I hung out with Oasis at their peak and saw them become the biggest band in world – I know exactly why they’ve reformed
THE champagne super-novas in the sky have aligned and we will once again see Oasis live on stage – well, the Gallagher brothers at least.
It’s a reunion I definitely feared we might never witness — but maybe hoped we would.
The sibling rivalry appears to have been put aside for one hundred million reasons or another.
The Irish-blooded brothers’ new peace deal is the biggest since the Good Friday Agreement, itself forged in the glorious ’90s when Oasis were at their zenith.
The band’s sequence of reunion shows next summer will be the most significant for generations.
It is something their heroes The Beatles never did, while the Stones never stopped.
Noel is, of course, close to The Jam’s Paul Weller and The Smiths’ Johnny Marr, who both disbanded their juggernauts and never looked back in anger — so why has he chosen to do the opposite?
It feels that there’s a bit of now or never.
Next year will mark the 30th anniversary of the group’s album (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? — 22million sales and counting.
Do they really want to wait until the 40th, when both men will be well into in their 60s, and in what sort of health?
Frontman Liam, who recently underwent hip replacement surgery, threw down the gauntlet to his brother this year with his Definitely Maybe 30 shows which were mesmerising and as close to Oasis as you could ever get, Noel-less.
With Oasis founder Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs on guitar and his erstwhile band’s wall of sound faultlessly recreated and vocals supreme, the younger Gallagher made it clear he would do the same in 2025 to mark What’s The Story? — with or without his brother.
They didn’t give a toss about offending anyone
This seems to have forced the hand of Noel who, although the band’s main songwriter, was losing the battle to keep the Oasis flame burning and attract younger fans.
At 57, he was almost being written out of his own story.
He also has to shell out for an expensive divorce from Sara MacDonald, who was seen as one of the main barriers to rebonded brotherly love.
I’m told Noel has had severe doubts about putting the band back together, worried about tainting its legacy and not living up to previous live triumphs such as Knebworth and Maine Road, both in ’96.
The truth is the band’s latter performances before their Paris implosion 15 years ago were patchy and, on occasion, shambolic.
There is certainly an appetite.
Liam’s solo gigs, particularly, are populated with teens and above for whom Ed Sheeran, Coldplay and Adele just don’t cut it, alongside Stone Island and C.P. Company-clad fiftysomethings who should know better but yearn to relive happier times.
The band’s original detonation has to be viewed in context. #
Grunge had been the dominant force in the early 1990s, with dark, introspective lyrics and riffs to match, but after the tragic death of the scene’s flag-bearer Kurt Cobain in 1994, the doors were flung open for something new and homegrown.
Manchester had been relentless in its production of supersonic bands — The Smiths, Joy Division, New Order, Happy Mondays, significantly Inspiral Carpets and, perhaps most importantly, The Stone Roses.
The Roses looked like they’d stepped off the footie terraces and took the spirit of late-80s acid house culture and welded it with supreme guitar lines and a strut which blew away what would become Oasis.
Liam proclaims the Roses as the greatest band he has seen live and cites their historic Blackpool Empress Ballroom show in 1989 as changing his life for ever.
But they never quite hit the mainstream media in the way Oasis would.
Oasis were better-looking, had more and better tunes and gave brilliant interviews.
Oasis were better-looking, had more and better tunes and gave brilliant interviews
Dominic Mohan
They didn’t give a toss about offending anyone.
And pitch-perfect Liam always sounded like he was singing as if his life was on the line.
We were reaching the dog end of a flailing Conservative government and football was the new religion.
Gazza’s tears at Italia ’90 had changed perception of the sport and the Premier League was born in 1992.
Football, fashion and music seemed to entwine, stimulating and emboldening a generation of working-class lads and ladettes. It was our time.
In 1989 I was a university student and wannabe music journalist working part-time for a geeky record collector’s magazine called Spiral Scratch.
I’d arranged an interview with one of my then favourite bands, the much-hyped Inspiral Carpets, at London’s Dingwalls club in Camden.
After the soundcheck we decamped to the the pub opposite and were joined by a very witty and relentlessly ridiculing mop-top member of the group’s crew.
He made me buy him Guinness and left more of an impression than the group themselves. It was to be my first of many encounters with Noel Gallagher.
Little did I then know how central this young man would be to my career and what joy his songs would bring to our generation.
Five years later, a friend rang me and told me about a new band I must see, describing them as a cross between The Beatles and the Sex Pistols.
I’d heard Shakermaker on Radio One and rated it, so on August 16, 1994, I made the first of what would be many pilgrimages to see a band called Oasis.
At the front of a raucous Forum, in London’s Kentish Town, I wasn’t prepared for what I was about to witness up close.
It was incendiary, intimidating, aggressive, incredibly powerful, with that ear-splittingly loud wall of sound that blew your brains and ignited something within — they were truly unforgettable.
The band prowled the stage like a coked-up gang of football hoolies who were staring you out and wanted to punch your lights out.
My now wife said it was the first time she had felt frightened at a gig, it was as if it could kick off at any moment.
I was too young for punk and had never seen anything like it. Forget Suede, this is how I wanted my rock ’n’ roll served.
And the songwriting — indelible anthems like the nuclear opener that night, Columbia, then Slide Away, Live Forever and the cocksure arrogance of Supersonic, with its opening line: “I need to be myself. I can’t be no one else.”
These were ’90s hymns that put a spring in your stride, made you feel glad to be alive. It was as if they injected you with an instant swagger — you could put your troubles to one side, stick two fingers up to the world and live in the moment.
Oasis were going to become the country’s biggest and best band, it was obvious, an intoxicating mix that captured a moment in time, made you want to drink too much and celebrate, put your arms around each other and sing along out of tune with friends.
These were paeans that would echo relentlessly from pub jukeboxes and be chanted in the streets at closing time across the land for years.
In the mid-90s there was no better place to be than London.
Cool Britannia was birthing before our tired eyes, and as we approach its 30th anniversary, it is worth reflecting on that momentous time when football, politics, fashion, art and music collided, with the United Kingdom at the epicentre of a popular culture earthquake and an awakening which captured our nation — and the world.
We finally had our own 1960s, and as The Sun’s showbusiness reporter and then editor, I had a ringside seat.
I was a hungry young journalist who landed a dream job at precisely the right time and was soon being paid to write about my favourite bands and travel the world with them.
A friend rang me and told me about a new band I must see, describing them as a cross between The Beatles and the Sex Pistols
Dominic Mohan
Suddenly, what was previously regarded as indie music for readers of the NME and Melody Maker had become the mainstream — and I was lucky enough to be chronicling it.
You’d pop down to the tiny Met Bar on London’s Park Lane on a Thursday night and see Liam entwined with future wife Patsy Kensit, as Madonna and Dennis Hopper bopped on the makeshift dancefloor while Rod Stewart, Chris Evans, Teddy Sheringham and the Manic Street Preachers looked on, not a smartphone or camera in sight.
Oasis swiftly followed up debut Definitely Maybe with the imperious What’s The Story? and, just over one year after seeing them at the humble Forum ,the band were headlining sold-out shows at cavernous Earl’s Court.
It was the ticket to have and you should have seen the queue for the toilets.
Fast forward another few months and I was despatched to cover their crowning glory, homecoming gigs at City’s Maine Road. Manchester was buzzing as only it can.
Goggly-eyed Bez
We spotted a goggly-eyed Happy Monday Bez and his mates snaffling tickets from the box office with a bent coat hanger while the assistants had their backs turned.
At the city’s V&A hotel afterwards, some of the band’s friends discovered my hotel room number (227, I’ll never forget it) and allocated £750 worth of drinks to it — triple Glenfiddichs at 7am, I recall. Mad fer it, indeed.
It was all happening faster than a cannonball and in a haze of cigarettes and alcohol.
Two nights at Knebworth were soon upon us, with two-and-a-half million people applying for tickets, nearly five per cent of the population.
Models, footballers, artists and authors mingled backstage. Liam called it the Woodstock of the ’90s. A colossal sunshiiine-bathed field full of lads in Burberry shirts and Clarks Wallabees.
This was the pinnacle of Oasis, which they would and will never match. There were 7,000 people on the guest list.
Simultaneously that summer, Gazza’s England were inches away from conquering Euro ’96 at Wembley as Wonderwall and Don’t Look Back In Anger captured the nation’s zeitgeist.
Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting revolutionised British cinema and Underworld’s lad anthem Born Slippy thumped through the nation’s dancefloors as indie and dance music fused with the eruption of bands such as The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers, both of whom supported Oasis at Knebworth. Genius.
Liam and Patsy posed for the cover of Vanity Fair, which proclaimed Britain the coolest country on the planet, as Tony Blair sat on the cusp of power with New Labour courting a Hooch-guzzling and Loaded magazine-reading youth, all of us desperate for political change.
Take That split and made way for guitar bands such as Blur, Pulp, Supergrass, The Manic Street Preachers, Elastica and Ash, who dominated the charts alongside the Gallaghers and, of course, the Spice Girls, a Girl Power counterpoint.
Girl Power counterpoint
Cancel your hols…we’re gonna party like it’s 1995
Jarvis Cocker was arrested, yes arrested, for wiggling his bum slightly in the direction of Michael Jackson at the 1996 Brit Awards.
It felt a symbolic moment, as if a shift of cultural power was taking place on our shores.
Who needs the King of Pop when your own nation has homegrown Britpop royalty?
That summer, the Sex Pistols themselves reformed and were introduced onstage in Finsbury Park by England stars Stuart Pearce and Gareth Southgate, while punk-like young British artists Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin and designers such as Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney became globally celebrated, with our new Britpop stars gracing the front rows of their fashion shows.
I would go on to see Oasis more than 20-odd times, in Oslo, Milan, Tokyo, Majorca, San Francisco and even Exeter.
With Liam, you’d never quite know whether he would try to grab your privates, push you up against a wall, talk about babies or greet you with a hug.
But as the years wore on, the albums became less memorable and their live performances less explosive.
The latter records were restricted to merely two anthems per album, as opposed to eight.
Fabled gigs
Can Oasis 2025 match those fabled gigs 30 years previous? The answer is probably no. But who really cares?
It will be a bloody good night out and these surely spectacular shows will bring great joy to younger generations who missed out the first time.
If we can snaffle a ticket, we will take our kids, families can unite and together sing these anthems that have yet to be eclipsed.
We will recall a simpler, happier and more peaceful, pre-pandemic world before we became chained to social media and smartphones.
Cancel your holiday, stock up on the cigarettes and alcohol and prepare for the summer we have been craving for 15 years.
We’re gonna party like it’s 1995.