Recalling the day Oasis became a still life in our window - Kevin Buckle

Promoting the Oasis single Don’t Look Back In Anger in 1996

At the start of January in 1996 I received a call from Creation Records to say they were looking to do something quite special to promote the new Oasis single Don’t Look Back In Anger due out the following month.

Their plan was to recreate the single cover in a small number of record shop windows and would we be interested.

It meant removing everything we had in the left window in our West Nicolson Street shop including a rack, but I felt it was worth it. I was later told two other shops had agreed, one in London and one in Manchester, though I later heard that the Manchester display did not go ahead.

When I say recreate I do mean recreate and we were told a white piano had been sourced from Varsity Music just around the corner and they would be providing the other instruments needed too with a matching drum skin to be sent up to the shop by the label.

That still left the flowers and with the piano installed in time for the weekend ready for the Monday release a van turned up on the Friday full of flowers. It certainly was a faithful representation of the single cover and caused a lot of comment, though oddly despite informing all the media outlets only one ran an article with a picture which I do still have somewhere.

It did look great and the label and their distributor were more than happy with the result. On the Wednesday the flower van turned up again with an entirely new batch of flowers as seemingly even though it was February the label had worried the flowers might have wilted and need replacing. As it turned out the flowers in the window looked fine and it was definitely not worth disturbing them so we donated the flowers to a local hospital.

The single of course went to number one and became their second biggest selling single after Wonderwall at a time when even to the biggest bands having a number one single or album meant a lot which brings me to the second much shorter story.

In the August of the following year Oasis we due to release their third album Be Here Now and again I received a phone call. There was no doubt that the album would be number one but the label was worried that it would sell so many copies in the first week that it would not stay at the top longer than a week or two and be deemed a failure.

They had heard that computer games were kept at number one by only releasing a certain amount of stock each week, therefore spreading the sales out over a longer period and wondered what I thought. I explained that was absolutely madness and thankfully I heard no more about it and the album spent five weeks at the top anyway.

In next week’s column, the time Oasis sat drinking in the pub under our Cockburn Street shop after their 2009 Murrayfield gig.