The Masterplan

The Masterplan is Oasis’s B-sides compilation, released on 2 November 1998 on Creation Records. It gathers 14 songs the band gave away as B-sides on singles from their first three albums. The album peaked at number two on the UK Albums Chart, and fans routinely rank it among the band’s best records of any kind.

Every track on the album started life as a supporting act. In the CD single era, Oasis filled their singles with full new songs rather than remixes and edits. The Masterplan collects the strongest of those songs into one record, and the Oasis albums hub shows where the collection sits in the catalogue.

How was The Masterplan put together?

The songs come from sessions spread across 1993 to 1997. The band recorded them alongside the singles for Definitely Maybe, Morning Glory and Be Here Now, with Owen Morris and Noel Gallagher producing. Because the material spans four years, the album plays like a shadow history of the band’s imperial phase.

Creation aimed the collection at overseas fans first. In the United States and Japan, the B-sides existed only on European import singles that cost far more than a domestic album. The compilation put those songs on general release, in one place, for the first time.

Commercially, the idea landed at home as well. The Masterplan sold about 122,000 copies in its first UK week and reached number two, held off the top despite its strong start. It was also the final Oasis release on Creation, the label the band had defined and outgrown.

The track sources read like a singles history in miniature, and Some Might Say alone contributes three songs: Acquiesce, Talk Tonight and Headshrinker. Cigarettes & Alcohol contributes three more: Fade Away, Listen Up and I Am the Walrus. One four-track CD single carried real weight in 1994.

Twenty-five years later, the album returned to the same position.

The 25th anniversary reissue in 2023 took it back to number two on the UK chart. The BPI certifies the album 3x Platinum, a remarkable total for a record of songs the band once gave away free with singles.

The sequencing rewards close reading as well. The album opens with Acquiesce, a song fans had chanted for three years, and it closes with the title track. That final placing quietly argues the whole collection deserved full album status all along.

At the time, its timing could have hurt it. The album arrived fifteen months after Be Here Now, with no new studio record behind it, and fans still treated the leftovers as an event.

Which songs define The Masterplan?

Acquiesce opens the album and sets its standard. The track backed the Some Might Say single in 1995, and it pairs Liam’s verses with a Noel-sung chorus about friendship. Fans have treated it as a lost single ever since, and it opens Oasis concerts to this day.

Talk Tonight carries the album’s most famous back-story: Noel wrote it after walking out on the band during a disastrous American tour in 1994. A conversation with a fan in San Francisco talked him back to the group. The acoustic recording still sounds like the moment itself: exhausted, relieved and quietly defiant.

Half the World Away reached its audience sideways, backing Whatever in 1994 before The Royle Family made it a BBC sitcom theme. Noel’s gentle vocal made it the rare Oasis B-side that non-fans know by heart. Its own story sits on the Half the World Away page.

The Masterplan closes the album and justifies its title. Noel has called the song one of the best he ever wrote, and he has admitted regretting its release as the B-side of Wonderwall. Orchestral, patient and sung by Noel, it sounds like a finale, and The Masterplan song page tells its full story.

Going Nowhere, the Stand by Me B-side, supplies one of the album’s most reflective moments. (It’s Good) To Be Free, the other Whatever B-side, pairs with it as the collection’s thoughtful heart.

Around those four peaks, Underneath the Sky, Listen Up and Rockin’ Chair each run deep with their own advocates. A live cover of The Beatles’ I Am the Walrus captures the 1994 band at full swagger. Stay Young, the Be Here Now era B-side, supplied the sound of a generation keeping its chin up.

How did The Masterplan do on release?

On release, the album reached number two in the UK and stayed there. Critics treated it less like a stopgap and more like a fourth classic album arriving a year after Be Here Now.

Its reputation has only grown since 1998. Four of its songs later reappeared on Stop the Clocks, the best-of Noel curated in 2006. That choice confirms the material’s standing inside the band’s own canon, and it ends the argument about their quality.

For new listeners, the album solves a practical problem. Hunting down fourteen CD singles from the nineties costs time and money, and several vanished from the catalogue decades ago. The Masterplan gathers the era’s essential extras in album order, remastered and still in print.

How does The Masterplan stand now?

Today, the album anchors most arguments about the band’s peak depth. Writers cite it whenever they discuss how casually Noel spent great songs in the mid-nineties. Fans defend it as a better record than several studio albums, because the quality across the 14 tracks barely dips.

Meanwhile, the compilation also changed how the band’s catalogue is judged. A normal act gets measured by its albums, but Oasis gets measured by albums plus this parallel songbook running underneath them. Any honest ranking of their work has to make room for The Masterplan near the top.

The album also reframed what a B-side could be worth in British music. After The Masterplan, fans began judging acts by the songs they gave away, not only by the singles they kept. Oasis’s extras had become a parallel catalogue, and every British guitar band after them inherited that standard.

On the practical side, the album remains easy to buy and stream in its remastered anniversary form. NME covered the 2023 reissue as a major catalogue event, and the chart return that year proved the demand was real. Few B-sides collections by any band have lived a longer commercial life.

Will you hear The Masterplan at Live ‘27?

Acquiesce gives the album a permanent seat in the modern Oasis set. The band restored the song as their concert opener for the reunion, and its dual vocal makes it a signature moment of the night. It appears in full on the live tracker.

Still, the title track and Half the World Away hold strong claims beyond it. Noel’s two big B-sides suit his mid-set acoustic turn, and each drew huge reactions whenever the band aired them in later years. Talk Tonight belongs to the same family of candidates, though the band reaches for it more rarely.

Four songs from this collection sat in the 2025 blueprint. The night-by-night Live ‘27 tracker will record any change from the first night in Glasgow. Listen Up and Headshrinker complete the longlist of plausible rotations from its fourteen tracks. This album supplies more setlist contenders per track than any Oasis release outside the first two studio albums.

Acquiesce paired Liam Gallagher and Noel Gallagher on shared vocals. Noel Gallagher sang Talk Tonight, Half the World Away and The Masterplan in the blueprint set.

No other song from this collection has been confirmed for 2027. Any extra B-side return stays a rumour until a played setlist confirms it.