‘Like they owned the very sky above them’
On 21 July 2000, I had not long turned 15. I boarded a bus from Brighton to London with my best mate, neither of us being entirely truthful with our parents about where we were going, on our way to the gig of our lives: Oasis at Wembley stadium. We were too young to have seen our favourite band at Knebworth, or Maine Road or all the other shows of Oasis lore. But I remember seeing Knebworth on TV: Liam Gallagher strolling on to that stage as though he owned the very sky above them, all in white as Columbia started up, and all I could think was: “I need to be part of this.” When Be Here Now came out in 1997, I queued round the block at my local Woolworths and listened to nothing else until The Masterplan came out a year later – an album of B-sides so brilliant it deserved its own release.
There is a snobbery and snottiness about Oasis, a band from a council estate who sang about wanting to be in a massive rock’n’roll band and who not only did it but, when they got there, drank up every last drop of it. For me and those like me who grew up on estates in the 80s and 90s, we saw a bit of our own hopes and dreams in them. They were like us, they believed in themselves and their songs, and look at how far it had taken them.
There were, of course, the dramas and the brawls and the fights on ferries and the whacking each other about with cricket bats that in the end got in the way of carrying on towards the end. But in a way, this is also the rare magic at the core of Oasis: the friction, the tension, the love and hate and love and hate again. It is Liam’s voice, raw and guttural and swaggering. It is Noel’s melodies and lyrics – sometimes solitary and pained, other times soaring and sweeping and so full of energy and hope and clarity that complete strangers in pubs still hug each other and sing along to every word of Don’t Look Back in Anger. It is – I hope – Bonehead, back from a brush with cancer, returning to rhythm guitar and reminding these brothers that it all started somewhere beautiful before it came off the rails.
I like to imagine Liam and Noel’s mum Peggy, rock’s great matriarch, behind this reunion. Getting them up to Burnage and giving them both a good clip round the the ear and saying it’s time to make it up. I much prefer that to a room full of lawyers and managers and suits, anyway. You’ll find me at these reunion shows singing along, dancing my bones sore, crying and laughing with everyone else who has been desperate for this moment for 25 years. Jenny Stevens
‘Their songs are ingrained in our psyche’
I occasionally DJ at a 90s night run by a hardcore Blur fan and I am astonished any time he lets me get away with playing Oasis. The night is mostly a mass of sweaty students making out with whoever is closest to them while I panic mildly about what song from the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack to play next, but the reaction when any Oasis track fades in is electric: pints fly, arms flail and lads grab each other and strain their neck muscles singing along.
The tracks from What’s the Story (Morning Glory)? in particular are so ingrained in the British cultural psyche that the possibility of hearing them played live by a reformed Oasis in a crowd would send me just as feral. The siren-like blare of the riff at the beginning of Morning Glory, the sheer cinema of Champagne Supernova, the deadening emotion of Don’t Look Back in Anger, all activate a neural pathway that was forged in such a potent time that when it lights up, it burns.
To me, Oasis sound like a time when everything seemed aflame with potential: the world was out there just waiting for me to get into it. The kids at the club night suggest that this feeling rings as true for Gen Z as it does for a geriatric millennial. And honestly I love drama, so any fireworks between Liam and Noel would be a bonus. No new stuff though, thanks. Kate Solomon
‘This is the mother of all no-brainers’
“Britpop revivalism”, if you can really call it that, has been in the air for a few years now. Alt-pop mad scientist AG Cook made a triple album partially inspired by the genre; Dua Lipa said her new album was inspired by Britpop, even if it ended up sounding more like the Love Island soundtrack; my Instagram feed is full of guys in track jackets and mod haircuts doing their best Gallagher-style mean mugging. It’s all a bit depressing, if only because every halfhearted, vibes-based allusion to Britpop pales in comparison to, say, the era’s sexy, striking Face magazine covers, the old newspaper clippings chronicling the scene’s irascibility and penchant for public spats, and films like Oasis Knebworth 1996, whose footage of hundreds of thousands of drunken revellers gathering to sing in unison seems like a vestige of a culture that we can never really get back.
An Oasis reunion, of course, would exist outside all that. Ten nights at Wembley? Does anything sound better, more pure, more thrilling, more unifying? Reunion tours, increasingly common in recent years, are usually totally cynical, totally depressing or, very occasionally, surprisingly gratifying, and this would likely be all three. It’s the mother of all no-brainers, long overdue, something I am very willing to spend a ridiculous amount of money on if need be. The fact that a wan version of Britpop fever has been threatening to boil over in recent years simply adds to the sheer necessity of another Oasis jaunt. Last night, I texted my best friend, who lives in Australia, that an Oasis reunion was going to be announced this week. She responded “OMG” immediately, and then: “I will do whatever I can to be there.” Shaad D’Souza
‘The sound of hedonistic, pissed-off Britain’
It’s hard to overstate how exciting Oasis seemed when this sneering, scrapping bunch of bolshy young northerners appeared in the spring of 1994. They had everything: adrenaline-powered tunes with roar-along choruses; thermo-nuclear charisma in the shape of the glaring, monobrowed Liam; a sense of barely controlled danger thanks to the sibling rivalry boiling between Liam and Noel; and a burning desire to finish the job started by their forebears the Stone Roses – to provide the soundtrack to the lives of a young, hedonistic, pissed-off Britain whose dreams and aspirations were only rarely articulated in mainstream culture, which Noel did via the “guttersnipe surrealism” of his brilliant early lyrics. It was all summed up in the piledriving early tune Bring It on Down: “You’re the outcast / You’re the underclass / But you don’t care / ’Cos you’re living fast.” I’m still envious of the friends who saw them on their early tour of university student unions and came back slack-jawed and starry-eyed.
By the time I saw them live myself, at their mega Knebworth gig two years later, everything had changed. They’d fired their drummer Tony McCarroll, who might not have been able to do the fancy jazz fills of his successor Alan White, but whose playing had a brutal simplicity they’ve never achieved since. The furious punk tunes were starting to be crowded out by sentimental, scarf-waving ballads like Don’t Look Back in Anger. And they were massive to the point of being completely inescapable. For years, you didn’t need to play an Oasis album – it would find you instead, on the radio, in shops, on the TV … everywhere.
This wouldn’t have mattered if the music had remained brilliant, but their third album, Be Here Now, was catastrophically bad, and the fourth, Standing on the Shoulder of Giants, reached a historic nadir with a tuneless lament about cocaine addiction called Gas Panic! which opened with the line: “What tongueless ghost of sin crept through my curtains?” Seeing them live around this time was also not exactly an unalloyed pleasure – I remember dodging bottles of urine at a 2002 show in Finsbury Park, thrown from a crowd exuding an unpleasant quality that we didn’t then call toxic masculinity. And when a new wave of guitar bands like Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party and the Libertines appeared, Oasis derided them as not “proper” rock’n’roll, in boomeranging insults that made them look completely out of touch.
If the audience for these forthcoming shows will exclusively be superannuated lads bellowing along to Champagne Supernova, then count me out. Yet Liam Gallagher’s appearance at Reading and Leeds at the weekend is a reminder that Oasis’s best songs still have the ability to cut across ages and demographics, and to bring people together. In 1997, waiting for a plane in Barbados, I saw a bar of rastas erupt into a singalong when Wonderwall came on the radio. That’s the power of their early stuff – a potency that will draw audiences in their hundreds of thousands for another taste of up-for-it, carefree, mid-90s optimism, the kind of shared cultural moment which was squelched by the smartphone. Alex Needham
‘The classics are de facto national anthems’
Before the Spice Girls came to take over my life, first there were Oasis. What’s the Story lived in the car CD changer for what felt like the entirety of my childhood and the whole family loved it: dad and I listened to it on the drive to school every day; my mum is called Sally, so my brother and I would sing Don’t Look Back in Anger at her; the watery sloshing sounds at the start of Champagne Supernova were often used as in-car warfare to torment anyone in desperate need of a wee. Be Here Now would come to join it in the CD rotation, and much as I now recognise that that album is coke bloat incarnate, aged eight I found its massive sound extremely exciting.
Later, when I worked at NME in the dying days of its paid-for existence, I came to loathe Oasis and the “real music” culture they were used to represent. They were cover mainstays long after they had split up, as were Liam and Noel’s solo projects – admittedly they shifted issues, but that tactic seemed to me to reflect a short-termist conservatism that ultimately did for the magazine. I was never fully immune to their charms, however: I loved Alex Niven’s smart 33 1/3 book on Definitely Maybe, published in 2014, and in 2017 I joined a friend to watch Liam play an afternoon set on Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage. While the snoozy Beady Eye tracks were a good excuse to have a chat, the Oasis classics were undeniable – de facto national anthems, like Robbie Williams’ Angels, that feel like they live somewhere deep inside me. I haven’t been to a gig with my whole family in nearly 20 years, but I’d love to crank up the old CD changer on the road to Wembley with them. Laura Snapes
‘A few nights of drunken unity? I’m in’
Ever since Liam started wielding Noel’s guitar around “like an axe” backstage at a Paris concert in 2009, I’d always assumed it was a matter of when not if Oasis would reform. Brothers fall out spectacularly – but they also make up. Unlike when, say, the Stone Roses reformed, there has always been a sense of inevitability to this one.
I was a teenage Oasis obsessive – every poster from every magazine covering every inch of my bedroom wall. Despite, or more likely because of this, I’m in two minds about a reformation. Having got the chance to see them several times back in the day – often electrifying, occasionally plodding – I wonder if my reserves of enthusiasm can stretch to yet another 90s colossus gearing up for a gargantuan payday. And then at the same time I think … it’s Oasis. You can’t really miss it, can you?
No guitar group since the Gallaghers’ heyday has come close to dominating the culture like they did. Why not? I recall interviewing Noel in 2019 when he told me about how the communal spirit of acid house influenced his songwriting, and why so many people have the wrong end of the stick when it comes to appraising the band. “Oasis was never about snarling and shouting and gobbing in the street,” he said. “It was inclusive. That’s why so many people turned up to the gigs. And that’s why if I got up tomorrow morning and said, ‘Let’s do it’, the world would change again.”
Changing the world might be a bit of a stretch, but a few nights of drunken unity in a bitterly divided country? Who wouldn’t want to be there for that? Tim Jonze
‘I still marvel at these songs’
In retrospect, my childhood conception of the pop music canon was utterly bizarre. For some reason, I was convinced that the Rednex version of Cotton Eye Joe was one of the pillars of modern music. The only Beatles song I knew was Yellow Submarine, which led me to believe they were some kind of kid-friendly novelty outfit. And I thought Oasis were quite probably the greatest band of all time.
I’m still not fully able to let that last one go. In my teens, I heard that Oasis were bad – lairy has-beens who rested on their laurels, which weren’t even their laurels to begin with – but by that stage my love for this apparent rockstar chicanery ran too deep for critical derision to touch. This affection was partly a result of exposure – What’s The Story was one of only two cassettes my parents had on rotation in the car for a large chunk of the 1990s – but I don’t think I was brainwashed. I admit, after years spent trying to puzzle out the strange specificity of Don’t Look Back in Anger, that their lyrics are largely nonsensical. I can hear the repetition and lack of ambition. Yet I also still marvel at these songs: pop shifted off-centre with an ingenious level of precision; lyrics just odd enough to stick in your head; melodies that perfectly balance sour dissonance with supercharged catchiness.
The Gallaghers’ fraternal psychodrama bores me senseless, but the prospect of seeing them live is thrilling. Whatever superficiality originally blighted their material, their songs have accrued plenty of meaning now, as formative musical memories for millions. But it goes beyond nostalgia: you don’t become the soundtrack of a nation for no good reason. Obviously, I don’t still think Oasis are the greatest band of all time. Just one of them. Rachel Aroesti
Source: theguardian.com
