Oasis back together and giving people what they want

A total of 5,789 days after Liam Gallagher threw a plum at his older brother Noel at a festival in Paris, setting in motion a chain of events that would lead to Oasis’s break-up, the Gallaghers walk onstage with Liam’s arm slung over his brother’s shoulder. The words “This is not a drill” ring out over the PA, followed by the opening chords of Hello.

“It’s good to be back,” sings Liam, sporting an unnecessary cagoule in the July heat, as Noel remains sphinx-like, focused on his guitar.

But when Noel sings too, his voice curling around his brother’s, the emotional reality of their long-awaited reunion dawns. It’s like a dam breaking, a collective yearning satisfied.

Sixteen years have passed, years that the elder Gallagher spent disabusing fans of the notion of a future Oasis reunion. It would not happen, not even if “all the starving children in the world depended on it”, as he said. The bookies’ odds of them not making it on to the stage for this opening night at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium all were 10/1 – steep, but still a factor.

And yet somehow, Hello becomes Acquiesce, a song about two people who “need each other”, which then rolls into a seismic Morning Glory. More tracks from the first two Oasis albums follow, plus a smattering of B-sides from their imperial phase. Fan favourite Little By Little, from 2002’s Heathen Chemistry, is the youngest track Oasis play, with Noel toying with his guitar’s resonance.

It is, pretty much, what people want: a set of zero selection surprises, no deep cuts, no messing about, no pyro, no T-shirt cannons giving away merch for free; just two-and-a-bit hours of unadulterated fan service. The roof of the stadium is shut, the better to boost the extreme volume of this band’s three-guitar attack. 

Huge screens across the back display Peter Blake-inspired collages of faintly psychedelic Oasis touchpoints: Manchester vignettes, Sixties pop art ephemera, and magnified images of the band. Attached to Liam’s microphone is a lens pointing right into his face; a beady eye-cam that reveals his raptor gaze in even more intensity.

No one has ever accused Oasis of being light on their feet, but this first gig rolls out like a juggernaut. It’s a muscular display, designed as though to supply as much essence of Oasis as possible, to fill the hungry gap they left. There’s not much bonhomie – but Oasis never were that kind of band.

Instead, Liam asks everyone to turn around and sling their arms over the shoulders of the people next to them and jump up and down. The payoff is Cigarettes and Alcohol, a loose and lairy hymn to simple pleasures in hard times – and the glam rock band T Rex. At various points, Liam tosses a tambourine into the crowd, who react like piranhas scenting steak. 

On a swaggering Supersonic, Noel’s guitar makes like a plane landing as he scrapes his plectrum. Roll With It, an underdog affirmation, is peak Mancunian. That attitude turns borderline toxic when Liam sneers: “Is it worth the £4,000 you paid for a ticket?” 

If there is not much in the way of light and shade to this route-one music, the section of songs sung by Noel provide most of the dapple. As it’s a special occasion, a three-piece brass section is on hand to add subtle lustre on a few songs, such as an expanded version of Half The World Away, which found ubiquity as the theme tune to the sitcom The Royle Family; poignancy mixed with good cheer.

The band speed towards the encore, and the late 90s flashes before the ears of people happily drowning in their projections of what these songs mean to them. 

Live Forever closes the first set with a sustained guitar note hanging in the air, and a visual tribute to Liverpool footballer Diogo Jota, killed in a car crash the previous day alongside his own brother. Don’t Look Back In Anger carries with it the heavy resonance of its post-Oasis life as the Manchester national anthem, following the terrorist attack on an Ariana Grande concert in 2017. 

“This one is for all the people in their 20s who’ve never seen us before who have kept us shit hot for the last 20 years,” Noel says, dedicating The Masterplan to Oasis’s millennial and Gen Z fan base, whose desire to see the band was surely a factor to Noel recanting his hardline stance. Another? The publishing rights to all Oasis’s songs revert to him in 2025.

The power of Wonderwall, Oasis’s soppiest song, lies in its eloquence about being tongue-tied; it is an anthem to wanting to put things right. That emotional payload is writ large, then undercut a little when Liam changes the words to “there are many things that I would like to say to you – but I don’t speak Welsh!”

The younger Gallagher’s emotional intelligence can sometimes be misconstrued. Liam knows how to read a room, and Cardiff is in the palm of his hand. “Thank you for being with us over the years. We are hard work – I get it,” he says, introducing Champagne Supernova.

And so the Gallagher brothers end Oasis’s first gig in 16 years with a respectful back-slap. This professional, assured version of Oasis may lack the chaotic energy of the band’s prime. But they have given their people what they wanted, wielding a precious power to impressive effect.

Photograph by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images