The song was written and recorded in one eveningDan Haygarth Liverpool Daily Post Editor and Regeneration Reporter
19:12, 28 Jun 2025
The Motor Museum Recording Studio on Lark Lane in Liverpool(Image: Liverpool Echo)
Oasis may be one of Manchester’s most famous exports but Merseyside played a vital role in the band’s rise to fame. They were famously inspired by the music of The Beatles but they were also helped by a Bootle group in their early days.
After meeting then-roadie Noel Gallagher while on tour with the Inspiral Carpets, The Real People took the budding songwriter under their wing, later inviting him and Oasis to record their first ever demo at their studio near Liverpool’s Northern Docks. That demo – known as Live Demonstration – secured the band a record deal after it was handed to Creation Records’ Alan McGee, who spotted them at a gig in Glasgow in May 1993.
The Real People acted as mentors to Oasis as they began to make their name in late 1993 and 1994. Their time working closely together took in nights out in Bootle and on Lark Lane, as the Manchester band recorded their debut single ‘Supersonic’ at Aigburth’s Motor Museum studio (then called the Pink Museum) – in a December 1993 session The Real People helped to organise.
However, ‘Supersonic’ was not the track they planned to record in that session at the studio in a converted warehouse on Hesketh Street, just off Lark Lane. It is believed they had planned to record ‘Bring It On Down’ but it was not coming together.
Not wanting to return to Creation empty handed after a day at the studio, the band decided to change tack. It led Noel to write what would become the band’s first hit in record time.
As the ECHO visited the Motor Museum this week, owner Al Groves, 38, explained the Oasis story has been passed down from between owners of the building. The studio was established in 1988 by Hambi Haralambous, a legend of the Liverpool music scene, in the former warehouse which had briefly been a classic car museum.
Al Groves, producer and owner of The Motor Museum Recording Studio(Image: Liverpool Echo)
Of the Gallaghers’ time there, Al told the ECHO: “Oasis were getting an enormous amount of attention and a lot of expectation was getting piled on that band. The obvious choice was whether they went to London and had the big city lifestyle and all the wooing.
“I think it was decided between the band and their management that wasn’t going to breed the best work, it would be very distracting.
“So to keep them closer to home would be a sensible thing – somewhere where they could develop and gestate and create music without as much expectation and pressure. They happened to be really good friends with a band called The Real People.
“I don’t know why Liverpool was suggested. You would be surprised, with the Manchester and Liverpool rivalry, that it happened but it somehow did. The Real People were managed at the time by Hambi, so there was probably a thing of ‘Hambi, this is our mate’s band, look after them’. It was very casual.
Al added: “There was an engineer here called Dave Scott. Oasis came in here to record a song, they worked all day, it was pencilled to be the single but it just wasn’t happening.
“They got to the evening and everyone was frustrated because they were working all day on the song and it wasn’t coming together.
“It would have been a difficult sell to go back to Creation, their label, and say ‘we’ve had this session and it didn’t bear fruit’. So at the end of it, Dave said to Noel ‘do you have any other songs – any we could start, so we have something to show for it?’.
“Noel said ‘hold on, I’ve been working on this chord progression’. It became ‘Supersonic’. The band went off for dinner, Noel went upstairs and half an hour later, he came back and had finished the song.
A sitting area where Noel Gallagher composed Supersonic in The Motor Museum Recording Studio(Image: Liverpool Echo)
“He wrote ‘Supersonic’ up on the couch in half an hour, wrote the lyrics on the spot and they recorded it that evening. It was one of the shortest recording sessions of a huge single that there’s ever been.
“They were recording a demo but kept the demo. Dave Scott is a really well respected engineer. That session was only meant to be a demo, it was never meant to be released to the public.
“He thought that they’d come back in a week and do it properly. But they released it as it was.”
Last year, Chris Griffiths from The Real People told the ECHO about what it was like to be involved in the session.
He said: “We took them into the studio on Lark Lane to do Supersonic. The whole reason we did the demos was that we were mates and we had a studio and they didn’t, but we could also see the potential in them.
“So then, when they more or less got signed, we got put in the studio with them because we did the demos. Because we were all matey really, it was all like a team.
“There was me, Tony (Griffiths, his brother and band member), Dave Scott, Mark Hoyle – we all went into the Pink.
“We were all sort of producing it. I think they were there to record something else – I think it was ‘Bring It On Down’. We were setting up and they were jamming this song. I actually thought it was a song of ours – ‘Car Outside’ – which is a little bit similar.
“They were jamming and we had a good sound so then we set up. Once again, we needed to get them to play live.
“They stopped playing what they were playing and started another song, it might have been ‘Bring It On Down’ – and they said ‘right, we’ll just record this first’. Our kid (brother Tony Griffiths) said: ‘What are you doing? What you’re playing right now doesn’t sound as good as what we were recording on the sound checks just before’.”
Tony knew whatever they were playing in the initial jam would become a hit. The intervention worked.
“We scrapped what we were doing and just recorded that brand new idea”, explained Chris. “We recorded it first and it was only after we recorded that brand new instrumental that Noel started writing the lyrics. He was in there playing and then just went out and wrote.”
It seems Oasis enjoyed their time in Merseyside. Chris explained that the two bands bonded over their shared love for music and writing songs, as the Gallaghers took a liking to our region’s pubs.
Chris and Tony Griffiths from The Real People outside their former studio on Porter Street, Liverpool(Image: John Johnson)
He said: “While we were doing this, we went out for a f***ing good laugh. We took them out on Lark Lane, we went to The Albert, and we’d taken them to pubs around Bootle before, like The Shakespeare.
“We had some good nights out in Bootle and they’d stay in my flat on Hawthorn Road, the lot of them.”
“We had the same sense of humour and we were all into the same sort of things. We were having a great time, there was no rivalry at all – we didn’t even talk about football.
“At the time, I don’t think Manchester City were any good. We’re Evertonians and we were never doing that well.
“The ’90s were bleak for us but I’m pretty sure they got relegated to the third division in the ’90s. We didn’t really bother with talking about football, we were just really into music and really into the process of writing songs.
“We look back so fondly. It was just great that we were an integral part in the success of the biggest rock and roll band of the last 40 years. We’re just so happy that we were involved. Without us, it wouldn’t have happened.”
To read last year’s full interview with Chris about The Real People’s time with Oasis, click here.