Oasis’ 1995 album (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? is a significant piece of music history, having yielded iconic songs like “Wonderwall,” “Don’t Look Back In Anger,” and “Champagne Supernova.” Those songs have come to mean a great deal to a lot of people, but according to Noel Gallagher (who wrote them), the latter doesn’t really mean anything at all.
He recently spoke with SiriusXM’s ’90s alternative station Lithium to commemorate the album’s 25th anniversary (as Stereogum notes), and he admitted that he’s not really sure what “Champagne Supernova” is about:
“I was on my last tour and I was playing ‘Champagne Supernova.’ That song is so long, and I often find myself drifting off enjoying the song and thinking, ‘What f*cking does it mean?’ You know, ‘Walking down the hall faster than a cannonball,’ what the f*ck is all that about? And I should know, ’cause I wrote it, and I haven’t got a clue. I was somewhere in the north of England and I happened to glance up at the crowd. It was just a sea of teenagers, all young lads, all with their tops off on each other’s shoulders, singing the words of a nonsensical song by a band that were broke up when… they were two years old when the band f*cking broke up. So I think to myself sometimes, you know, ‘That’s what it means. Because we recorded it and it was written while we were still relatively young. It still appeals to young people, and it’s gone through three or four generations now.”
This lines up with what Gallagher has said of the song before. In a 1995 interview, before the album was even released, he told NME, “Some of the lyrics were written when I was out of it. There’s the words, ‘Someday you will find me / Caught beneath a landslide / In a champagne supernova in the sky.’ That’s probably as psychedelic as I’ll ever get. It means different things when I’m in different moods. […] But some of the words are about nothing. One is about Bracket The Butler [from British children’s television series Chipley]. He used to take about 20 minutes to go down the hall, and then I couldn’t think of anything that rhymed with ‘hall’ apart from ‘cannonball,’ so I wrote, ‘Slowly walking down the hall / Faster than a cannonball,’ and people were like, ‘Wow, f*ck, man.’”
Listen to snippets of the SiriusXM interview below.