Last August, Liam Gallagher and Noel Gallagher shocked fans when they announced that Oasis would be reuniting and going back on tour. As you may remember, their last show ended in fisticuffs backstage during a 2009 festival in Paris. After the initial set of dates were announced, fans showed the f-ck up to purchase tickets. Many people were still skeptical, however, that the show would happen. When I told Mr. Rosie about it, his response was “A year out? I bet you it doesn’t happen or the tour gets canceled halfway through in some spectacular way.”
Well, y’all, it turns out that sometimes special people can change because they did it! After almost a year of anticipation, Oasis played its first show in 16 years this past weekend. The concert, which kicked off a 41-date world tour, began as a two-night gig at Principality Stadium in Cardiff, Wales. They appropriately opened their set with the song, “Hello” and closed the four-song encore out with “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” “Wonderwall,” and “Champagne Supernova.”
The first Oasis show in 16 years starts with “Hello,” amid scenes consistent with a riot. A continuous mosh pit thrashes through the center of Principality Stadium, from front to back and up into the stalls. Liam Gallagher is incandescent, his brow a triangular furrow; he yells at the mic as much as into it. “Hello, hello, it’s good to be back”—back in the 1990s.
By the end of the set, legion fans and critics—those there at the very beginning—will hail it as the best Oasis show since the mid-’90s. This is easy to believe. I was a bit too young for the first go-around, but witnessed firsthand the solo careers and the birth of the Oasis nostalgia complex. Tonight, the gravity of the occasion—perhaps the biggest reunion in our lifetime—makes the atmosphere combustible. Liam sounds ferociously on-form, his nasal snarl infused with a malevolent purr. Down the front, fans pogo, lurch, and squabble. A few get stretchered away, suffering an excess of ecstatic devotion.
Some 14 million people tried to buy tickets for the reunion tour, likely to be the most profitable in British history. One in 200 of them made it to Cardiff. As with Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, host cities have transformed into themed boutiques. The London Dungeon will offer free eyebrow waxing in a “Gallagher Grooming Gauntlet.” A Manchester Aldi supermarket has been renamed “Aldeh,” honoring the Gallagher brogue. In Cardiff, a shopping mall has installed a 250-square-foot mural of Liam and Noel made entirely of bucket hats. Dozens of Oasis merch stalls clog the streets, with fans dressed in the old merch awaiting the new. Lines snake along the main strip and into side alleys where men in vintage tees bellow “Live Forever,” pints aloft.
Liam has fired up the tour with his usual zeal. He excoriated Edinburgh’s local government (“quite frankly your attitude fucking stinks”) when councillors fretted over the influx of “rowdy” middle-aged men. These visitors, documents warned, were liable to drink to “medium to high intoxication.” This may seem a generous assessment—a prudent forecast would be crazy-high intoxication, at a minimum—but this pertains to the have-it-large contingent, which is relatively small. Among viewers of the Cardiff bucket-hat mural, for instance, are children and teenagers escorted by parents whose own parents took them to their first Oasis shows.
Even the most sentimental fans are under no illusions about the reunion’s motive: Oasis are in it for the money. But the promise of exorbitant profit only compounds the pressure on opening night, where fans who paid up to $500 for face-value tickets (thanks to Ticketmaster’s contemptible “dynamic pricing” model) will find out how much Oasis still mean to them, and how much the reunion means to Oasis.
As “Hello” tumbles into beloved B-side “Acquiesce,” the energy is frenzied, the sound mammoth. It is hard to tell where the feedback stops and the rapturous screaming starts. The camera catches bassist Andy Bell grinning at Noel and wiggling his eyebrows, as if to say, “How about this then?”
The band exerts calm control. Barking through a thunderous suite of “Morning Glory,” “Some Might Say,” and “Cigarettes & Alcohol,” Liam stands sternly inert, silhouette frozen at the mic stand. Denim-shirted Noel seems a bit aloof, as if he might be an undercover operative from Edinburgh Council. But the tradeoff for theatrics or chemistry is a set so heavy, quick, and tightly drilled that it instantly obliterates its own memory, propelling us deeper into the past, without a moment to comprehend that any of this is really happening.
I watched a bunch of video clips from their opening night on YouTube, and yeah, I can confirm: they sounded great and the crowd was electric. It is palpable through the screen that everyone was Eras Tour-levels excited to be there. Noel and Liam were on such good behavior that they even held hands and briefly hugged. I know they are grown-ass men, so take this with a grain of salt when I say it, but that feels huge. Obviously, they have only done two shows, but hey, they’re trying. All the roads that led them here were winding, but now it can only go two ways: They either continue to behave and put on fantastic performances or they give everyone a show by getting into a fight on stage and still get a lot of buzz. I’m 1,000% rooting for the former, but part of me is expecting the later to happen at least halfway through the tour. We shall see.
Photos credit: Hannah Meadows Photography/Avalon, Getty