Oasis: from clash to cash

Malaysian Reserve

a day ago

LONDON – Fifteen years after their explosive split, British music legends Liam and Noel Gallagher are reuniting for an Oasis tour that promises not only Britpop nostalgia but also a staggering payday.
While Liam has insisted that money is 'way down the list' of reasons for the feuding brothers' reunion, British press reports have suggested that each sibling could pocket around £50 million ($67 million).
Matt Grimes, a music industry expert at Birmingham City University, offered a slightly more conservative estimate of around £40 million per Gallagher for the 17 UK dates alone.
Oasis, whose hits include 'Wonderwall', 'Don't Look Back in Anger' and 'Champagne Supernova', kick off the reunion tour Friday in Cardiff before playing several dates in their home city of Manchester next week.
Almost 1.4 million tickets have been sold for the UK shows, generating an estimated £240 million, according to Barclays bank.
And that's just the beginning.
Merchandise sales, from T-shirts and puzzles to baby clothes and tableware, plus six pop-up shops across the UK and Ireland could push total revenue to around £400 million, Grimes said.
The 24 concerts outside the UK, including in Buenos Aires, Chicago, Sydney, Tokyo and Toronto, will drive revenues even higher.
Still, the money from the return of Oasis is dwarfed by Taylor Swift's record-breaking Eras Tour, which grossed $2.2 billion from ticket sales alone across 149 shows worldwide.
It was 'a much bigger logistical event or sets of events than Oasis are proposing', Grimes said.
There was a chaotic scramble for prized Oasis tickets when they went on sale in August last year.
But fans were left outraged by exorbitant ticket costs that saw sudden price hikes — known as dynamic pricing — based on overwhelming demand, in some cases from £150 to £350.
Ticketmaster, one of the official sales websites, said the pricing decision was made by the 'tour organiser'.
Oasis pointed the finger at their promoter.
The Gallagher brothers' promotional plan, however, was minimal: two posts on social media — one to tease, the other to confirm.
'The fact that they announced a reunion after many, many years of 'Will they, won't they' is enough to make the press interested,' Chris Anderton, professor of cultural economics at the University of Southampton, told AFP.
For Oasis there's no new album to promote, just classics to revive.
'In the 1970s, even maybe the 1980s, you went on tour to sell albums,' Anderton said.
'Now you go on tour to make money and the album is something on the side — if you make one at all.'
'Definitely Maybe', released 30 years ago, climbed back to the top of UK sales charts on the back of the reunion tour announcement.
Each Oasis concertgoer will spend an average of £766 on tickets and outgoings such as transport and accommodation, according to Barclays.
That is set to inject £1 billion into the British economy.
Two key shifts help explain the rise of mega-tours, said Cecile Rap-Veber, managing director at the French artists' rights group Sacem.
On one hand, streaming 'doesn't bring in as much money as the CD era', prompting artists to look at how to make money elsewhere, she said.
On the other, 'the public's appetite for live shows' surged after the lockdown years of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Those factors make fans more willing to spend big.
Grimes sums up the choice: 'Do I go to… Spain or maybe the south of France for a week's holiday that's going to cost me £600? Or do I go and see my favourite band?' –AFP
FIVE best-loved classics from the bad boys of 1990s Britpop Oasis, who make their long-awaited comeback with a reunion tour kicking off in Cardiff on Friday:
'Supersonic' (1994): The first Oasis single released was from their inaugural album 'Definitely Maybe' and penned, as with most of their songs, by Noel Gallagher.
It features brother Liam's distinctive singing style: holding and drawing out a syllable, with a touch of his Manchester accent coming through.
In a Vogue interview in 2019, Liam named 'Supersonic' the song he liked best from the band's repertoire and it contained his all-time favourite lyrics:
'I need to be myself/I can't be no one else/I'm feeling supersonic, give me gin and tonic'.
'Live Forever' (1994): The Manchester band's breakthrough hit came with their third single, which was their first to reach the top 10 in the UK charts.
The single cover was a photo of Beatles legend John Lennon's childhood home — the band Oasis often compared themselves to and to whom they would be compared.
'It was the tune that changed everything,' Noel recalled in an interview in 2009.
The upbeat track, with lyrics such as 'I just wanna fly' and 'I don't wanna die', were written partly in reaction to the negative message of grunge.
In particular Nirvana's song 'I Hate Myself and Want to Die' irked the young songwriter Noel.
'Kids don't need to hear that nonsense,' he later said.
Cigarettes & Alcohol' (1994): But life-affirming optimism was not exactly a running Oasis theme, already clear from their next single and now one of their all-time classics.
In their concerts it is the most performed of all their songs, featuring 645 times, according to the programmes of 837 concerts published by setlist.fm, analysed by AFP.
The track captured the band's image as bad boys, a reputation that would solidify over the next decade till their break-up in 2009.
It included lines such as: 'You could wait for a lifetime/To spend your days in the sunshine/You might as well do the white line.'
Questioned about the example the song might be setting for young fans, the brothers said it was not about glorifying bad behaviour.
'It's a feeling you get when you are on the dole and you've got no money, maybe to escape from your surroundings, that all you have is cigarettes and alcohol,' Noel said on 'The O Zone' in 1994.
'Wonderwall' (1995): 'And after all/You're my wonderwall' — the refrain is so familiar even non-fans are likely able to belt it out.
The song was taken from their second of seven studio albums, and by far the band's most successful: '(What's the Story) Morning Glory?' shifted over 20 million copies globally.
A 1960s film with the same title, and featuring music by Beatle George Harrison, had been an inspiration for the contemplative song, which includes prominent mellotron that sounds like a cello.
Looking back, the Gallaghers struggled to understand the huge success of the track.
'Every time I have to sing it I want to gag,' Liam told MTV in 2008, according to The Guardian.
But in 2012 he did reprise it for the Olympics closing ceremony in London, performing without Noel.
'Don't Look Back in Anger' (1996): One of the rare tracks with Noel on lead vocals, this pensive song is the second most featured in 837 concerts.
It came out towards the end of Oasis's heady mid-1990s when they were at the peak of their fame.
As a mark of their status in British culture extending well beyond the music scene, when recently elected Prime Minister Tony Blair entered Downing Street in 1997, the fresh-faced leader invited the band for celebratory drinks and Noel was captured in a now-famous image with Blair, both sipping a glass of wine.
'I was 30, off me head on drugs, and everyone telling me we were the greatest band since who knows,' Noel said to Spin magazine in 2008 about that time.
The place of 'Don't Look Back in Anger' in the public imagination was clear decades after its release, in 2017, following a bombing at a Manchester pop concert that killed 22 people.
A grieving crowd spontaneously sang the song's now-poignant lyrics after a minute's silence in the city centre for the victims, days after the attack. –AFP