Oasis released Stop the Clocks in the UK on November 20, 2006. Noel Gallagher selected 18 songs for the compilation, giving B-sides such as “Acquiesce” and “The Masterplan” room alongside “Wonderwall” and “Don’t Look Back in Anger.” Across two CDs, the collection made the songs originally tucked behind singles a central part of the band’s story.
That was a significant change of position for Gallagher. In an August 2005 interview with NME, he had insisted that “we will only do a best of when we split up.” Sony requested a compilation after Oasis completed their six-album deal, as Noel explained to The Guardian in 2006. The release announcement described the band’s break as a pause before work on new material. The question became which songs would represent Oasis while the band still had more records to make.
The balance leaned heavily toward the beginning. Definitely Maybe and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? supplied five tracks each, with four B-sides from the same early period taking the total to 14 of the collection’s 18 songs. The 1997 album Be Here Now was absent. That omission wasn’t unanimous: NME reported in November 2006 that Liam Gallagher wanted “Rockin’ Chair” and “D’You Know What I Mean?” included. Noel told The Sun that the latter had survived until just before mastering, when he removed it because its length disrupted the running order.
The sequencing mixed different periods of the band’s catalog. The first disc opened with “Rock ’n’ Roll Star,” then moved through “Some Might Say” and “Talk Tonight” before reaching “Lyla” and “The Importance of Being Idle,” both from Don’t Believe the Truth. Those 2005 recordings appeared among the early songs. “The Masterplan” closed disc one; “Don’t Look Back in Anger” finished disc two. Read as a sequence, the collection suggests that how the songs fitted together mattered more than presenting a chronological history.
The B-sides also drove the release campaign. “Acquiesce” had originally accompanied “Some Might Say” in 1995, while “The Masterplan” appeared on the “Wonderwall” single that year. Both returned on the four-track Stop the Clocks EP, released a week before the compilation alongside a “Cigarettes & Alcohol” demo and a live recording of “Some Might Say.” “The Masterplan” received an animated promotional video in 2006, giving a song from the band’s singles catalog a fresh visual identity as it helped introduce the retrospective.
One song the collection didn’t contain was “Stop the Clocks.” The title came from an unreleased Gallagher composition, but the song never became a bonus track on the album that bore its name. Oasis went on to release Dig Out Your Soul in 2008.
The missing song followed a different route. In an October 2011 NME interview, Noel said it had been recorded for two Oasis albums without being finished. Discussing his solo debut with the magazine that month, he described how the choir and the ending’s saxophones and guitar solo helped convince him the recording was ready. “Stop the Clocks” finally appeared as the closing track on Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, released in October 2011.
