B-Side of the Week: Take Me Away

Thursdays are now b-side days. Why? Because Thursdays are just those kind of days, when all the important a-side business has gone out of the way, and everybody starts spending their post-lunch office hours booking hotels for their weekend trips. A bit like how some people approach songs that don't quite fit into albums, or songs that nobody likes but them, or songs that recording execs say no to because teenage girls won't get dandy hearing them. For a variety of reasons, Thursdays seem every bit like an intuitive day on which we celebrate the under-appreciated, under-exposed, often highly satisfying b-side.

So what better way to open this account than with the first b-side on the very first Oasis single, Oasis being perhaps one of the greatest b-side bands of our recent generation.

Oasis
Take Me Away (from Supersonic single)
(Creation)

Take Me Away is a Noel Gallagher sung, Noel Gallagher written, Noel Gallagher played acoustic strut through what must have been a disgusting life working in construction sites and getting into one too many fights. Sure, it was only a matter of months before this gentle cry would be heard by over a hundred thousand people in a week, when the Supersonic single displaced Take That's Everything Changes on 11 April 1994 to become a UK number one single.

However, the arrogance and cocksure bravado of the a-side would act as a prototype, as Take Me Away would also be overshadowed in the coming years by a slew of more high-profile b-sides, eventually missing out on a spot in the Oasis b-side collection The Masterplan. But for good measure, this is as good an Oasis b-side as any other, and miles ahead of many an album filler.

Oasis - Take Me Away

Trivia: Take Me Away's chorus contains an Octopus' Garden reference in the lyric "i'd like to be / under the sea".