The Story of ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ by Oasis

By Oliver Tearle

In 1956, the young playwright John Osborne wrote a play, Look Back in Anger (much of it supposedly written while the young Osborne sat in a deckchair on Morecambe pier). With this play, Osborne heralded the arrival of the ‘Angry Young Men’: British working-class twentysomethings who rebelled against the status quo and ushered in a new era of youthful expression in theatre, fiction, and music, without straying too far from the kitchen sink.

I’ve often thought it was probably no coincidence that Osborne’s play premiered around the same time that rock ‘n’ roll really took off: a musical revolution which provided another kind of youthful artistic rebellion against conventional society. Forty years later, Oasis gave us ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ (1996). That suggestive title, the ‘story’ of the song, and the identity of the mysterious Sally who features in the lyrics, have had Oasis fans scratching their heads ever since, and not just because of dandruff and nits.

Noel Gallagher has clarified some of the issues surrounding the meaning of the track: ‘It’s about not being upset about the things you might have said or done yesterday’ and ‘about looking forward rather than looking back. I hate people who look back on the past or talk about what might have been.’

Don’t let the past govern the present, much less your future, then. Move on. Don’t look back on the past and let yourself be swamped by angry feelings about how things turned out (or didn’t). This, in short, is the universal meaning of the song, and one reason why this track by a Manchester band was sung in solidarity following the Manchester Arena attack in 2017. Don’t let hate rule your life, in other words.

The genesis of several famous lines in the song – taking that look off one’s face while standing up beside the fireplace originated in something Noel Gallagher’s mother used to say to him when taking family photographs – is well-known. And rather than viewing the lyrics as telling a cohesive story, perhaps we should regard them as impressionistic snapshots conveying a mood, an outlook, a piece of advice.

As for the rest of the lyrics, they may be nonsense, there to fit the shape and rhythm of the song, but not to carry any intrinsic meaning per se. But the idea of starting a revolution from one’s bed clearly recalls John Lennon’s famous ‘bed in’ protests (more of Lennon in a moment), while Noel Gallagher, the writer of ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’, has said he was inspired by a line from Lennon’s diaries when he penned his line about his brains going to his head (and it’s a good line, after all; as T. S. Eliot put it, immature poets imitate, but mature poets steal).

Sally, by the way, doesn’t exist and never did: according to Noel Gallagher in a 2007 interview with Uncut magazine, the band were in Paris two days before their first big arena gig (in Sheffield) when, during a sound check, Noel started strumming his acoustic guitar and improvising lyrics along with the tune he was playing. Liam asked him what he was singing, guessing it was ‘So Sally can wait’. And although it wasn’t, that’s what it quickly became. Noel realised the line ‘fit’ with the song and so ‘Sally’ was born, despite being nobody, or nobody real.

Much has been made of the piano intro’s similarity to the opening of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ (1971), but the likeness (surely a conscious homage) runs deeper than this: both songs are, above all else, pleas for peace and harmony, for a ‘revolution’ founded not on sudden change or violence but on calmness and even stillness, on sitting and watching the grass grow (step outside, the song tells us, as summertime is in bloom: in other words, stop being angry and go smell the roses).

But ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ might also be understood as part of a general trend in 90s music which ironically sent up the idea of a 60s-style revolution: Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ is often cited as the classic statement on this, but the mood runs through much indie music of the decade and the Morrissey-inflected idea of staying home and doing nothing (something Morrissey was himself inflecting through Oscar Wilde) can be felt in the music of everyone from Suede to Pulp to Oasis and beyond.

Though of course, here they were merely following John Lennon, too, and his ‘Revolution’ (from the Beatles’ White Album, 1968), which rejected the idea of destruction or violent revolution as a means by which to change the world.

As Alex Niven points out in his book Oasis’ Definitely Maybe, there’s an elegiac quality to ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’, and, after acknowledging that the song’s lyrics are ‘mostly meaningless glossolalia’, he suggests that the band seemed aware – if only ‘dimly’ – that ‘a long chapter in the narrative of working-class, Old-Labour history was coming to an end.’

But, for Niven, the song also invites us to revel in the idea of surveying the ‘ruins’ of pop culture in the three decades since the Beatles (Oasis’ biggest influence) changed the face of pop music and youth culture. Look back without bitterness or enmity, Niven suggests.

His point about the last gasps of ‘Old Labour’ is particularly well-made. A year after this song reached number one in the UK charts, Tony Blair and ‘New Labour’ would win a landslide majority and install themselves in 10 Downing Street to the tunes of D:Ream’s ‘Things Can Only Get Better’. Now there’s something it’s hard not to look back over in anger.