This isn’t the first time I’ve stood at a crossroads and taken hope from Noel Gallagher
The moment I realised my partner was The One was when we were parked outside a Tower Records in Chicago, heard “Acquiesce” on the car radio, and started singing at the top of our lungs. I often joked I would get the Oasis records in the divorce, and that seems to be coming to pass.
It felt symbolic when I not only got tickets for the reunion tour – without getting stung by dynamic pricing – but grabbed them for the first night in Cardiff, which was Independence Day (a complicated time for a lot of us Americans). It’s like they knew. The fact he declined to attend this gig with me, despite never having seen them, is a sad bookend to the relationship, a hard look at how far we’ve drifted from the people we used to be.
Oasis are more than nostalgia for me: Noel Gallagher’s songs are a perpetual comfort as we have aged in parallel. But it’s only with hindsight I realise why Oasis has always been so comforting. Contrary to their appearances and public personae, their songs of positivity, hope and self-actualisation motivated me to keep going at age 22. Now, at 52, they’re doing it again.
In the 90s, Oasis was the soundtrack to my despair – to being young and having hopes and dreams and no clue how to achieve them. For many people they were working-class kids who turned their snot-nosed Beatles-influenced punk into the sound of a generation – but I always responded to the melancholy and ennui that lurked beneath the swagger and laddish behaviour. These were also messages of self-affirmation and manifestation: basically “live laugh love”, but with guitars. I think even now people refuse to see the band’s complexity – that where Pulp gave us anthems and Blur gave us critical commentary, Oasis gave us heart.
To me, Noel Gallagher’s lyrics were transmissions from the other side: for all the “you might as well do the white line” references, there’s the leitmotif of sunshine, of new days, of making things happen and of being true to yourself. You can’t bellow “you need to be yourself, you can’t be no one else” ad infinitum and not internalise it.
My first and only Oasis gig was Chicago in 1996, the ill-fated North American tour where Liam didn’t show – half the arena was empty because punters demanded refunds knowing they weren’t going to get a Britpop WWE bust-up. Their loss – Noel was on fire, and I had resisted seeing them again because I wanted it to be special, like the first one, if for all the wrong reasons.
In the lead-up to the shows, they said “people will never forget how you made them feel”. In Cardiff, they did not disappoint. They hit the ground at 90mph and did not stop. Blistering guitars. Vocals clear and true. The bonhomie was infectious. Pints aloft, kids posing with dads in matching T-shirts, singalongs, men taking selfies with strangers, hugging, dancing, laughing, radiating pure joy. The helicopter flutter that opens “Morning Glory” had me shouting “YES MOTHERF**KERS” in a guttural howl straight from the bowels of my own personal hell before they’d even played a note – I think I frightened the poor sods in front of us. Ironically, the whole thing would have reminded my partner why he liked Oasis in the first place.
All that “we’re the best band in the world” rhetoric in the 90s unveiled itself with the assurance of a group that always knew how good they were, and knew without doubt the world could no longer deny they were right. They still have It.
I took a beat to think about this. It was one thing to take my antidepressants and cry on my bed and listen to Oasis records as a confused new adult. It’s another to take my antidepressants and bury my grief so my son doesn’t see it and play my Oasis CDs in the car on the sly, snuffling back tears to “Don’t Go Away” on the Old Kent Road. But this gig made me feel new. Like I too came through the other side, stronger and accomplished, and that this band could be just mine again, unstained and unhaunted. It made me feel almost… supersonic.
