I. BECAUSE WE NEED EACH OTHER
When Oasis announced their return to the road just over 11 months ago, the least original people on the internet all made the same observation: No chance the Gallagher brothers stay together until next summer. It was semi-jokey conventional wisdom that Liam and Noel — who broke up their band in 2009 after a backstage blowup in Paris that involved at least one plum tossed in anger — were too prone to interpersonal strife to pull off the highest profile rock reunion tour of the 21st century. If they did make it to the tour, haters and pessimists insisted, the shows would be a debacle (at worst) or an overpriced ego trip (at best).
Well, I saw Oasis last week at Wembley Stadium in London with 81,000 other fans. And it was incredible. Incredible! One of my favorite shows of all time. And hands down the greatest stadium show. The comeback is real, and it’s spectacular.
I really believe this. I know it. But as a full-time music critic and occasional, quasi-competent music journalist, I want to verify my own claims. The problem is that I didn’t take very many notes while I was watching the concert. And the notes I did take are mostly useless. (One just says “MEGA” in all caps.) The thing is, it’s hard to take notes when you’re holding drinks in both of your hands, a state of affairs that occurred frequently during the two-hour performance. And it’s doubly difficult when you’re constantly hugging your pal when the band starts playing another song you have loved since you were 16.
So, I’m listening to a bootleg recording as I type this. The audio quality is shockingly good considering it’s an audience tape recorded in a sea of overexcited blokes donning football jerseys and Paul Weller haircuts. But it can’t fully convey what I remember witnessing. The Paul Weller blokes are singing along slightly behind the band, and Joey Waronker’s drums are extra thuddy to a degree that seems unfair to Oasis’ replacement timekeeper. (As a Zac Starkey partisan I’m trying to be fair here.)
The highlight for me comes early in the set. All the songs are highlights, really, even the ones I didn’t particularly love going in. (I take back all the snarky things I ever said about “Roll With It.”) But “Acquiesce,” which they played second, is my No. 1 favorite Oasis track, and it set the tone for the entire concert. They’ve been playing the same setlist every night, and because this is Oasis, the message conveyed by the song selections is not subtle. They begin with “Hello,” because “it’s good to be back,” apparently. (Also, opening with “Columbia,” like they did back in 1996 at Knebworth, would have annihilated everyone in attendance.) Later, “Talk Tonight” and “Stand By Me,” normally presented as love songs, are recontextualized as anthems of reconciliation. The B-side “Fade Away,” already one of their more poignant and barbed songs, has extra-significance as a statement about the passage of time. And playing “Live Forever” and “Rock N Roll Star” back-to-back before the encore made Oasis’ most swaggering anthems sound almost melancholy.
But “Acquiesce” is the song. In the past 16 years, I have seen Liam and Noel play Oasis tunes on their respective solo tours. (I also saw Beady Eye many years ago, though I wouldn’t recognize a Beady Eye song now if it tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Beady Eye music, mate.”) I enjoyed hearing Liam sneer his way through “Slide Away” in a medium-sized club, and I was thrilled to see Noel encore with “Don’t Look Back In Anger” at a small theater gig. But “Acquiesce” is the one they have to play together, with Liam on the verses and Noel on the chorus. It was, in a sense, the tune we were all gathered to hear.
After the cataclysmic guitar riff — which sounds like a violent backstage melee possibly involving produce — Liam comes in hot. His voice, as confirmed by the bootleg, sounds outstanding. (The hoarseness you hear on Familiar To Millions, the live album recorded at the old Wembley a quarter-century ago, has been cleared away.) It’s a million degrees in the stadium, and yet Liam is inexplicably wearing a brownish green jacket zipped up to the neck and a scarf, plus the de rigueur corduroy bucket hat. Actually, given that this is Liam Gallagher, the attire is explicable. Liam wears a winter jacket in July because he’s among the last of the genuinely cool rock guys. His refusal to sweat is his most profound artistic act.
When the chorus arrives, Noel hits it with 16 years of pent-up energy. His voice also is in outstanding shape. More important, he sounds sincere. “Because we need each other / We believe in one another,” he says emphatically. “And I know we’re going to uncover / What’s sleepin’ in our soul.” Noel sings those lines like he is levitating two feet over the stage. And for a split second, the entire audience seems to be levitating, too.
What I detected — what we all detected — was entirely unexpected: Are these guys feeling … sentimental about all this? After spending the better part of this century giving each other the insult-comic treatment in the press, do they … like each other now?
What was sleepin’ in our souls had truly been reawakened. Oasis, holy crap, was really back. And it was, against all odds, better than you could have hoped for.
II. WALKIN’ TO THE SOUND OF MY FAVORITE TUNE
The one other time I saw Oasis was on January 18, 1998. The Be Here Now tour at Northrop Auditorium in Minneapolis. Guigsy was still, technically, in the band. (I say “technically” because he appeared to have consumed enough marijuana to render him medically brain dead.) They played 16 songs, four of which were solo Noel songs. And one of those tunes, “Talk Tonight,” was interrupted by a fire alarm. The encore was “Acquiesce,” which climaxed with Liam leaving the stage for the front row, where he heckled Noel as he sang the song’s outro. After the show, we stood outside in subzero wind chill and called up to the window in the band’s green room, where Liam occasionally appeared and flashed two-finger salutes to the crowd.
These were my heroes. On this night, the antics were excellent and the music was just okay. The deafening, mile-high “wall of guitars” sound of the album carried over to the tour, but it was rendered with a decided lack of enthusiasm. Souls were in deep slumber at this time. In the moment, I attributed this to a combination of misery-inducing factors: the disappointing reaction to Be Here Now, the awfulness of traveling to Minnesota in January, general burnout from the nonstop grind of the past several years. But after seeing Oasis at Wembley, I now know the real reason why that gig was underwhelming.
They were playing for Americans and not British people.
In August and September, Oasis will perform in a handful of select cities in America. And based on what I saw last week, I expect those shows to be good. But they won’t be as good as the shows in the U.K. They just won’t. In the U.S., Oasis is a good live act. (And, sometimes, they are a mediocre one.) But in England, they are amazing in concert. Even when they suck in Great Britain, they are still better than they’ll ever be in America.
Oasis has the most decisive home-field advantage I have ever witnessed in music. I didn’t fully appreciate it until I experienced it firsthand — not just at Wembley but all over London, where Oasis band shirts were ubiquitous in every neighborhood and tourist attraction I visited. Surely, excitement over the reunion shows played a part in that. But the central place that Oasis has in British culture — which feels more akin to monarchy than “normal popular rock band” status — really does seem unique. The Tragically Hip, I think, has similar significance in Canada. But I struggle to come up with an American equivalent. Taylor Swift? I don’t know that she’s more popular here than everywhere else in the world. Springsteen? Too much partisan political baggage. Michael Jackson? Too much “baggage” baggage.
I was keenly aware of my otherness at Wembley. A running bit where Liam kept slagging off Arsenal fans went completely over my head, despite multiple attempts by my associate, Australian Dave, to explain it to me. And that was okay. I was just a guest here. An American interloper eavesdropping on a passionate love affair.
I now understand, sort of, the reply guys crowding my mentions every time I talk about Oasis on social media. (Particularly on the less fun and more scold-y one named after the sixth Wilco album.) Many of them are from England, and they all buy into the conspiracy theory (originally forwarded by Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine) about how Britpop was a government plot to increase national pride in the 1990s. Maybe that’s true. (If it is, it’s the greatest triumph for the British government since the liberation of France.) But in the end, it’s irrelevant. The Brits love Oasis, and hating them seems like the way less fun alternative. Just imagine the indignity of being a British Oasis hater. It must be like hating the NFL in America. Their cultural loneliness has radicalized them. Oasis is everywhere there, creating joy and camaraderie, and they can’t participate in it.
If I lived in England, and had this band rammed down my throat for more than 30 years, I might hate Oasis, too. But I don’t live in England. So, while I empathize with the haters, I can’t relate, thank god. For me, being among the ecstatic Oasis lovers was like, finally, arriving at my rock ‘n’ roll home.
III. MY BODY FEELS YOUNG BUT MY MIND IS VERY OLD
A few days before the concert, I met up with my pal Alex (who like me originally hails from the American Midwest) at a 200-year-old pub near my Airbnb. It was his favorite bar in London, which he discovered not long after moving there seven or eight years ago. On his inaugural visit, they were having a piano sing-along night, and they eventually started playing Oasis songs. One after another, he told me. Not just the big ones, but also the B-sides. And not just the B-sides, but also the deep cuts that, in America, only the real heads know. Here in England, however, even the normal everyday drinkers had memorized every word. It wasn’t until they got to “The Girl In The Dirty Shirt” — a song about Noel’s now-ex-wife, from Be Here Now — that they flubbed a lyric or two.
At the show, I saw fans demonstrate their Oasis devotion in various ways. The full spectrum of human emotion was represented. During “Cigarettes And Alcohol,” the GA floor section was transformed into a human wave of bobbing bodies that (almost) resembled a mosh pit. During “Don’t Look Back In Anger,” I saw a burly man behind me sobbing heavily. During “The Masterplan,” an extremely high yob knocked a drink out of my hand like he was rehearsing a lethal karate chop. But the most common expression of communal excitement was the mass sing-along.
It’s one thing to hear a couple dozen people nail Oasis B-sides in a bar. It was quite another to see the throngs at Wembley sing every word to “Half The World Away,” one of the undercard tracks from 1994’s “Whatever” single. I’ve always had a “whatever” kind of attitude about “Half The World Away,” one of the lesser Noel acoustic songs from their imperial mid-’90s period. But after hearing all those Brits nearly drown out Noel at Wembley, I have newfound appreciation and even awe for how ingrained Oasis B-sides are culturally over there.
The importance of this sing-along aspect cannot be overestimated when assessing Oasis’ music. After this concert, I’m now convinced that it’s the cornerstone of their appeal. Noel Gallagher is not a great or even cogent lyricist, and his melodies can sometimes seem a little samey. But when it comes to writing songs that large groups of individuals in various states of inebriation can sing in unison, perfectly, Bob Dylan and Beethoven have nothing on him. He is the absolute genius of that very specific art form. Oasis is constantly compared to the Beatles, the Sex Pistols, and the other iconic British rock bands. But their songs actually have more in common with “Happy Birthday” or nursery rhymes. (In the case of “Some Might Say,” and “my dog’s been itchin’/itchin’ in the kitchen once again,” I’m talking literal nursey rhymes.) In England, for a certain generation, I imagine they are the kind of tunes you don’t remember ever learning, they just seem implanted in your brain from the time you’re born.
I’m not normally a sing-along guy at concerts. And I generally don’t like it when other people do it at shows. This was different. This was transformational, and a key part to the home-field advantage. When Oasis plays “Half The World Away” in America, will the audience care? Or will they hit the bathroom until “Wonderwall” comes on? At Wembley, the performance of the audience elevated the performance of the band. It shrank the expanse of the stadium down to the size of a cozy pub. And it made strangers feel, for about 120 minutes, like lifelong friends.
IV. A DREAMER DREAMS SHE NEVER DIES
When the Oasis shows were announced last summer, my friend Steve Gorman — who toured with Oasis many years ago in another lifetime — called it the last big rock reunion tour. At first, I pushed back. Surely there will be others. But then I thought about it: Who is left to reunite and tour on the level that Oasis can? The few remaining big bands/brands that haven’t cashed in already — Talking Heads, The Smiths, anyone else? — seem unlikely to do so. And time is running out for the last remaining giants, a fact reiterated by the tribute to the late Ozzy Osbourne that flashed on the jumbotron screens during “Live Forever.”
Stadium shows get a bad rap for good reasons — the sound is lousy, the sightlines are worse, the drinks are overpriced, and getting in and out of the parking lot feels like it takes twice as long as the concert. But at their best, they have a sense of scale that is emotionally overwhelming. They create a temporary world that feels vast and utopian, where the only tasks at hand are music and revelry, where you don’t even care that an extremely high yob karate-chopped your drink because you’re also psyched to hear “The Masterplan.” A great stadium show connects you to a hive mind the size of a decently populated Middle American city, and that’s a very powerful feeling.
Oasis is back because Liam and Noel are (relatively) young middle-aged men, and because there are so few other bands in their lane. The world’s stadiums require groups that have 12 to 15 songs that tens of thousands of people know by heart and want to experience one more time as part of a mass-population event. Oasis can do that, and I suspect they will be on the road for a very long time and will make an extreme amount of money in the process.
Of course, it’s possible the spell will break soon and Liam and Noel will go back to hating each other. I would bet on that happening, given the laws of nature and the nature of brotherhood. But at Wembley, Oasis played and they played brilliantly. The audience came and they left satisfied. The band wrapped, as they must, with “Champagne Supernova,” one of our finest stadium-rock anthems. And Liam concluded by balancing a tambourine on his head, a gesture both ridiculous and grand, just like the band he sings for. And on that night, at least, the tambourine did not fall.