James’ Shamelessly Nostalgic A-Z Of Albums That He Liked To Listen To When He Was Younger – Part 4: Dig Out Your Soul

Due to the traditional omission of Sundays from the April A-Z Blogging challenge, we’re now out of synch between the date and the numerical position of the letter du jour. Today is, of course, the 5th day of April but we are only on the fourth letter of the alphabet.

I’m sure we’ll all cope. It’s going to be a consistent problem from here on in.

As anyone who is familiar with the alphabet will know, the fourth letter is ‘D’. I’m certainly not going to depart from the status quo. So ‘D’ it is.

D is for Dig Out Your Soul

As I stated in last year’s A-Z challenge, indeed on the very same letter of the alphabet, Oasis are, quite probably, my favourite band of all time. But most of that love is based on their first two albums and a B-sides compilation. Their remaining five studio albums have tended to leave me a little underwhelmed. I don’t hate any of them. I am quite fond of the third album Be Here Now because, while I can fully appreciate it is nowhere near as good as its predecessors, I was so desperate for it to be good that I played it endlessly on its release and developed a kind of Stockholm Syndrome-esque affection for it.

Of the remaining albums, the one that comes closes to evoking any kind of equivalent nostalgia is Oasis’ final album – Dig Out Your Soul. It is one of the more critically acclaimed of Oasis’ later efforts, though still fairly hard to distinguish from its immediate predecessors. But the tour that accompanied the release is the stuff of legend. Taking place between August 2008 and August 2009, it incorporated 117 shows worldwide and, given the notoriously combustible relationship of the Gallagher brothers, was quite possibly one of the most ill-conceived ideas in the history of popular music. The subsequent fall-out resulted in the implosion of the band, with no obvious signs of any kind of reconciliation well over a decade later.

I managed to see them in July 2009, little-anticipating the fate of the band. The soon-to-be Mrs Proclaims had bought me tickets and the date of the concert happened to fall upon the day that we both completed our teacher-training, and thus the ‘wilderness years’ were finally drawing to a close. It was a brilliant evening, though I’ll confess that the concert highlights were universally the tracks from the early albums.

Dig Out Your Soul is not Oasis at their best, but it’s good enough that we can pretend that, had the band not spectacularly imploded, there may yet have been a great album to follow.

The pick of the album’s tracks would probably be The Shock of the Lightning.