History
The album's title was taken from the words made famous by Sir Isaac Newton: "If I can see further than anyone else, it is only because I am standing on the shoulders of giants". Noel Gallagher saw the quote on the side of a £2 coin while in a pub and liked it so much he thought it would be a suitable name for Oasis' new album. He then wrote the name on the side of a cigarette packet while drunk. When he awoke in the morning, he realised he had written "Standing on the Shoulder of Giants".
Due to the departure of Alan McGee and two original band members, Bonehead and Guigsy, while the album was still in production, their parts had to be re-recorded for legal reasons. Thus, the album only features the Gallagher brothers and Alan White, and the sleeve of the album also features them.
Noel decided to drop the equipment used in the three previous albums and instead buy "loads of really weird pedals, old guitars, and small amps", as the lack of deadline to deliver the album allowed Gallagher to "take quite a few days just messing around" and attempt new musical sonorities.
Read more about this topic: Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment’s comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)