Incredibly, some critics were lukewarm about Oasis’s second album, with one calling it “laboured and lazy” and another dismissing it as a “marginally less hook-laden reprise” of their debut.
But (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? went on to become the bestselling British album of the 90s and a guitar Noel Gallagher used to write it will, Sotheby’s has announced, be a star lot of its April rock and pop sale.
Gallagher’s signed Epiphone EJ-200 acoustic guitar will feature alongside a handwritten lyric sheet for Don’t Look Back in Anger and a Rickenbacker 12-string guitar used by Gallagher for a decade.
Craig Inciardi, Sotheby’s New York-based pop culture specialist, said Gallagher used acoustic guitars to write a lot of the band’s songs and the jumbo-sized one up for sale was “typical of what he plays to this day”.
The guitar comes with a letter of authenticity stating it was used throughout the making of the album, which was recorded in just 15 days.
“It was quite extraordinary how they managed to record it in such a fast period of time,” said Inciardi. “He was just so prolific at the time … with the amount of songs that were coming out of him, it’s almost unprecedented. And if you look at that album and you look at the track listing, it looks like a greatest hits album.”
Its songs include Don’t Look Back in Anger, Wonderwall, Morning Glory, Some Might Say and Champagne Supernova.
It sold a phenomenal 350,000 copies in its first week of release in October 1995 and would go on to sell 22m, making it one of the top 50 of all time.
Roll With It, also on the album, was a major player in that summer’s “Battle of Britpop” rivalry with Blur.
It prompted a media frenzy, with the Guardian sending out reporters to talk to fans in record shops to assess who was winning the chart battle between Oasis’s Roll With It and Blur’s Country House.
“Working-class heroes lead art-school trendies”, read the resulting Guardian headline. The Los Angeles Times called it “The Battle of Britain”.
The story seemed to drag on for ages, with the Wall Street Journal, in January 1996, declaring: “There is no sitting on the fence. Either you are a Blur fan or you are for Oasis.
“Yet unlike the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, to whom Blur and Oasis are endlessly compared, there has been real acrimony in this rivalry.”
The guitar was given by Gallagher to a roadie and it was bought from them by the person selling it, Inciardi said. “He is a huge Oasis fan. He was in the social circles of people who were around the band at the time.”
For fans and collectors, guitars like the one on sale are “holy grails” or relics, said Inciardi. “These are functional objects that have become so sought after and the value of musical instruments that have this sort of historic provenance has significantly increased over time.”
The guitar, which is being auctioned for the first time, has an estimate of $60,000-$80,000 (£45,000-£60,000). Online bidding for the auction opens on 9 April.