Mad for it! The triumphant return of Oasis

As Oasis mania sweeps Britain like it’s 1995 and the opening gig of a reunion tour we thought would never happen gets wall to wall five star reviews, it must be a tough time to be one of the peculiar obsessives who take every opportunity to diss the most successful band of the 1990s.

Flash your pan at the song that I’m singing, Liam sang on the title track to Be Here Now, the album largely heralded as the start of their long decline. Noel’s lyric perhaps acknowledged the received wisdom was that Oasis would be a brief and ultimately forgettable 90s craze.

Not so. It was clear when each Gallagher brother separately played Glastonbury in recent years that their songs had found a whole new Gen Z audience. Kids who know nothing of their contemporaries Blur, Pulp and Suede were singing along word perfect to even some of the lesser Oasis hits. So much for Oasis not enduring well. The clamour for a reunion spanned generations, even as the continuing war of words between the Gallaghers made it look impossible.

When, in the words of their PR, ‘the guns fell silent’, the rush to get tickets for the live performances was a rampage. There was furious fallout over the dynamic pricing – cue more headlines hyping the tour – and a fair bit of forecasting how terrible the whole thing would be. But the Gallaghers, while being pretty honest about the fact that they were doing it for the money, were never going to let that happen. If Oasis were to reform after all these years in the face of this demand and hype, it would have to be, to quote Liam, ‘biblical’. Turns out that at least two of the reviews of the first night used exactly that term – and many who were there described it as the greatest gig they’d ever attended. It’s a triumph on every level for the band – once again cheering the country up in gloomy times – and one in the eye for the naysayers.

There is of course a pre-1998 bias to the setlist. The days when Noel Gallagher was randomly chucking stone cold classics on to B-sides and seeming like the world’s most prolific writer of brilliant tunes only lasted a short period – but as Alexis Petredis puts it in The Guardian, ‘the show serves as a reminder of how fantastic purple patch Oasis were’. Hindsight is always 20:20: a better strategy might have been to save some of the throwaway classics up (The Masterplan would have been a great third album). That said, every Oasis album has its gems – Stop Crying Your Heart Out, The Importance of Being Idle, The Shock Of The Lightning, Lyla, Gas Panic and Little By Little – the one 21st century Oasis tune to make the live set – are great examples, as is one off single Lord Don’t Slow Me Down.

But there is no question that Oasis peaked in their ”golden years” in the mid-1990s – and the Gallaghers are savvy enough to focus their live performances on that era. After several failed attempts, I have managed to get a ticket – and I’m not sure I have ever looked forward to a gig more. So to celebrate, here’s my own collection of the days when Oasis truly burned like a champagne supernova in the sky.