A TV show inspired Oasis's Champagne Supernova: The secrets of the hit-makers

Noel Gallagher

Biggest hit: Don’t Look Back In Anger (Oasis), March 1996 – No 1; 24 weeks in chart 

Biggest Album: Definitely Maybe, September 1994 – No 1; 177 weeks in chart

I once said that I wrote songs ‘for the man who buys the Daily Mail and 20 Bensons every day’. And I meant that at the time. I’d consider myself to be just an average man in the street who’s been blessed with a talent to write songs. I don’t write songs for the Observer or The Guardian, or for the NME or Mojo. I’m not bothered about pushing the envelope. I wanted everyone to like Oasis, not just some people in Oxford, a few people in Hull and a couple of people in Glasgow.

I learned long ago not to go looking for songs. If it comes, it comes; if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. I’m not standing on the runway waiting for the aliens to appear going, ‘Come on.’ It just never happens, does it?

I only listen to music from, or derived from, the 1960s. I’m not interested in jazz or hip-hop or whatever’s going round at the minute; indie rubbish. I don’t listen to avant-garde landscapes and think, ‘I could do that.’ I’m not a fan of Brian Eno. It’s Ray Davies, John Lennon and Pete Townshend for me.

All that Definitely Maybe, Morning Glory, Be Here Now stuff was written while I was still on the dole. I had the chords, the arrangements, the melodies; just bits of lyrics to fill in. You start off writing songs, you’re not sure who’s going to hear them. Then when I tried to write the next batch, I was like, ‘We’ve 20 million fans.’ Then your records become eagerly anticipated and you start going, ‘Umm, I might go to the pub today.’

If you wrote Digsy’s Dinner (from Definitely Maybe) now, The Guardian or the music papers would destroy you. It’s a song about going to someone’s house for lasagne – you only write songs like that when you’re free of inhibitions.

It’s not natural for me to say to my missus, ‘I’m going to the country to write an album.’ That was Be Here Now. I had all the music but not the words. We were starting in two weeks, so I went to some Caribbean island and I thought I’d do it all in two weeks. I listen to those words now and I just cringe. I was heavily into drugs at that point and I just didn’t give a damn.

All the songs I like, they’re not written by songwriters pulling scabs off themselves. I’m not interested in all of John Lennon’s stuff about his mother, because it doesn’t mean anything to me. How can Mother mean anything to anybody apart from John Lennon? It can’t, because he’s singing it about his mother, not mine. The abusive father I had belongs to me. And I wouldn’t want to share any of that or to put it into a song.

‘Slowly walking down the hall’ (from Champagne Supernova) is from either Chigley or Trumpton. Which is the one with the train?

Paul Weller

Biggest hit: Going Underground (The Jam), March 1980 – No 1; nine weeks in chart

Biggest Album: Stanley Road, May 1995 – No 1; 87 weeks in chart

People always ask me how I write. No idea. It’s just something in me. It’s the most insurmountable thing until you’re doing it and then it seems just like walking or breathing.

You get lazier the older you get. The days of waking and thinking, ‘I’ve got to write this down’ are over – I can’t be bothered. I think, ‘I’ll wait till the morning and it’ll come back.’ Or not.

I’ve always plundered the Beatles songbook. Even after all these years, there are chord changes which come direct from the Fabs.

Some are autobiographical, but very few. I don’t live an interesting enough life to write about it all the time.

I don’t care about those records that just talk about themselves. That whole singer-songwriter thing from the 1970s – give it a break, cheer up, d’you know what I mean?

I’m still in love with trying to condense a grand idea into a three-and-a-half-minute pop song. It’s special when you pull it off. It’s a product of me growing up in the 1960s. When you think of all the twists and changes in Good Vibrations in just over three minutes, it’s incredible.

Ray Davies

Biggest hit: Sunny Afternoon (The Kinks), June 1966 – No 1; 13 weeks in chart 

Biggest Album: Kinks, October 1964 – No 3; 25 weeks in chart

I still wake up and wonder what I’m going to do when I grow up. Why am I a songwriter? That’s the way it ended up. I used to describe song-writing – when I was writing Waterloo Sunset – as like whittling down a stone and smoothing the rough edges.

I remember writing the intro to Sunny Afternoon. I’d bought a white upright piano. I hadn’t written for a time. I’d been ill. I was living in a very 1960s-decorated house. It had orange walls and green furniture. My one-year-old daughter was crawling on the floor and I wrote the opening riff. I remember it vividly. I was wearing a polo-neck sweater.

All the times when I’ve had big success it’s been when I’m ill or miserable or we’re stuck. When You Really Got Me got to No 1, we were stuck on a train that broke down on the way back from Torquay the press were waiting to meet us. We all got flu, freezing cold in this carriage.

I will always aspire to write the great three-minute song. I’ve not written it yet. You Really Got Me, All Day And All Of The Night and Tired Of Waiting For You came close. I just know there’s more juice in the tank.