Shed Seven.

My second reaction was "What, again?" Didn't they keep splitting up in the nineties and early 2000s? Reading the news from the time and comparing it to now it seems like they keep recycling the same old ideas when it comes to band altercations.

They definitely had a big barney in 1996. I remember it well, as it had a direct effect on my life.

Anyone who reads this blog regularly (anyone there?) will know I'm what you could call an aspiring writer and am currently working on a novel. What you may not know is that it's not my first novel. I wrote my first novel in the early nineties. In retrospect it's probably not that good and hasn't aged well, so it's not worth revamping or rewriting. However I was quite proud of it at the time - a simple science fiction tale about the first manned mission to Jupiter in 2022 (some hope now of course) during the course of which one of the crew goes insane. This insanity turns out to be the effect of being contacted by a stranded disembodied alien entity.

I never did work out a proper title for it, but I'm sure I would have come up with one when it was published. Because it did come closer to being published than anything I've written since.

At the time a friend of a friend was working at Creation Records who were planning on starting up a books division and were looking around for unpublished novels with which to launch their range. I passed on my novel which was liked by them enough for me to start on a rewrite. Things were looking up, but then on Friday 13 September 1996 the news came out: Oasis Abruptly Cancels Rest of Its U.S. Tour.

The following Tuesday I received an email from my contact at Creation:
It is my unfortunate duty to inform you that due to certain factors, i.e. the instability of Oasis, Creation Records is discontinuing its book division. Alan just doesn't feel like he can put any more money into anything right now. Which is a drag as it was meant to be my job for the next year or so.
So that was that then - not only was my book deal out of the window but my contact at Creation had lost her job. I suppose I could have continued touting my book around agents and publishers, but to be honest my heart had gone out of it, and I hoped I'd soon have other stories to tell.

Of course a few days later Liam and Noel made up and would continue repeating this pattern over the next decade. So you will forgive me for taking this latest shock revelation with a pinch of salt. And a yawn.

However, I probably would sit up and take notice again were Noel to develop a heroin addiction before boarding an ill fated airliner which disappears somewhere over the Pacific. And then get blown up in an undersea base.

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