What are we going to talk about now? For a decade and a half, Oasis have been stranded in the subjunctive mood, caught between their warring brother-frontmen. But perhaps a reunion of some sort was always inevitable. Since they split in 2009, Chekhov’s Guitar has hung above Noel Gallagher’s mantelpiece, daring him to pick it up and get the band back together for a few gigs (and hopefully avoid shooting his brother in the process).
Now, it has been confirmed that Oasis will reunite next summer for a string of gigs across the UK and Ireland, with four nights at Wembley Stadium. And if 2024 was the year that Wembley became the beachhead for an American invasion – all cowboy boots, NFL boyfriends and Nashville country turned globe-conquering pop – now prepare for the homegrown counter-insurgency. In 2025, the stadium will become the den of what Noel affectionately calls the “parka monkeys”: Liam Gallagher’s devoted army of fans. To get ahead, think cans of Strongbow Dark Fruits scattered on a roadside verge, think bucket hats – think, above all, Umbro.
It is a mark of Oasis’s turn in fortunes that this return is even a cultural event at all. By the time of their long overdue split in the summer of 2009, they were something of a musical joke. The albums had become sleepy. Liam’s live voice had declined to the point that he sounded like he was gargling marbles onstage. The brawling and the bravado, from two middle-aged men with thinning haircuts and school run responsibilities, had become embarrassing. Writing in the mid-Noughties, the music critic John Harris could contentedly describe Oasis as “somewhere between (to be cruel) Status Quo and (from a slightly more charitable perspective) the Rolling Stones of the 1980s”. Past-it at best, in other words.
But since then, an inactive band has salvaged its reputation and its momentum from an indifferent listening public. It’s easy to be cynical about the motives behind this reunion (perhaps it’s no coincidence that a brown envelope of divorce bills just landed on Noel Gallagher’s doormat). But a cultural event of this size can’t be dismissed so readily. Very few bands alive or dead can snap their fingers and threaten to blow British gig attendance records out the water. Understanding how Oasis have regenerated themselves for a new and young audience requires closer reading. Because clearly there is something special about their music – something that perhaps those caught up in their memories of Maine Road or Knebworth can’t see.
Even before the split, Noel and Liam had effectively begun new careers as surly rent-a-gobs who occasionally played music. The insults soared (Noel’s description of Liam as “a man with a fork in a world of soup” remains epigrammatic), but the tunes didn’t. But once Oasis were gone, it became easier to abbreviate their history to the Nineties glory years, especially if you weren’t there in the first place. This shift back to credibility accelerated with the release of the documentary film Oasis: Supersonic in 2016, a selective but kinetic account of the band’s rise to fame in the early Nineties. Closing in 1996, and conveniently eliding the 13-year trudge to come, it froze the band in their youth. It also sympathetically retells their self-made, Manchester-to-Maida Vale origin story without the excesses of fame that followed.
And most importantly, the film airbrushed all the embarrassing context – the forces of Britpop and Blair – that the band were intimately associated with. Free from these taints, their music could be re-embraced on its own terms by a new generation. Among the younger audiences who use Spotify, Oasis’s first two albums, Definitely Maybe and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, are the most popular albums of the 1990s. They’ve even shaken off some of their musty air of dad rock: there’s a reason Dua Lipa felt comfortable using the band’s font to promote her last album.
Context aside, understanding why those albums have resonated is a deeper mystery. And the best place to start, oddly enough, is with a pre-fame and barely post-pubescent Pete Doherty in 1997. Queuing up to buy Oasis’s third album, Be Here Now, he was asked by an MTV interviewer to summarise the band’s appeal. His answer: “Noel Gallagher is a poet and Liam is a town crier.” The second half of this claim is easier to reckon with. Liam Gallagher has, or certainly had, one of the greatest voices in rock history, capable of howling indignation and impassioned sensitivity. It wraps itself around delicate blues notes on “Wonderwall”, and achieves a soaring, pleading climax on “Live Forever”. If Liam had never left Burnage and spent his days as a hod carrier on the building sites of Greater Manchester (the trade brother Noel fell into at first), he would have been known for streets around as the kid with the great voice.
What of Noel Gallagher, “poet”? At his best – and he is a formidable talent – Noel Gallagher is a master pasticheur. The composition of those early Oasis albums is a distillation of the three decades of musical history behind him. It wasn’t a sophisticated process, even if its musical conservatism was at time overstated – the trance-like quality to some Oasis tracks owe a debt to more recent musical innovations in dance and acid house. But, thanks to Noel’s ear for sampling and rearrangement, these inherited sounds and styles combine to trigger deeper folk-pop memories, turning his straightforward songs into anthems which sound like they were written long before he was born.
None of this in itself explains the timelessness they have achieved: some other quality is at play. In Oasis’s case, I think the only explanation can be the street romanticism their music encapsulates. This is found in the Gallaghers’ raging personal ambition to become rock stars, and to escape the drab, abusive context of their upbringing. But it’s in the songs too. Oasis’s most resonant lyrics might be considered thin written down, trading in a shopworn sentimentalism that eschews detail and sometimes coherence. But, such as it is, the imagery is universal, cycling through “souls” and “storms”, visions of weather and the natural world, of rebirth and renewal: “I live my life for the stars that shine”; “I just wanna fly/Wanna live, don’t wanna die”; “Wake up the dawn and ask her why/A dreamer dreams she never dies”.
It’s a truism of pop music that what reads as the lamest banality on the page can be conjured into a symphony of meaning with the right tune, bypassing the head to land right in the heart – or the gut. This is the alchemy that takes place when Oasis get it right. And – in another debt to acid house and its associated stimulants – it’s a feeling that Oasis rendered in collective terms. In Noel’s vague stanzas, nameless first-person and second-person singular pronouns morph very readily into the plural. In “Stop Crying Your Heart Out”, for instance, “you” becomes “we”, before becoming “the stars” themselves, all over the course of a five-minute song.
To understand why there’s still a demand for this now, consider the rest of the musical landscape. At the risk of oversimplification, much of the most acclaimed contemporary songwriting today is powered by confessional narrative. Its pleasures are specific and novelistic, treasured personally and often privately. It may require greater craft, but it’s no substitute for the diffuse, headless, communal euphoria that Oasis could bring a crowd to. As Noel put it in the Supersonic documentary (a quotation recycled in the announcement video for next year’s tour): “People will never ever forget the way that you made them feel.” Millions of people across Britain and the world have never forgotten; now the rest of us will have the chance to find out.
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