OASIS ARE A BAND whose story is at least as big as their music. Even before they released their first single ‘Supersonic’ in April 1994, the group had been deported from Amsterdam after getting into a drunken brawl on a ferry. In the months leading up to the release of Definitely Maybe, they were banned from the Columbia Hotel in London after vandalising parts of it, and Noel Gallagher was attacked by someone in the audience at a gig in Newcastle. The chaos that trailed the band charged the album released at the end of August 1994 with a genuine sense of rock 'n' roll irreverence. In 1994, beside saccharine chart bedfellows Wet Wet Wet and Take That, it made their debut album sound uniquely edgy.

Here were two charismatic brothers, brimful of bravado, booze and cocaine, a fizzling bomb of sibling rivalry. Liam Gallagher whacked Noel with a tambourine during a gig at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles, and the following year at Rockfield Studios in Wales Noel Gallagher thumped his brother back with a cricket bat. When they weren't physically assaulting each other, they were smashed out of their minds insulting Michael Hutchinson or Phil Collins. Their contempt and arrogance might have owed something to punk and the Stone Roses’ ‘we’re the most important group in the world’ shtick, but Oasis quickly outgrew both. They were soon at the epicentre of Britpop, with a headline-grabbing, class-inflected rivalry with Blur. At the height of Cool Britannia, Noel Gallagher heralded prime minister-in-waiting Tony Blair and was invited to Downing Street after Blair's 1997 election victory. Oasis were, quite simply, a cultural behemoth. At the time it felt almost impossible to hear their music clearly above the surrounding noise.

Tracklist

1. Rock 'n' Roll Star

2. Shakermaker

3. Live Forever

4. Up In The Sky

5. Columbia

6. Supersonic

7. Bring It On Down

8. Cigarettes & Alcohol

9. Digsy's Dinner

10. Slide Away

11. Married With Children

“Listening to the band's rudimentary and derivative moving parts thirty years later, it is easy to conclude that the tumult surrounding the band lent the music something which simply isn't there on the master tape.”

But now, thirty years on, we can. Without the Union Jacks, New Labour or tabloid headlines, Definitely Maybe sounds different. Oasis might have borrowed some of their attitude from the Stone Roses, but they were unable to emulate their fellow Mancunians’ musical virtuosity. On the evidence of an initial re-spin, the lads sound like mediocre musicians trudging along at mid-tempo. The drumming is unrelentingly dull, the rhythm guitar cycles languidly through the chords, and Noel Gallagher’s lead guitar, particularly when placed alongside contemporaries Johnny Marr and Graham Coxon, sounds lifeless. Liam Gallagher had a strong voice but he elongated his vowels just like Johnny Rotten, reminding us that Oasis couldn't achieve the Sex Pistols’ ferocity. Close your eyes and on certain tracks you could be in The Queen's Head in Stockport or Croydon listening to the local pub rock band. The much-discussed accusations of plagiarism only add to the sense of something staidly unoriginal, and the music which isn't open to claims of copyright infringement clings to bygone eras to such an extent it borders on pastiche. Some passages of Definitely Maybe are so close to the Beatles’ ‘Rain’, the B-side to the 1966 single ‘Paperback Writer’, it is uncanny.

Listening to the band's rudimentary and derivative moving parts thirty years later then, it is easy to conclude that the tumult surrounding the band lent the music something which simply isn't there on the master tape.

But then: the more you listen, the more you hear something else, something honest and uncynical. The blaze of guitars concreting over every inch of ‘Rock 'n' Roll Star’, the glittering guitars counterpointing on the intro of ‘Shakermaker’. The tunes begin to hook in again and the brothers’ occasional harmonies come through, along with the sour notes of Noel Gallagher's guitar, half-buried in the noise. The thematic mould and album’s standout track, ‘Live Forever’, rolls along on the great wheels of Noel Gallagher's chiming chords; it has that irreducible magic of a melody intoxicating enough to convince you of a lyric’s impossible dream. And what you begin to hear is Noel Gallagher three decades ago, with his Beatles haircut and wearing his Adidas tracksuit top, driving past Sifters record shop, or listening to Revolver in his bedroom. This might be derivative of mid-60s Beatles, T. Rex and the rest but it is turbocharged with brash guitars – the lyrics laced with kitchen sink details of nineties Manchester: lasagna for tea, the rain that ‘soaks you to the bone’ and a jobless life of ‘cigarettes and alcohol’. Yet the Beatles’ ‘sip lemonade when the sun shines’ optimism is still there, translated into plainspoken aphorisms, all the more powerful for their apparent innocence: ‘you've got to make it happen’ and ‘you need to be yourself’. Three decades after the cultural noise has passed, it is this boisterous kernel of self-reliant positivity which rings out loud and true. The fact Oasis were working-class made their ‘go and realise your dreams’, world-conquering ambition genuinely inspiring. It was a message heard by many.

Speaking on BBC Radio 2, Scottish comedian Kevin Bridges recounted watching an Oasis gig on a VHS cassette. It made him realise ‘the only thing that's maybe holding (him) back is just going for it’. The same evening he sent an email about an open mic slot. Fellow comedian Rob Beckett said on the Jonathan Ross Show earlier this year: ‘when you are a working-class kid hearing these songs it makes you feel like you can go off and do things’. During a decade in which John Major and Tony Blair made grand speeches about creating a classless Britain, Oasis’s debut album was a manifesto for life with genuine transformative power. The album’s despite-all optimism comes from a very special place, a place Noel Gallagher understood very well all those years ago. It was a secret your parents will never understand: what it is like to be young, when the future is wide open. Oasis’s Definitely Maybe is that secret writ large: you are going to live forever, wherever you come from.