Brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher – the Paul and John of arguably Britain’s biggest mainstream musical enterprise since the Beatles – went down acrimoniously down their own personal Reichenbach Falls in 2009, after push came to backstage ‘altercation’ at the Rock en Seine festival in Paris, where Liam apparently tried to attack his brother with a guitar. Things had grown ugly after elder brother and songwriting-engine Noel had blocked frontman Liam from a clothing advertising deal for a forthcoming festival. Yes, that’s how the cookie crumbles for a band …that created stunning, anthemic tunes like ‘Wonderwall’, ‘Stand By Me’ ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger,’ and ‘Supersonic’.
Fact is, Oasis had turned to shite much before 2009, so you can’t really blame UPA-2 this time. I saw them headlining at the 2004 Glastonbury Music Festival. They were so grandiosely incoherent that I walked out of their set at the Pyramid Stage to watch The Chemical Brothers instead. That time, Liam, in his white overcoat, looking more stuffed pigeon than strutting star, made the flattest of pancakes out of ‘Morning Glory’ – a song whose sheer pace and chorus-line usually makes breakfast cornflakes take on cocainic proportions. Liam would blame that performance to his first-time use of in-ear monitors – ‘It’s spun me out for 15 years…I hated that gig, man’. Sure.
But with the return of Oasis – the monastically named ‘Oasis Live ’25’ tour tickets going on sale from yesterday to end all speculation – I have been awash with a rush that’s 80% music-related, and 20% zeitgeist-specific (read: retrofitted nostalgia). So is this going to be one of those (monetised) opportunities where old fogeys on the cusp of retirement will get to relive their hey-heydays in the age of Taylor Swift rainbow friendship bracelets and nasal Coldplay ersatz by raising their cellphones (no one apparently possesses lighters anymore) and singing in unison as if in a Sound of Music Nuremberg rally, ‘Because may-beeeee/ Yougonnabetheonewho saves me-eeee/ And afta aa-aall/ You’re my wonderwa-aaall’. Well, hell yes, and not totally.
Since their decoupling, Noel and Liam have had successful separate careers – and, more importantly perhaps, regular appearances in the media. So, to quote one of their 1998 songs, they never did ‘fade away, away, away’ like, say, Bryan Adams or alarm clocks or other past sell-by date commodities.
Also, Liam’s full-blown return to music and stage this year has been nothing short of bangers and mash. A new generation has been transfixed by the parka-clad 51-yr-old lad. But by teaming up with Noel again, Liam makes gestalt out of Oasis. It’s like Laxmikant-Pyarelal returning by popular demand to save the world from K-pop and Swifties. Yes, of course, there’ll be riding on the back of back catalogues. You don’t write astoundingly good songs like ‘Rock’n’Roll Star’, ‘Live Forever’ and ‘Roll With It’ and don’t perform them worrying that you’ll be accused by some poncy influencer of nostalgia-mining. But it’s really the unmitigated swagger – both in their music and their presence – that will draw us, as well as them, like moths to a champagne supernova. If the 90s through the Oasitic lens was all about arrogance and kindness, brashness and next-door-neighbourliness, Knebworth and knobhead, showing the two-finger and flashing the V sign, champagnism and socialism all joined tightly at one hip, a retrofit to this age of corporate rockstarring, Insta-gratification and opinion-spieling could deliver a good dose of anti-self-righteous vaccine to the 2020s.
So, will I catch the Brothers Gallagher next summer in Cardiff, Manchester, London, Edinburgh, or Dublin? If for nothing else but to hear that scorching Noel opening guitar line in ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’ and see/hear Liam tilting at the microphone like the Man from La Manchester and sneering away: ‘Is it worth the aggravation/ To find yourself a job when there’s nothing worth working for?’? Definitely maybe.
