G major · Camelot 9B · 86 BPM
Stand by Me
by Oasis
- 86
- BPM
- G major
- Key
- 9B
- Camelot
- 20
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
Noel Gallagher wrote "Stand by Me" while suffering from food poisoning shortly after moving to London. His mother Peggy kept phoning to check he was eating properly, so he attempted to cook himself a proper British Sunday dinner. The meal gave him food poisoning, and he spent two days vomiting. As he put it in a 1997 interview promoting Be Here Now, it was back to Pot Noodles after that. The opening line, "Made a meal and threw it up on Sunday", came directly from the experience.
The song appeared as the fourth track on Oasis's third studio album, Be Here Now, released on 21 August 1997, and came out as a single a month later on 22 September. It peaked at number two on the UK Singles Chart and matched that position in Ireland, while also reaching the top 10 in Finland, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Spain and Sweden. Certified gold in the UK in October 1997, it eventually reached platinum in 2019 and double platinum in 2025.
Because Noel generally disliked Be Here Now and usually decided the band's set lists, the song was rarely played live after the Be Here Now Tour. A notable exception was an acoustic version filmed for a BBC One documentary the night before the album's release, with Liam Gallagher on vocals, Noel on acoustic guitar and Alan White on tambourine, recorded beside a swimming pool. In 2019 Liam performed it again for MTV Unplugged, backed by former bandmate Paul "Bonehead" Arthurs, and since Oasis' 2025 reunion it has featured at every show on the Live '25 Tour.
Stand by Me runs at 86 BPM, the tempo of boom-bap hip-hop, reggae and slow R&B. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.79 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 698 ms. It is in G major, Camelot 9B, which shares its notes with E minor and mixes cleanly with C major and D major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.