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Two moments were all it took, and what had been unthinkable for years suddenly seemed like a done deal. When Liam Gallagher dedicated Half the World Away to his brother Noel from the main stage at Reading Festival this Sunday, the music world took notice. The two couldn’t stand each other for the past two decades, just scroll through the posts on the X network, then Twitter.
When Noel Gallagher encouraged fans to “ask him anything from the last ten years” three years ago, Liam responded eloquently with a question: “Why are you such a huge bitch?” They couldn’t stand being in the same room together, so they were at least at each other through social media and messages in conversations.
When Liam Gallagher finished his set at Reading on Sunday and the stage on the festival’s biggest stage went out, the words ‘8am’ appeared on the projection screen, followed by the date ‘27.08.24’. Both messages were displayed in the Oasis logo graphic. Footage from Reading was then shared simultaneously by the Instagram accounts of Liam Gallagher, Noel Gallagher and their famous band.
A not-so-sophisticated cipher directed the fans to today’s nine o’clock in the morning of our time. The band’s website was down for less than an hour, but fans didn’t give up on social media. It’s official: Oasis are back.
So far they have announced 14 concerts, next year in July and August they will occupy stadiums in Cardiff, Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland and Dublin, Ireland. They will play four nights in London’s Wembley, and at home in Manchester as well. Tickets go on sale on the morning of Saturday, August 31.
Oasis symbolically returned the world to the time when (at least the foreign) music publications were published in hundreds of thousands of copies and music filled the front pages of newspapers. It is already clear that the younger of the Gallagher brothers has announced one of the biggest musical events of 2025 at Reading Festival.
Worst concert ever
Only Oasis’ return to Glastonbury remains shrouded in mystery. Excited debates about the program are part of the folklore of the most famous festival on the planet, they regularly take place right after the end of the current year. In this case, however, the probability of confirming gossip increases slightly. Glastonbury has been shaping the landscape of British music, and therefore popular culture, for more than half a century, and it’s hard to imagine the organizers missing out on such an event. But official confirmation is far from over.
“The guns fell silent. The stars aligned. The big wait is over. Come and have a look. It won’t be on TV,” reads a brief statement on the band’s communication channels. Concerts from the big stages of Glastonbury are broadcast live on BBC television, this year’s headline set by Coldplay was watched by 7.6 million Brits at home. If the Gallaghers really don’t care about the cameras during their comeback, they will have a hard time playing Glastonbury.
At the same time, the press release states that the 14 stops around Great Britain and Ireland represent “next year’s only concerts in Europe”. In any case, none of this contradicts Glastonbury’s tradition of publishing the program long after tickets have sold out, a month or two before the last weekend in June when it opens its doors each year. Also common are “surprise concerts” by big bands that are not listed in the program. Last year, for example, Foo Fighters performed unannounced on the main stage. Still, in the eyes of the British, Oasis are a different weight.
Oasis played at Michael Eavis’s cattle farm for the first time in 1994, Blur and Pulp also performed there that year, the dramaturgy of Glastonbury only accelerated the rise of Britpop. A year later, Oasis closed the festival on the main stage, the generational triumph was complete.
However, their last concert there in 2004 was recorded as one of the worst in the band’s history. “Dull, lifeless, dull,” quoted newspaper The Independent witnesses. At the same time, the memory includes words like “nightmare” or “the lowest point of Oasis’ career”. Many blamed the flop on drummer Zak Starkey, Ringo Starr’s eldest son, who had only been in the band for six weeks. Liam complained about the technology, he said he had just started using in-ears, i.e. listening directly in the headphones, which isolated him from the audience. Still, the Gallagher brothers belong in the meadow below the village of Pilton.
Every year, Liam cruises through the crowd and follows bands far from the VIP zones, he last stood on the Pyramid stage in 2019. Brother Noel was supposed to perform a year later, but due to the pandemic break, the people of Glastonbury did not see him until June 2022. The author of these lines watched both concerts and will readily testify that Oasis’ hits have lost little of their charm and allure after three decades.
On both occasions they were sounded in the late afternoon, the sun low enough for the flares and smokestacks to stand out above the heads of the large crowd. Nostalgia played a big role, but the whole picture cannot be described with that word. Even people who were born at the time of the release of the biggest hits watched the band enthusiastically. Oasis’ songs have been passed down from generation to generation, as if the band had found the universal key to the British soul.
More vulgar than the Sex Pistols
The Gallagher brothers grew up in so-called council houses, i.e. state-owned houses and apartment complexes. They may not be among the most luxurious, but thanks to rents below the market level, they are in short supply today. When Oasis hit the scene in 1994, they looked and talked like flutists from a Manchester block of flats. In no way did they resemble rock aristocrats like the Rolling Stones or U2.
“You’re an outcast / you’re from the poorest / but you don’t care / ’cause you live fast,” Liam sang of his brother’s lyrics on Bring It on Down on the debut. Oasis sounded like a bunch of flutists singing about wanting to strum guitars and have a famous band.
Hundreds of thousands of teenagers grew up in the same environment as the Gallaghers and knew very well that it was not about image. When Oasis achieved the rock dream, they gave confidence to their peers and, figuratively speaking, to the whole of Britain. The time has come celebrate. They told their fans that the world might not be the friendliest place to live in, but in the end, it is everything will turn out well.
They amply compensated for the fluffiness of the player’s technique with charisma. During interviews, they interspersed sentences with vulgarisms that the Sex Pistols would be ashamed of, exchanging dry British humor for blunt ones. “At the end of this decade, I want to have Phil Collins’ severed head in my fridge. And if not, it will be my personal failure,” Noel describes his ambitions in the documentary Oasis: Supersonic. From the beginning, they didn’t play for anything and kept to themselves.
Verse, chorus, verse, chorus
The heady wave of rave was fading in Manchester for the teenage Gallaghers. It was here that the proverb arose about ecstasy as the drug that taught the white man to dance. But the music playing in the hedonistic club The Haçienda meant nothing to Liam and Noel. They modeled themselves after the early Beatles, and instead of songs based on a repetitive and seemingly never-ending beat, they began to write handmade songs according to the pattern of intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, chorus. And of course they were in the right place at the right time.
At the beginning of the 90s, British music was in decline, the island charts were dominated by empty Eurodance, the world was dominated by American grunge. The path of Oasis was paved by Blur, who released their album Parklife three weeks after Cobain’s death. While Blur slowly climbed the charts, Oasis shot their debut Definitely Maybe six months later, which became the UK’s fastest-selling album. They jumped right into Britpop and pretended it was a full pool champagne.
Already at the time of Definitely Maybe, the media often hailed the album as an “instant classic” and talked about Oasis as the new Beatles. Young Stars related to the British musical tradition, in addition to the Beatles, they referred to The Jam, The Who and other musicians who used the British tricolor and other symbols. Thanks to the success of Britpop, the island’s culture rose so much that the second half of the 90s began to be nicknamed Cool Britannia.
A wave of enthusiasm and pride included fashion designers, writers and artists from the Young British Artists collective led by Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. Years later, graphs tracking the development of the economy also began to rise, the imaginary peak represented by the arrival of the Spice Girls.
The euphoria was intensified by the European Football Championship, which England hosted in 1996. Although the national team “only” achieved bronze, at least the best scorer of the tournament was the shooter Alan Shearer, at that time the striker of the Blackburn Rovers club.
One of the peaks of Britpop was the Oasis concerts in Knebworth in 1996. 2.5 million people, or five percent of the British population at the time, tried to get tickets. The band could sell out the concert twenty times in a row, they played only twice. Being British was suddenly cool, being young meant going to concerts.
Tickets for the concerts announced so far will surely disappear within a few tens of minutes and stadiums will be flooded with nostalgia.
Will the Gallagher brothers write another song together, or even an album? Maybe. For now, they just fulfilled the wishes of millions of fans and fulfilled the words of their older song. As Noel sings in Crying Your Heart Out: “Because all the stars go out / try not to be afraid / one day you’ll see us.”
