Maybe… definitely? Almost 30 years to the day since the release of Oasis’s debut album, it seems beyond doubt that the news fans have been dreaming of for 15 years is about to land. Yesterday, both Noel and Liam Gallagher (and the official Oasis account) tweeted a time and date written in the rock band’s font: 8am, 27/08/2024.
The prospect of an Oasis reunion has been bandied about so much over the years that you’d think fans were trying to speak it into existence. Yet it could only have ever really happened now, after the once-warring brothers had proved themselves as successful artists in their own right – Liam as a solo singer (his band Beady Eye didn’t fare quite so well) and Noel with his High Flying Birds. Some growing up has taken place: marriages, kids, divorces. Liam enjoys a bike ride, a face mask and an early night. Some of the harder liquor has been swapped out for apple cider vinegar.
Early reports might have jumped the gun a tad, but a string of live shows next year seem like a certainty if a reunion is in fact what we are getting. No one is exactly crying out for a new Oasis album (although that would be interesting), but there are thousands, if not millions, of fans who would give their right arm for a ticket to see the band play Wembley Stadium in London or Heaton Park in Manchester.
Claims that they’ll surpass Taylor Swift’s record of eight Wembley shows in a single tour are off the mark – she holds the record for a solo artist, after beating Michael Jackson’s seven shows in 1988. Oasis would have to sell out nine shows to beat the record set by Take That in 2011 during their Progress tour, when they were reunited with Robbie Williams.
Naysayers might ask why reports of a band reunion are generating so much hype, when plenty of their Britpop peers have done the same in recent years. Blur returned to Wembley Stadium in July 2023, the same month that Pulp sold out Finsbury Park as part of their massive UK tour.
But no other rock band of their time really compares when it comes to that narrative arc: the humble origins, the difficult childhoods then the rise to global fame. The partying, the excess. Then the Romulus and Remus-level fallout of 2009, when Liam squared off with his brother in a backstage room at Rock en Seine festival in Paris, wielding Noel’s guitar “like an axe”. And now, it seems, the reconciliation.
Of course, there are the songs. I defy anyone not to be stirred by the acoustic intro of “Wonderwall”, or roar along to the chorus of “Cigarettes and Alcohol”. I never got to see Oasis live, but I did end up standing on a chair (I know, I know) for a particularly soused rendition of the latter at the NME Awards in 2018, where Liam had just been handed the Godlike Genius award. Yes, they were gobby in the press and on the street, but the songwriting carried with it a sense of community. Anyone could go along to a gig solo and find themselves with a drunken arm thrown affectionately around their shoulders. Liam’s unmistakable holler – a kind of sneering, fists-raised yowl – still makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.
I was born into Britpop. Definitely Maybe and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? both came out when I was still a toddler; my older brother bought me Don’t Believe the Truth for my 13th birthday, a couple of months after it came out. Other critics can hate on that album all they like – I remember the thrill of hearing that jangling opener “Turn Up the Sun”. The punchy guitar on “Lyla” still hits home; “The Importance of Being Idle” is the best homage to date to “Sunny Afternoon” by The Kinks (with a bit of “Dead End Street” thrown in for good measure).
Living through the Nineties, even if you weren’t a fan, it was as though Oasis permeated every facet of British pop culture. Their tunes blared out from every radio station; Liam and Noel’s faces scowled at you from every newspaper stand. And every week, it felt as though there was another record smashed, or else some new scandal or scrap they’d got themselves into. Their live shows were, as critics have pointed out plenty of times, hit and miss, more often than not dependent on Liam’s degree of sobriety.
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Sources close to the band have told me that a reunion has been in the works for some time, and Liam has, despite his habit of poking the bear, never hidden his willingness to get the gang back together. In 2017, he was more than happy to praise Noel (“a good songwriter”) and said he missed being in a band with his brother. Particularly as he wasn’t a huge fan of giving interviews.
“That was the good balance of Oasis,” he told me. “But now I’ve got to do a bit of that kind of thing and I’ll probably have to get media trained.”
He never did. But fans paying attention to his social media will have noticed how the swipes at Noel have become less and less frequent, traded in for compliments about his songwriting, or his High Flying Birds project. Arguably one of the biggest clues that those fences had been mended was when Noel offered rare praise for his younger sibling in a recent interview.
“It’s the delivery or the tone of his voice and the attitude,” he told musician and critic John Robb of Liam’s performance on hits such as “Slide Away”, “Cigarettes and Alcohol” and “Rock ’N’ Roll Star”.
“I don’t have the same attitude as him,” he continued, comparing Liam’s voice to “a shot of tequila” and his to “half a Guinness”… “Liam’s is 10 shots of tequila on a Friday night,” he joked.
“I would prefer to be in a band, and we should never ever have split up,” Liam said in 2017. He and Noel needed to have a “good old chat about what’s what”, he reckoned. From the sounds of it, finally, that’s exactly what they did.