Oasis: Time Flies...

Shakermaker

I was laid in my bed, the walls around me were familiar but they weren't the ones I grew up in, the womb of my childhood. The one place I was remotely happy. I was comfy here, I didn't hate it or anything but I wanted to be back there more than anything.

I wanted to build myself a house out of plasticine, to escape to childhood, when everything was simpler.

Hidden under the warmth of the duvet, hidden from the world, completely preoccupied with the music videos my phone played in front of my eyes.

Hours or days might have past. I didn't know and it didn't matter. All that mattered was the endless songs I'd played on Youtube, staring into my phone screen in my otherwise dark room.

Liam smiles a cheeky smile into the camera, an innocent young man as his friends mess around on a council estate in Manchester. His fringe in a curtain parting, his dark blue shirt that could fit someone double his size, the way he wandered around in the long grass.

"I'd like to be somebody else and not know where I've been." Liam's slow Mancunian drawl draws me into the song as it did with everything he sang.

"Yes, please." I thought, I'd like exactly that, to be somebody else.

His brother looks dead serious, always straight edged yet there was glimpses of a smile to be seen. Noel always looked so serious in videos, except that drunk smile in Whatever.

They're all concentrating on their instruments, Noel, Guigsy, Bonehead and Tony, pretending to play the song while Liam mouths along to the words.

Liam stares right at me, his Gallagher blue eyes mesmerise me.

"Shake along with me!" His hand reaches out, it's no longer pixels making up an image, it was there in the flesh.

I didn't think, I just took hold of it like there was no choice for me at all and he pulled me into his reality.

I landed on that random settee abandoned in the garden, sat right next to him. He put his arm around me and pulled close me close to him in a hug. He was so comforting, so gentle.

The last time I was in 1994 I was just a baby, since I was an adult this time and accepting this was impossible, I expected to wake up (I had to have fallen asleep and this was a dream) but I didn't.

He didn't question how I got there and neither did I, neither did anyone else there.

"This is our Strawberry Fields Forever, int it?" he commented before closing his eyes and quietly singing "Living is easy with eyes closed."

I hadn't thought of it like that but he was right, the whole video was them hanging out where they grew up, playing footie, messing around. It was like the Beatles' video but much more subtle in showing their childlike nature.

"Yeah, it is." I agreed.

He was so calm, so happy, so carefree, nothing like the Liam I knew he could be and liked to prove he was. The fighting, the arguing, the swearing, this Liam wouldn't do any of that.

I looked around noticing there were no cameras or anything they'd need to film a music video and yet the events of the video continued on.

"Come on, let's go." Liam took my hand again and we drove in some old yellow car.

I knew exactly we were going although no one told me and I didn't know Manchester.

Back in their back garden Bonehead showed off a signed Man City football, Liam pointed the signatures out, impressed, baffled that they owned such prized memorabilia. Of course none of those names meant anything to me but I smiled along anyway.

Tony ignored me, he had no time for me, far too preoccupied with his drumming. Bonehead was the same with his guitar but Noel gave me an intense stare as I walked right up close to him.

He fascinated me, the brothers fascinated me, how Liam was so free while Noel was so rigid in his place.

Liam didn't mind me circling him, while Guigsy looked away, looking shy when I got close.

Guigsy gave me a ride on the back of his motorbike, to the football field.

He runs around still with his helmet on, running right at me, staring at me with his huge brown eyes. I stand back and watch their skills, him heading the ball, still with his helmet on, the tackles that make Premier League players look like pub team players.

Back to those familiar red brick walls and grey paved floor, the overgrown green grass and bushes, the only sign of life, of nature to be seen. Everyone stands like they're fixed to the ground, everyone but me.

Noel stares as he plays, Liam stares as he sings, I don't mind, I could watch them play like this forever.

Out of the car and into that oh so famous record store, Sifters we go. Liam picks out Paul McCartney's album Red Rose Speedway from the boxes and showed it to me. I didn't know it but he thought it was cool, it was a Beatle's work, of course he thought it was cool. I thought he was cool with his fringe parted again, sunglasses on indoors and a straight face.

On the way home Bonehead cracks the funniest joke any of us had ever heard. We were all splitting ribs, laughing. I hadn't laughed anything like that in ages or never before in this year.

Nothing distracts Noel, nothing but the annoying kid sat on the wall above him, kicking his foot against the bricks just to get a look in on what we were doing. Noel throws a look at him for just a moment, the kind that might say "Stop it or I'll kill your children's children."

Liam gives me a lesson in music I didn't know I needed. Clapping to the beat and a crash course in air guitar. I clap along with him and play air guitar too, beaming at him the whole time.

The kids chase me away down the garden alleyways, all laughing their heads off thinking they're hilarious. The lads continue to play, doing nothing to deter the kids from their neighbourhood.

I find Liam using a flower as his mic, singing, always singing with his beautiful, serenading voice until the day was coming to an end.

The lads abandoned their instruments and we sat around in the garden. The kids went home as it got dark and we watched the sunset, sat together on a warm summer's night.

We chatted through the night like we'd known each other forever, I knew them from the millions of interviews I'd watched but it was nothing like the blissful lads I knew now.

The next morning we woke up and did it all again, every moment played out exactly the same from start to finish and I still wasn't bored of watching them play.