"Cigarettes & Alcohol" is a song by English rock band Oasis, written by Noel Gallagher. It was released on 10 October 1994 as the fourth and final single from their debut album Definitely Maybe (1994), and their second to enter the UK top ten in the United Kingdom, peaking at number 7 (three places higher than "Live Forever"), eventually spending 79 weeks on the charts. On 13 March 2020, 26 years after release, the song was certified Platinum, indicating 600,000 sales. Background Whereas the band's first two singles "Supersonic" and "Shakermaker" had used psychedelic imagery, and the third single "Live Forever" used softer chords and tender lyrics, "Cigarettes & Alcohol" demonstrated the rougher musical attitude that Oasis appeared to be promoting. The song proclaims the inherent appeal of cigarettes, alcohol, and other drugs as a remedy to the banality and seemingly futile nature of working class life. Lines such as "Is it worth the aggravation to find yourself a job when there's nothing worth working for?" taps into a common sentiment of disenchantment in the 1990s. Alan McGee, who discovered the band, boisterously claimed upon first hearing the song that it was "one of the greatest social statements of the past 25 years". The song was the second case in which Oasis was accused of plagiarism, the first being "Shakermaker". The main riff of the song is lifted from "Get It On" by T. Rex, who themselves took it from "Little Queenie" by Chuck Berry. It also bears a similarity to the opening of Humble Pie's cover of the Eddie Cochran song "C'mon Everybody". Musical style In 2014 book on the album entitled Oasis' Definitely Maybe, Alex Niven typified "Cigarettes & Alcohol" as a "twelve-bar blues rock song" and "a classicist boiling-down of the Rolling Stones' rebel rock archetype". B-sides The CD release of the "Cigarettes & Alcohol" single includes three B-sides: a cover version of The Beatles' "I Am the Walrus"; "Listen Up", a six-minute slow rocker musically similar to "Supersonic"; and the popular, slightly punk-styled "Fade Away", whose wistful lyrics are about the destruction of "the dreams we have as children" (this phrase was later used as the title of Noel Gallagher's first live solo album). These three songs were later re-released on The Masterplan (1998), a compilation of b-sides. An acoustic version of "Fade Away" was released on The Help Album (1995), a charity record, and subsequently