5 days ago
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Oasis are the greatest Irish band of all time
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t is fashionable – and easy – to lampoon Oasis. They were far from the most musically or lyrically inventive band of the 1990s (surpassed by peers such as Radiohead and the Manic Street Preachers). Their later albums were patchy, and Noel Gallagher still apologises for their most wayward live performances. When their reunion tour was announced a year ago, numerous critics predicted mediocrity or outright failure. That 14 million fans sought to buy tickets – with some paying upwards of £350 – was just further proof that you can't trust people.
Oasis, then, arrived on stage at Cardiff's Principality Stadium for the first show of the tour as a band with a point to prove. Noel, in particular, wore the expression of a man still asking himself whether this was a good idea. It was.
Liam Gallagher – the wildcard on whom an Oasis show hinges – sang with the intensity of a teenage frontman striving for a record deal. During the band's final years, his Lennon-Lydon sneer was sometimes reduced to a Kermit-like croak (in part the result of having Hashimoto's disease). But in Cardiff, the resurrection of the voice that reverberated through the Nineties was confirmed. When combined with Noel's falsetto, you are reminded just how this melodic superpower colonised the decade.
The cynical charge is that the tour is a purely monetary exercise (the brothers are forecast to make around £100m each). Noel, who combines working-class Labourism with a Thatcherite attachment to success, has never disguised his enjoyment of wealth. Yet no band intent on merely going through the motions would play a song with the punk-like fury of 'Bring It On Down' ('You're the outcast, you're the underclass/But you don't care because you're living fast'). The setlist may have been weighted towards Definitely Maybe (1994) and (What's the Story) Morning Glory? (1995) – the albums that produced the quasi-national anthems of 'Live Forever', 'Wonderwall' and 'Don't Look Back in Anger' – but the Gallaghers still did enough to dispel the myth that they recorded nothing of note after these two behemoths.
'D'You Know What I Mean?', with its Apocalypse Now visuals, has never sounded more menacing. 'Stand By Me', accompanied by a montage of family photos, rarely more moving. 'Little By Little' – the only post-2000 song played – prompts one of the biggest singalongs of the evening ('But my god woke up on the wrong side of his bed'). Such is the richness of the band's back catalogue that while five B-sides are played, five number one singles are not.
There were many in attendance old enough to recall Oasis's first coming – aged 13, I witnessed their shambolic second Wembley Stadium show in 2000 – but there were also plenty of others who weren't even born then. In defiance of laddish stereotypes, it is teenage girls ('the Oasisters') who now comprise the band's most obsessive fanbase, daily advertising their devotion on X and TikTok. For a generation accustomed to anodyne pop stars, there is something thrilling about the discovery of Liam, who speaks in a voice that is unmistakably his own. In common with the likes of Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn, he serves a human yearning for authenticity.
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Where do Oasis go from here? The band are insistent that no new material will be released – the Stone Roses, their Mancunian forebears, are one of many cautionary tales – and that this will be their final tour ('a lap of honour', in Noel's words).
Their rebirth, as a year-old Labour government staggers, will inspire no shortage of reflections on national decline. Nostalgia for Britpop, already amplified by the return of Blur and Pulp, will reach new heights. But Oasis, subtly, stand apart from this trend. Behind Noel on stage was a largely unnoticed green 'Éirinn go brách' ('Ireland forever') flag. This, far more than his rarely played Union Jack guitar (which was long ago confined to a museum), is a clue to the band's real roots. All five of the original members are from Irish Catholic families; Gallagher has attributed Oasis's 'punch-the-air quality' to the rebel songs he heard played in the clubs of Manchester (recalling how his family were 'demonised' during the Troubles).
Would an English Oasis have been possible? Noel, for one, believes not. 'Oasis could never have existed, been as big, been as important, been as flawed, been as loved and loathed, if we weren't all predominantly Irish,' he has said (having once declined the opportunity to write a song for the England football team).
Here is a wicked irony. For a nation unsure of itself, Oasis are an enduring source of patriotic pride. This summer, as the tour reaches first Manchester and then London, commentators will muse on whether anything like 'Cool Britannia' could happen again. But while the Gallaghers, never ones for modesty, would agree that theirs is a national triumph, they would add that it is less an English than an Irish one.
[See also: So you want to be Irish?]
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