Oasis and Me

An intimate memoir

Yes, it’s another post about music. During this period while I’ve been trying not to get too depressed and furious about politics, and dump all that on you, music — listening, playing, or just thinking about it — seems to have expanded to fill the gap. I hope you’ll indulge me in a rich trip down memory lane.

The world continues to feel like it’s being run by evil amateurs who hate us, but something that has given me heart recently has been watching the progress of the Oasis tour in the UK. Part of this pleasure, I’ll admit, is rooted in a smug satisfaction at seeing how misplaced all the sneering was from people who said it’d never actually happen, or that Oasis were has-beens — or never any good in the first place — and nobody would really care when the tour started and the hype burst.

How very wrong you were, my friends.

The non-British out there might not realize how foundational Oasis are in the UK, especially to Gen X and early Millennials. For the second half of the 90s — having seen off early competition from too-cool-for-school Blur — they were the British band. The first two albums in particular (Definitely Maybe and What’s the Story, Morning Glory) were in constant rotation in our house and others, to the point where the songs became ubiquitous across a nation. I must have heard them hundreds of times during that period. Any of a dozen bangers immediately brings back heady nights in one or other of the flats we lived in over that period, or in pubs, and parties, high times spent anywhere with other people (especially our friend Zaz, who was obsessed with them). This wasn’t just music: it was omnipresent life texture.

After years of rather mannered and fashion-focused pop, suddenly here were a bunch of surly working class Northern lads ready to shove some rock and roll in your face, loudly. The fact they didn’t seem to necessarily be the nicest people in the world (Noel’s never appeared troubled by a lack of self-confidence, and Liam may be the only man in history able to shake a tambourine in an openly hostile fashion) was somehow part of the appeal. They became the sound of London, of Britain — in an era when the country briefly woke up and thought hey, let’s be cool again. They owned the times to the point where the final, present-day scene in the BBC’s superb span-of-time drama Our Friends In The North was (perfectly) accompanied by the Oasis track Don’t Look Back in Anger. No other song could have nailed the zeitgeist so hard.

Then — at around the point where over-familiarity was beginning to breed contempt — Oasis exploded in acrimony, of which more later, and Britain lost its cool (again). I drifted from actively listening to the band for a long time. They were however always lurking in the background. In recent years during trips back to the UK I’d noticed how, if you’re in a pub and an Oasis song comes on in the background, all the men and women of a certain age will start unconsciously bobbing their heads as if re-hearing a maternal heartbeat in the womb. The question was whether that bedrock bonding could be leveraged into gig attendance after a decade and a half.

The answer is evidently a resounding yes, leading to arguably one of the biggest come-backs — or most triumphant returns — in rock history.

People are genuinely fucking mad for it, to an eye-opening degree. For a band to saunter back on stage after sixteen years and fill night after night of 70-90,000 seater stadiums with people singing every word to every song... that’s not normal. I’ve been to a bunch of gigs at Wembley over the years, including veteran crowd-pleasers like AD/DC, and nobody gets the entire place singing and dancing all at once, faces full of glee, as they’ve done there and everywhere else, including Edinburgh — 

Yes, Liam gets it going — but I’m here to tell you that Gen X don’t do shit that they’re told to do, unless they wanted to do it in the first place. We’re like cats. And check out the look on this family’s face from about 45 seconds into this example from Wembley, when the mother and her son turn and see what’s going on all around them… honestly, it’s worth watching from the beginning.

Then there’s the sight and sound of an entire audience singing the chorus of a song so loudly that the singer just leaves them to it... [from about 1:05 here]

I don't even know what this is. It’s like some massive sporting event where nobody loses. It’s community, turned up to 11. It’s jubilation, and fuck me that emotion’s rare right now. It’s sometimes people losing it, with some other, hard-to-identify emotion, openly crying while singing. The comments on YouTube gig videos are full of people saying it’s the best time they’ve ever had and they’ve never felt anything like it.

Oasis are tapping into something, and it’s not merely nostalgia or a yearning for an earlier and simpler era — though I wholly acknowledge that’s a big part of it for me. Those were good times, and the mid-nineties are half my lifetime ago. We bought these albums on CD. There were no streaming services, smartphones, social media. It was music that provided the social glue. I know that. But it’s not just that.

Perhaps it’s partly the sight of two brothers with a famously life-long mutual animosity getting their shit together (albeit with the prospect of making a fuck-ton of cash as a result) and not only failing to break out in fistfights (so far, don’t jinx it), but seeming almost affable towards each other — and increasingly so as the tour progresses.

There’s been a curious underlying tension about the tour, and the fact it’s “so far, so good, in fact, great” feels like it’s fighting the run of play with everything else in the world. It’s a bit like everybody decided: well, we could try not being dicks?

But it’s also the music itself. Liam has a thing, like Mick Jagger has a thing. You just can’t argue with it. And the crucial bottom line is Noel writes very good songs, and these are songs you can sing. All of you, of us. They have actual tunes, and those tunes are within the range of normal singers (neither Gallagher is Whitney Houston, let’s face it). I literally cannot sing at all, and yet even I can sing these songs. That’s huge. Watching the gigs, it’s astonishing to see how the crowd sings along — at high volume — throughout the entire show. There are bands that’ll get that for a banger or two, but not the whole goddamned set. It’s partly because of that singability (and isn’t that what songs are for, in the end?), but also because people truly love these anthems.

The songs are the point, the songs and the way they make people feel. There’s no stagecraft with Oasis. Nobody’s scampering up and down a runway extension out into the crowd. Bonehead’s not going to be transported into the sky on a riser to play a ten-minute solo. There’s no dancers. There’s just Liam looking — as always — like he’s had a line of coke too many and really wants to fight someone, anyone; and Noel — as always — looking like he’s trying to remember if he locked the front door when he left home. They just stand in a line and play the fucking songs. That’s it.

And sometimes that’s all it needs.

Anyway. Here’s the “and me” part.

1996

Back in 1996 I was working on a TV adaptation of Clive Barker’s Weaveworld, and at one point during that two-year melodrama was flown over for a couple of days of meetings with Showtime in LA. I was waiting in the mainly-deserted little lounge by the departure gate at Heathrow (they were flying me in style) and suddenly realized first that the motley crew of blokes loitering twenty feet away were... Oasis.

Then, that things did not seem to be going swimmingly.

Within a few moments there was a brief altercation, after which Liam — who appeared to be, I have to say, profoundly fucked up, and looked like he’d been awake for a week — strut-staggered out of the lounge, as always swaying from side to side like a chimp on shore leave, snarling that he wasn’t fucking there for this fucking shit, and fuck this and fuck them all and fuck you especially. The rest of the band glanced at each other while Noel stared at the ground with weary here-we-go-again chagrin.

Next morning I called my wife from LA to catch up before my meeting and mentioned this… and she told me it was national news at home, as Liam had stormed off the start of the US tour that was hoped to finally cement their stature in America. He missed the opening gig in Chicago, and the tour eventually hit the wall.

I was there the moment it happened, dude.

You may be wondering how the meetings went. I was staying not far from the studio and rashly elected to walk there from my hotel. It was so ludicrously hot during those five hundred yards that the black pens I had in my shirt pocket exploded, gushing ink all over my white shirt, so I went in looking like I’d taken a shotgun blast to the heart and was profusely bleeding ichor. That’s how they went.

2018

Fast forward twenty two years. Some time after we’d moved to Santa Cruz, we happened to be down in Santa Monica visiting friends and Paula took a picture of me and Nate near the beach. Only later did we notice a gentleman photo-bombing on the far right. Yes, that would be Noel in the photo at the top of this piece, looking as Noel as it's possible to look while walking along a beach promenade in Southern California, possibly the last place you’d expect to spot a strolling Gallagher.

1998

The year we got married, Paula and I took a long road trip in the US, driving from Boston to Los Angeles over the course of three weeks. A few days after we got back to London there was a party, packed with friends, co-workers, and a bunch of people we’d never met before. At one point in the evening Wonderwall came on — and the entire room, men and women, of widely varying ages, regardless of the kind of music they generally listened to, not only knew all the words but felt there was no option but to stop what they were doing, abandon all conversations, even stop drinking for a minute, and lustily bellow the song while pointing vigorously at the sky. Seldom if ever in my life have I felt so much a part of a community united by one thing.

Evidently the music’s still doing that — and now is a very good time for this. Rock on, you pair of arrogant, bad-tempered, talented bastards. Make people sing. Make us feel, for just one night, like we’re a star. And part of something good.