Don’t Look Back In Anger: A Love Letter

I still remember the first time I’d ever listened to it. I was twelve years old, and earlier that afternoon I had been wandering around FYE, flipping through CD’s in the lamentably broadly categorized pop/rock section, when I’d come across that band from England I’d heard about. Before that moment, my musical tastes consisted of solidly established classics pillaged from my dad’s record collection: The Beatles, The ‘Stones, The Eagles, etc., and here were a band who not only looked like the Beatles, but apparently sounded like them as well. I spent what at the time seemed like an astronomical $15, and upon arriving home with my investment, played it in my bedroom on my beloved Sony boombox.

Hello. Roll With It. Wonderwall. Track after track, I slowly began to fall in love with the Mancunian vocals, heavy guitars, and dreamy psychedelic soundscapes that harkened back to the golden age of album-oriented rock. But it was the fourth song on the album that truly captured my imagination. The lyrics, bizarre and abstract, brought out an atavistic response in me that nearly brought me to tears- “Please don’t put your life in the hands of a rock and roll band, who’ll throw it all away.” The melody, sung in a major key, I found infectious. I had to listen to it again. And again. And again. I went downstairs tried to figure out it’s chords on my piano. I memorized the lyrics. I had a new favorite song.

I was never the same after that moment. I bought the rest of Oasis’ albums. My love for Oasis begat an interest in Blur, Pulp, Elastica, Suede, Supergrass, Ocean Colour Scene, Cast, The Verve, The La’s, The Stone Roses, The Smiths, The Jam, Squeeze, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Radiohead, and later The Libertines, Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party, The Kooks, Kaizer Chiefs, Razorlight (back when they weren’t shit), The Futureheads, Arctic Monkeys, The Streets, and so on and so on and so on. But as fantastic as all those artists are (and believe me, I do think they’re all fucking fantastic), none of them have ever successfully produced a song as universally gorgeous as Don’t Look Back in Anger.

I’ve heard it played at three in the morning in Dublin’s Temple Bar by a busker in front of a crowd of drunk revelers. I’ve heard it sung by a chorus of Manchester City fans. I’ve heard it on the steps in front of Sacre Cour in Paris. I’ve heard it on the speaker system of a nightclub in Bogotá’s Zona Rosa. It gets the same response every time.

The response is always something like this:

Don’t Look Back in Anger is a Frankenstein creation that borrows from each of rock and roll’s greatest stadium anthems. A hint of John Lennon’s Imagine, a touch of Mott the Hoople’s All the Young Dudes, a dash of Hey Jude. It makes atheists into believers, chavs into indie kids, and grown men want to embrace each other and belt it out at the top of their lungs. It’s simply the most perfect pop song ever written, and I will never tire of it.