Owen Morris talks about Tony McCarroll/Alan White

Tony’s drumming. It was simple, certainly, but his timing was immaculate and he hit the shit out of them. Tony’s simple patterns allowed the space for Bonehead’s strumming rhythm guitar playing to really work. On record, Noel mostly played the bass, but on what Guigs did play – particularly live – he was solid and right. I loved the sound of Oasis with Tony drumming. There was magic in the dumbness of the rhythm tracks. The band never sounded the same after Tony left.

Now, given that I knew instantly that Tony was extremely basic in what he did after listening to his drumming on Rock ‘n’ Roll Star, but that his timing and tempo were almost autistically perfect, I set up a big regenerating tape delay doing eight time notes on Tony’s drums, which subliminally added groove and offbeats. Then I also added the Visconti Harmoniser trick to the snare to add subliminal depth and rhythm.

After these two very basic tricks, which I subsequently used as something to tell people that I was ripping off Spector and Visconti, I just did what I wanted. I heavily compressed the overall drum sound. Squeezing it so every hit was the same. I’d also program a tambourine to play along with the snare drum when I felt it helped. Anything to make the rhythm track exciting and grooving. The most obvious use of the tape delay trick can be heard on Columbia, where the actual recording of the drums and bass is just doing four beats in a bar, I doubled up the bass drum, snare and bass guitar to create the eight beats in a bar, faster, pumping rhythm.

Alan was very obviously different from Tony. He was intelligent and articulate and a real musician for a start. I was never a big fan of Alan’s drumming really, even though he played on the most successful recordings I’ve made so far. Alan’s essentially a jazz drummer. He is NOT a rock band drummer. He was always shuffling away on his snare (which actually became the signature rhythm of Wonderwall), and never hitting the basic back beats in a dumb rock and roll way. Also, because Alan’s brother Steve was in Paul Weller’s band, and Paul Weller’s producer employed a “proper engineer”, Alan always thought I wasn’t capturing his true sound (man!). But I always thought Alan never actually hit his drums hard enough or actually understood the basic Oasis sound.

But recording him on Morning Glory was a complete pleasure. He was a professional and Noel enjoyed sitting in the studio with him while Alan did his drum takes and being able to talk musically/part wise to a drummer who could quickly understand and then actually play what Noel was imagining. So, ultimately, certainly for the recording of the Morning Glory album, Alan was the right man at the right time.