Rock’s biggest will-they-won’t-they finally has an answer: Oasis have announced that they will reunite for a 14-date tour of the UK and Ireland in 2025.
They will not, however, be headlining Glastonbury festival as was rumoured over the weekend, nor playing 10 dates at Wembley and Etihad stadiums respectively.
Instead, the dates will take place in July and August, hitting stadiums in Cardiff, London, Manchester, Edinburgh and Dublin. Tickets go on sale at 9am on 31 August with prices to be revealed on the day.
A press release billed the dates as the “domestic leg” of the tour and said that “plans are underway” for it to go beyond Europe later in 2025.
Of the famously feuding brothers’ decision to reunite, the release stated: “There has been no great revelatory moment that has ignited the reunion – just the gradual realisation that the time is right.”
In a joint statement, the band said: “The guns have fallen silent. The stars have aligned. The great wait is over. Come see. It will not be televised.”
The dates will mark 16 years since the band split acrimoniously after Noel Gallagher quit ahead of a show at a French festival, as well as 30 years since the release of their second album, 1995’s What’s the Story (Morning Glory)? Unlike Liam Gallagher’s ongoing 30th anniversary tour of the band’s 1994 debut Definitely Maybe, the setlist for the 2025 reunion shows will not be explicitly geared around that album.
The Oasis lineup has not been confirmed; the band also has no plans to re-enter the recording studio to make new music.
The Gallagher brothers had been teasing the news on social media in recent days, sharing a clip of the date “27.08.24” in the same font as the Oasis logo on their respective social media accounts, as well as the official Oasis accounts.
The clip was also shown at the end of Liam’s headline set at Reading festival this weekend, where he dedicated their 1994 B-side Half the World Away to Noel, and 1994’s Cigarettes & Alcohol to people who say they hate Oasis. It was also shown after Blossoms played Wythenshawe park in Manchester this weekend.
Liam is currently touring Definitely Maybe with guitarist Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs; earlier this year, he and Stone Roses guitarist John Squire also toured their collaborative album, practically named Liam Gallagher John Squire. Noel also recently concluded a run of festival dates with his band High Flying Birds.
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The band are yet to go into greater depth about how they buried the hatchet in the years since Noel walked out at Rock en Seine in 2009. Since then the brothers have publicly sniped at each other and denied that a reunion would ever happen. In recent years, however, relations appeared to have softened: in 2017, Liam tweeted Christmas wishes at his brother and said he was “looking forward to seeing you tomorrow”.
This week, in a video to mark the 30th anniversary of Definitely Maybe, Noel praised Liam’s singing abilities. “When I would sing a song, it would sound good. When he sung it, it sounded great … I can’t sing Cigarettes & Alcohol, Rock’n’Roll Star and all that. I don’t have the same attitude as him. My voice is half a Guinness on a Tuesday – it’s all right. Liam’s is 10 shots of tequila on a Friday.”
Despite Oasis’s inactivity, the band’s legend hasn’t waned: they have 21.6m monthly listeners on Spotify and command a huge gen Z audience. Earlier this year, Dua Lipa used the band’s immediately identifiable font in the marketing for her supposedly Britpop-inspired album Radical Optimism.
Some have speculated that one motivation for a lucrative reunion might be Noel’s recent divorce from his second wife, Sara MacDonald, in a settlement reported to cost around £20m.