I sobbed along to Oasis at Heaton Park. Why? It’s complicated...

Oasis were back home. Their strange enduring power continues to be dissected in British media, often with the detachment of an anthropologist peering into a foreign land.

So let me explain what Oasis means, as a fan who sobbed in that park during the final throes of Champagne Supernova, a song that Noel Gallagher suggests means nothing at all.

It would be easiest to talk about Don’t Look Back in Anger, which possesses some of the lyrical nonsense of other Oasis tracks, but has clarity at its core. It was the first song I heard on the radio as I returned from a desperate Burnley FC loss with my stepdad. It was the last I listened to at university, sung low at a vigil after my mother and sister escaped the Manchester bombing.

Or there’s Rock ’n’ Roll Star and its urban malaise. I was born in Burnley, about 30 miles from Burnage where Liam and Noel grew up, but with whispers of their upbringing in my early childhood. I lived with my nan, mum and brother in a council house big enough for two. I did what Liam said he did when he was plotting his escape: “Watch TV and dream.”

But it was Champagne Supernova, the illogical anthem, that brought me to tears last weekend. A song about slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball, about being caught beneath a landslide that is also, somehow, up in the sky.

I cried for its place in my spool of memories, for seeing it move so many others, for the way it courts attention from six emotions at once. I cried because it denies interpretation or reduction, and so speaks to the abstract life out of which we carve meaning.

It is plucked from the ether as the best music is – a song that has always existed somewhere until it exists in us.

Photograph by Izzy Clayton/Alamy Live News