Noel Gallagher on the songs conception (to Q Magazine):

One Sunday afternoon I was at home watching EastEndersd when our kid rings up and says, ‘You coming down for a jam?’ I’d never played with anyone else ever. I went, ‘Alright.’ I’m asking, ‘Do you know any Beatles songs?’ ‘No.’ ‘Not Ticket To Ride?’. We sit there for hours and hours, dead hot and sweaty, and its great. Same the next Sunday and – just because they didn’t know any Beatles, really – we decide to write a song ourselves and I come up with what turns out to be Columbia.

Noel on playing the song live:

It went down like a f—ing knackered lift (laughs). We played this epic, six minute, stone-grooved song, dow, wow, dow, duh duh, the total crossing of rock music and dance music beyond anything that’s been heard before and everyone’s like (blank face). Soul destroying. This bowl of silence.

Noel on looking back at the song (from the definitely Maybe 2014 re-issue):

When we started, we didn’t have a lot of songs so we would jam out current Acid House favourites and f–k about. ‘Columbia’ derived from one of those nights. It was an instrumental and we played it the first night I ever did a gig with Oasis. When we started at The Real People’s studio, somebody had the idea of adding lyrics and it’s still a bone of contention to this day who actually wrote the words. We were all on acid at the time but I know I wrote 90 percent of them. It’s named in honour of the hotel (in London). Because when I was a roadie with Mark Coyle working for the Inspiral Carpets, we loved that hotel, it was the scene of many nights of nonsense. And it sounded like a good title. I mean, why call anything anything?

Liam wrote the chorus.