Oasis’s reunion gives young fans the chance to see the band live for the very first time. And thanks to podcasts, web forums and Anaïs Gallagher, there are lots of them
In 2017, when James Corcoran got an iPhone for the first time, the first thing he did was search for an Oasis podcast. None existed. “I filled the niche, basically,” says Corcoran, the 45-year-old host of the Oasis Podcast. There was, he assures me, no master plan. “Nothing in my professional life prepared me for it. But within 12 episodes, I was interviewing [the band’s original drummer] Tony McCaroll.”
Today, Corcoran’s podcast is just one part of the world of very online Oasis fandom. He was there for the band’s 1990s heyday, but many who participate were not. When we think about internet music fans, it’s more armies of Swifties or breakout TikTok stars than the very analogue Gallagher brothers, Liam and Noel. But when Oasis take the stage for Oasis: Live ’25 next month, it will be the moment that an online subculture finally goes overground.
When Oasis split in 2009, Facebook was still imperial, Twitter a plucky upstart, and Spotify had just launched in the UK. All of this was suddenly more available than ever on the new iPhone 3GS. “In the early 2010s it was unfashionable to be an Oasis fan,” says Corcoran. But that changed thanks to the 2016 documentary Supersonic and Liam Gallagher’s comeback the following year.
Sadie Marchant, 22, became obsessed with Oasis during those years after hearing 1994’s Slide Away on the radio. “It flicked a switch in my brain,” she says enthusiastically.
Marchant was hooked, even learning to play guitar by watching videos of Noel Gallagher on YouTube.
“I made a Twitter account because I didn’t know any Oasis fans in real life, but I wanted to talk about them with people.”
What Marchant found surprised her. “Virtually everyone I’m close to through Oasis Twitter is a woman or girl my age,” she says “It’s mad how the band has gained this massive female following in the time they’ve been away.”
Corcoran notes approvingly that the younger female fans, who have been endorsed by Noel’s influencer daughter Anaïs, remind him of Oasis fans in the 1990s.
“They’re driven by the music but also the fashion, the style, looking back at the 1990s in the same way we at that time looked at how cool the 1960s was.”
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Anaïs Gallagher with her father, Noel, in 2022
The movement has been given a huge boost by one band member’s compulsive use of the platform.
“Liam being on Twitter [now X] has attracted so many people of my age,” points out Marchant. Fans use the #Oasistwt tag, or reply to Gallagher’s tweets. At first, fans like Marchant might begin posting on r/oasis, the band’s hugely active Reddit fan page, where younger users share Gallagher memes and gossip. But a pre-social-media fan forum, Live4Ever, has also had a resurgence.
“I’m on that forum virtually every day,” says Marchant, who enjoys its rabbit-hole deep dives, such as researching the often lively reasons behind every cancelled gig.
Not all of this online activity is positive. As a former resident of Manchester, I am part of local Facebook pages and WhatsApp groups, and I started to notice a worrying trend: scams. These were often highly plausible, with the names and accounts of real-life friends taken over with sophisticated messaging. And many worked: it has been estimated that Oasis fans in the UK – most likely to be aged between 35 and 44, and living in the north-west or Scotland – have lost more than £2m to ticket fraud.
With so much fan and public interest, the prizes will be big for online bootleggers who can capture the best Oasis videos and upload them to YouTube the quickest. Such videos are increasingly sophisticated affairs, often shot at high quality from multiple angles with good sound. It will be interesting to see how Oasis’s management company, Ignition, responds to this: it has its own big-budget live film in the works.
For Corcoran, next month’s reunion will be – to use one of Liam Gallagher’s favoured online expressions – biblical.
“I see it as my civic duty,” he says about recording Oasis podcasts as the tour takes off. “Have laptop, will travel. It’s like when your partner is pregnant: you have to have that bag packed at all times.”
Oasis’s Gen Z fans may use social media to express their love for Oasis, but much of the Gallaghers’ appeal is as an antidote to the timidity and self-censorship brought about by the toxicity of online debate.
“Oasis never shied away from expressing their opinions,” says Marchant. “You’ve got these two brothers who were on top of the world and did not care about the repercussions of what they were saying. It’s so refreshing for people of my generation, because we do not have that at all.”
Photographs by Mick Hutson/Redferns, Dave J Hogan/Getty
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