Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series.
In the constantly shifting landscape of popular music, headliners and opening acts can trade places in the space of just a couple of years. In fact, that’s exactly what happened to a pair of Greater Manchester bands 30 years ago. The Verve released its debut album A Storm in Heaven in 1993 and played several shows supported by a new band called Oasis that hadn’t yet released its first single. By April 1995, Oasis had become wildly popular, and the Verve opened a couple of their shows in Essex and France.
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Over the following months, Oasis and the Verve each released their sophomore albums, and their trajectories continued in opposite directions. The Verve briefly broke up weeks after the release of A Northern Soul, while (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? went supernova, becoming the biggest British rock album of the decade. But even as Oasis feuded with Blur and many other Britpop contemporaries, they remained good friends with the Verve. In fact, Noel Gallagher wrote one of Morning Glory’s most moving songs, “Cast No Shadow,” about some difficult times that Verve frontman Richard Ashcroft was going through. Ashcroft returned the favor, dedicating A Northern Soul’s title track to the Oasis guitarist.
The two bands’ roles reversed again, at least briefly, when the Verve reconvened and recorded the 1997 smash “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” and the band’s third album Urban Hymns actually outsold Oasis’s Be Here Now. Then Ashcroft embarked on a solo career, and Oasis carried on successfully, but rarely played “Cast No Shadow” on their post-’90s tours. Fast forward a couple decades, and a reunited Oasis have one of the biggest tours of 2025, with Ashcroft opening all the U.K. shows. And “Cast No Shadow” has made a triumphant return to Oasis’s setlists, with the band frequently dedicating the song to Ashcroft.
Three more essential Oasis deep album cuts:
“Up In the Sky”
Noel Gallagher is Oasis’s undisputed creative leader, writing every song on the band’s first three albums. Co-founding guitarist Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs did take credit for one of the catchiest riffs on Definitely Maybe, however, in a 2014 Irish Post interview: “I came up with the riff for ‘Up in the Sky’ and he built the song around that one but generally Noel would arrive with the finished song.” Arthurs rejoined Oasis this year for the first time since 1999.
“I Hope, I Think, I Know”
Be Here Now remains one of the most disappointing follow-up albums in rock history, partly because nearly every song is about twice as long as it needed to be. One exception is the charging “I Hope, I Think, I Know,” which gets to the point in a relatively restrained 4 1/2 minutes.
“Fuckin’ in the Bushes”
Oasis’s 2000 album Standing on the Shoulder of Giants opened with a funky, psychedelic instrumental, which featured a loop of a ’60s concert promoter declaring “The kids are running around naked, fucking in the bushes” sampled from the 1995 documentary Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival. Walmart stores declined to sell Oasis’s fourth album due to the profane song title. Instead of performing “Bushes” live, Oasis would use the track as their pretaped intro music at concerts, a practice that’s been revived for the Live ‘25 Tour.
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