18 January 1998
Nine minutes thirty-eight seconds is the sort of running time you’d normally associate with the spin cycle of a washing machine, but it’s actually what made ‘All Around The World’ for years our longest-ever number one single, until it was finally surpassed in 2021. To give us some yardsticks for this, ‘Hey Jude’ la-la-las along to a leisurely seven minutes and eleven seconds, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ zips by in a thunderbolt-and-lightning five minutes and fifty-five seconds, and ‘Riverdance’ crams a whole four-movement suite into five minutes and forty-eight seconds. The video below snips it down to seven minutes, which will only have you wondering what the two-minute offcut must have been like.
The long running time here is a fair indication of how bloated and gaseous this thing is. If you’re a young person and are only learning about Oasis for the first time here, perhaps as a school history assignment, they were a Beatles cosplay act with notions. So, ‘All Around The World’ has ‘All You Need Is Love’ as its template, starts off with a poor attempt at a Ringo-ism (“It’s a bit early in the midnight hour for me”), throws in a whole orchestra, then contrives a Jude-esque “la la la” singalong coda. Oh, and they get their own entire Yellow Submarine video. As an added bonus, there are two key changes, something we haven’t seen in an Irish number one since the Goombay Dance Band’s horrendous ‘Seven Tears’ in 1982. It’s all just cheap, lazy bombast by a band wilfully wasting our time as a flex. Never mind the quality, feel the length.
