Oasis Didn’t Play on the Trainspotting Soundtrack Because They Misunderstood What the Movie Was About

The 1996 film Trainspotting, directed by Danny Boyle and based on a book that goes by the same name, written by Irvine Welsh, us famous and acclaimed for a number of things, including the music in the film. Turns out Oasis, the most popular British band at the time, could have been part of what some think is a legendary soundtrack, only they turned the offer down.

Why? Well, according to Rachel Fleming, the film’s costume designer, the band members didn’t understand what the film was about. Something of an official synopsis would be: The film follows a group of heroin addicts in a late 1980s economically depressed area of Edinburgh and their passage through life. Beyond drug addiction, other themes in the film are exploration of the urban poverty and squalor in “culturally rich” Edinburgh. Meanwhile, Oasis and specifically Noel Gallagher, thought the movie was about people watching trains.

According to Fleming, she met with Gallagher recently, and he told her that he would have done something for the film, but honestly he thought the movie was about trainspotters. He had no idea what the film was actually about. Knowing about the book would have helped him out. It came out three years earlier, and had nothing to do with people spotting trains either.

The 1996 film made $72 million on a £1.5 million budget in the cinemas alone. It’s been ranked as the 10th best British film by the British Film Institute, in the 2004 the general public voted it as the best Scottish film of all-time.

Oasis performing at Knebworth in 1996

Boyle is currently filming a sequel called T2 which takes place 20 years after the original plot, based on Welsh’s sequel to the book, Porno. It features the same cast, and Boyle was reportedly waiting for the original actors themselves to age visibly enough to portray the same characters, ravaged by time. John Hodge, who wrote the Academy Award nominated script of the first film, also wrote the script to the sequel, due to be released on January 27, 2017 in the UK, followed by the United States on 3 February 2017, and worldwide on 10 February 2017.