The Masterplan

Too Good for a B-Side

There is a small, well-documented irony at the heart of one of the greatest songs of the Britpop era. In October 1995, as Oasis released "Wonderwall" and secured their place as the most important band in Britain, they quietly buried what Noel Gallagher would later call his favorite song he had ever written on the back of that single's CD format.^[1] It reached no chart position of its own. Nobody made a video for it. Most people who bought the record never flipped it over.

The song was "The Masterplan." Creation Records founder Alan McGee warned Noel that it was "too good" to be a B-side.^[1] Noel dismissed the warning. "I don't write shit songs," he reportedly replied.^[1] Years later, he conceded that McGee had a point.^[3]

Hotel Room, Tokyo, 1995

Noel Gallagher wrote "The Masterplan" in a hotel room in Japan during a 1995 tour, reportedly in the early hours of the morning.^[2] He has described it as the kind of composition that arrives fully formed, without effort. The track was recorded in September 1995 at Maison Rouge Studios in London, produced by Noel and Owen Morris, the same engineer who shaped the sound of (What's the Story) Morning Glory?.^[3]

The recording is notable for who is absent. Liam Gallagher does not sing on it. Paul McGuigan, the band's bassist, does not appear either.^[2] Noel sang lead vocals himself, played bass, and oversaw a lavish orchestral arrangement featuring strings and brass, organized with help from arranger Nick Ingman.^[3] For a B-side, the production ambition is extraordinary.

The "Wonderwall" single arrived at the absolute peak of Oasis's creative powers, in the months between Definitely Maybe and (What's the Story) Morning Glory?. Noel's songwriting was so prolific during this period that he felt comfortable letting genuinely exceptional material serve in a supporting role. He has cited The Jam and The Smiths as models for his B-side approach: single-buyers deserved new, quality material rather than remixes.^[4] The irony is that he applied this philosophy so generously that some of his finest work ended up where most listeners never heard it.

There Is No Masterplan

What is the song actually about? Noel has offered a remarkably candid gloss: "I suppose it's saying that there is no masterplan."^[1] He described it elsewhere as being about people's fear of growing old.^[9] The liner notes he wrote for the 1998 compilation are perhaps the most precise summary: "This sums up your journey through life. All we know is that we don't know."^[2]

These statements together form the song's philosophical center. It is a piece about uncertainty faced with equanimity. Life has no hidden blueprint. We age, and this frightens us. And yet the song does not leave its listener stranded in nihilism.

Its emotional arc moves from the acknowledgment of uncertainty toward something warmer and more communal. Noel has noted that references to brothers in the song extend beyond his relationship with Liam to something universal. "We're all brothers, aren't we? Brothers and sisters,"^[2] he said. Solidarity becomes the answer to existential uncertainty: if there is no plan, at least there are other people on the journey with you.

There is a tension in the arrangement that reflects this duality precisely. The song opens with intimate acoustic guitar, one voice speaking directly. Then the strings enter. Then the brass. By its close, the piece has expanded into something grand and almost ceremonial, a small private thought transformed into a communal statement. Noel described it as "quite melancholy but quite uplifting in the same way,"^[1] and the architecture of the track enacts exactly this transformation. A reversed guitar solo in the bridge adds further dimension, a moment of sonic disorientation that seems to suggest the value of looking at things from an unexpected angle.^[3]

One Night at the Royal Festival Hall

The song found its first large audience not through radio but through one of the defining moments of 1990s rock television. In August 1996, Noel performed a solo acoustic set for MTV Unplugged at the Royal Festival Hall in London.^[6] Liam, citing a sore throat, declined to take the stage and sat in the balcony instead. Noel delivered the set alone, including "The Masterplan," to a room that had expected the full band.^[6] The performance is now remembered as one of the great solo sets of the era.

By the time Creation Records assembled the 1998 compilation The Masterplan, naming it after this song and placing it as the closing track, the decision felt symbolic. The collection gathered fourteen B-sides from 1994 to 1997 and arrived during Oasis's first serious credibility crisis, in the aftermath of the divisive Be Here Now.^[5] It served as a quiet counter-argument: during their peak years, even the Oasis throwaways were extraordinary.

NME's James Oldham ranked the compilation as Oasis's "third best album," a judgment that says as much about the quality of the B-side material as it does about the inconsistency of their official releases.^[5] The collection reached No. 2 in the UK and sold approximately three million copies worldwide.^[5] Melody Maker named it the year's best compilation.^[5] As recently as 2025, it received a new platinum certification in the UK, signaling that new listeners continue to discover it.^[2]

The song itself has been ranked among Oasis's ten greatest tracks by Rolling Stone^[7] and appears on the 2006 best-of compilation Stop the Clocks, for which an animated music video was produced. The video, directed by Ben and Greg, draws on the paintings of L.S. Lowry and traces the Gallaghers' journey from their working-class upbringing in Burnage, Manchester, to global stardom.^[8] It is a piece of deliberate mythologizing that suits the song's own ambitions.

The View from Burnage

One reading of the song focuses on class and aspiration. The Gallagher brothers grew up on a council estate in south Manchester under difficult circumstances; their father was frequently abusive and their mother effectively raised them alone. The path from that upbringing to stadiums was not, on paper, likely. A song insisting there is no masterplan, that nobody knows where the journey leads, reads differently against that biographical backdrop. The absence of a plan can be liberating: if there is no fixed order, boys from Burnage can fill Knebworth.

Another reading dwells on the sibling relationship at the band's center. The Gallagher brothers were famously combative, their dynamic at once the engine of the band's energy and the source of its eventual dissolution. A song about brothers, about the journey through life, about solidarity in the face of uncertainty, carries additional weight when you know its author spent two decades working alongside someone he loved and fought with in equal measure. Noel has maintained the brotherhood references are universal. The personal layer is nevertheless hard to ignore.^[6]

Everything Else Was the B-Side

"The Masterplan" is remarkable not simply for its quality, though it is a beautiful piece of music. It is remarkable for what its existence reveals about its author at a particular moment in his career. Noel Gallagher in 1995 was so confident in his abilities, so certain of his command of the craft, that he let a track he loved sit in the margins because the foreground was already crowded with exceptional things.^[4]

The 1998 album that bears its name arrived as a post-hoc correction, a chance for the song and its companions to take their proper place in the Oasis canon. It closes that compilation, sitting at the back of fourteen tracks. The unspoken implication is clear: everything you just heard was the B-side material.

Noel's own gloss, "All we know is that we don't know," sounds simple until you sit with it. It is not despair. It is an acknowledgment, made gently and with full orchestral accompaniment, that uncertainty is part of the experience rather than a problem to be solved. The masterplan, if there was ever going to be one, was always going to turn out to be exactly this.