Everyone is here. Facebook mums clink plastic cups of frozen cocktails. Dads sneak their teenage daughters to the front of the heaving queue for the women’s toilets, which a girl with large hoop earrings has taken it upon herself to run like the navy (“Go! No time for wiping!”). A man desperately tries to keep up with his drunk-on-a-mission missus by hanging on to her belt loops, while a group of lads with photorealistic tattoos argue over whether to load up on pints or head in to secure a premium standing position. In every direction, best friends of all generations doggedly traverse a packed-out Wembley Stadium, each clutching two pints and a Twix to their chest. Others lean in for group selfies beneath the gigantic digital sign proclaiming “Oasis Live ’25”.
The air is a tangle of Glaswegian accents, Rochdale accents, Cardiff accents, East End accents and Scouse accents as strangers genially befriend each other; the horizon a jumble of jeans-and-shoes, jorts, and bucket hats of all designs. There are people in original 1994 Definitely Maybe tour shirts, and people who weren’t even born when Creation Records dissolved; Gen X ravers who now manage sales teams, and millennials repping the H&M Pacha collection. There are sober twentysomethings, retired pillheads and, judging by the (small) number of people walking sideways, active ketamine enthusiasts. This is, in short, the most accurate cross-section of the British general public you will ever experience outside of a motorway service station.
This weekend marked the final UK dates of Oasis’s sold-out reunion tour, which began in Cardiff on 4 July and is due to end in Sao Paulo on 23 November. “Did you miss us?” Liam, chewing gum, rhetorically asks the first of two 90,000-strong crowds. Then the band promptly launch into “(What’s The Story) Morning Glory?” and £8 pints go up in the air.
The scenes have been essentially the same around the world. Fans in Mexico City held up hand-drawn banners saying “Oasis saved me” and “R kid can I have your tambourine”. Fans in Dublin wore little round glasses over Irish flag balaclavas. Despite their relative lack of popularity in the US previously, Oasis fever has been as strong there as anywhere else. A Variety review, titled “How Oasis turned LA into glorious Britannia for a weekend”, describes a nostalgic and star-studded Rose Bowl Stadium crowd (which included Leonardo DiCaprio and Kamala Harris) trying and failing to do Man City’s Poznań dance. Another describes coffee shops and bars in Pasadena packed to the rafters with British paraphernalia, dovetailing with a summer in which Anglophilia has been strangely prevalent – be it through Bonnie Blue, that American TikTok lad who’s obsessed with being a “charva”, or the omnipresent jingle of “nothing beats a Jet2Holiday”.
It’s easy to write Oasis off as a “damaging pop cultural force” at home, where their image is invariably wrapped up with Cool Britannia messaging, the false promise of New Labour, and the simplicity of Euro 96 and that Walkers campaign where they shoved fivers into packets of crisps. As the band runs through a two-hour bangers-only setlist, however, it’s clear that A) no one cares, and B) that argument over-intellectualises something that is actually pretty simple: Oasis are responsible for a sizeable chunk of the most timeless songs in rock history.
You don’t need to be from the UK to understand them, but their blend of bravado and tenderness articulates a fundamental experience of being British. Working-class egos are often demonised in the media, but in Oasis’s lyrics they run free: stifled ambitions are turned into supernovas. They have made an art form of our tendency to romanticise the banal and the abject in order to imagine lives much larger than the ones afforded to us (“You could wait for a lifetime / To spend your days in the sunshine …”). And, like Premier League footballers, we admire them because they made it happen.
At Wembley, the Gallaghers, men of few words (on stage, anyway), communicate mostly through brief affirmations (“Nice one”) and “fucking come on then” hand gestures, and nod to broader goings-on through homage. Noel dedicates Half the World Away to the Irish and Little By Little to “the mandem”, and an image of the late boxing legend Ricky Hatton fills the screen at the end of Live Forever. Lads with shotta bags hug and climb on each other’s shoulders. Girls twirl each other. Men arrange themselves in circles and do that dance where they bend their knees, poke their arses back and point their index fingers one hand at a time. Primary school kids to the retired all throw their arms in the air alike, outstretched like Jesus on the cross, and the whole stadium erupts into a cry of “Why, why, why, why” as Champagne Supernova closes the set.
The Sunday papers prepare to print Tony Blair’s face on their front pages as he makes his utterly unwanted return to geopolitics. Meanwhile, the closest anyone has felt to national peace in decades comes courtesy of some fiftysomething blokes from Longsight and Burnage playing songs about cigarettes, alcohol, and brief glimpses of glory.
