Sixteen years ago last week, Noel Gallagher left Oasis. The band was no more. I wrote at the time, “I’m downright gutted.” I never saw Oasis live and in concert, though I considered seeing Noel Gallagher and Beady Eye at various times. (Money was usually the reason I didn’t.)
Noel Gallagher released solo albums, which I’ve liked. Liam Gallagher released albums, first with the rump Oasis (ie., Beady Eye), then as a solo artist, which were fine. Noel and Liam would feud in the press. Liam would talk about a reunion. Noel would say absolutely not. Liam would call Noel a “potato.”
Life went on.
Sunday night, I saw Oasis at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.
And it was epic.
After Saturday’s adventure in New York I met a fan on the bus back to New Jersey who was going to both shows. She saw my bag of stuff from the pop-up shop in SoHo and wanted to know how long I’d waited. I thought she meant for the bus, but no, she meant the pop-up shop. She was a fan. She was from Florida, had seen the band in the past, had seen Noel solo, thought Noel was a genius, who had both Oasis and Noel tattoos. We talked about some other bands, like Travis and Elbow, and I shared my mad dream of Noel collaborating with Elbow’s Guy Garvey on something, though, even though they’re both from Manchester, I can’t think of two more dissimilar musicians in tone than Noel Gallagher and Guy Garvey. As I got off the bus, I said to her, “I hope the next two days are everything you want them to be.”
We — my sister, niece, and brother-in-law — went decked out in the Oasis gear we’d bought at the pop-up store the day before. A guy at the hotel told my sister that, no, you just don’t wear the band’s merchandise at a concert, which made my sister question whether we — and mainly she — should have worn Oasis gear, and I kept telling her it was fine, almost everyone would be wearing Oasis gear, and not to worry about gatekeepers.
I had my bucket hat and the Nationals/Oasis jersey I’d bought through a Facebook ad. (It is customized for #63, Sean Doolittle, the Nationals player I felt was most likely to be an Oasis fan.) Baseball jerseys aren’t really made for overweight people — it was tight across the tummy — but it was fine. It was a different sort of look, and a guy complemented me on it in the parking lot after the show.
I don’t know that I’d ever been in a football stadium before. It was a little overwhelming, and the upper deck was hellishly steep. I may have been gripping the guard rails up the stairs for dear life.
A sister and brother sat behind us. They were a few years older than I was, and they had been to Oasis concerts in the 90s. They talked about tailgating at the Charlotte concert where Liam hopped on a plane back to Heathrow (September 12, 1996), causing the concert to be cancelled hours before it started. She looked like my former great-grandboss at Diamond, and he turned out to live in my sister’s neighborhood in North Carolina.
The opening acts were Cast, a band from Liverpool I had not heard of, and Cage the Elephant, a band whose name wasn’t unfamiliar to be but I would not have been able to bring one of their songs to mind. I have no opinion on Cast’s opening set, but Cage the Elephant’s was solid. I recognized a couple of songs — “Oh, I’ve heard this before” — and the frontman reminded me of Mick Jagger. There were two young women behind us who went out of their minds at Cage the Elephant, particularly “Spiderhead.”
At 8:45, Oasis took the stage to Standing of the Shoulder of Giants‘ “Fuckin’ in the Bushes.” I have always loved that album, and “Fuckin’ in the Bushes” has such an intense funky groove, with some spoken words taken from a documentary, and I shouted out those spoken passes — “Go to hell!” and “Kids running around naked, fucking in the bushes!” And that wasn’t weird, as the concert was basically a two-hour singalong with 60,000 friends.
The concert was divided into basically four sections — a Liam set, a Noel set, a second Liam set, and the encore split between the two of them. They played the hits — though three of those hits came in the encore — and they also played material that may have been a little more obscure to American audiences. By obscure, they played single and B-side tracks that appear on the B-sides collection The Masterplan (“Acquiese,” “Half the World Away”) or a greatest hits set (“Whatever”).
Liam would talk to the audience between songs. I have no idea what he said most of the time. “Fuck,” that I understood. I caught about half of his rant about music execs and not doing what they want. The rest of the time? Not a clue, though I later learned that he dedicated “Live Forever” to the two children murdered in the Minnesota school shooting a few days earlier. He did things with his maracas and tambourine from time to time, like trying to balance them on his head, and he occasionally made the sign of the cross, twice that I noticed. I can honestly say I’d never considered Liam’s religion before, or Noel’s, for that matter, even though their lyrics do occasionally reference god.
When they played “Whatever,” I sang the words “How sweet to be an idiot” instead of “I’m free to be whatever I” in tribute to the late Neil Innes, whose melody for “How Sweet to Be an Idiot” was nicked in part by Noel Gallagher and was later awarded a songwriting credit on the song. I don’t know how songwriter royalties work with live performances, and I hope Yvonne Innes will receive a nice little check for this tour and the inevitable live CD and Blu-Ray. (Ringo will as well; the performance of “Whatever” ended with a couple of lines from “Octopus’s Garden.”)
The concert ended with a four song encore — two Noel vocals, two Liam vocals. First, Noel on “The Masterplan” and “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” with Noel letting the crowd sing the “So Sally can wait” chorus. Then, Liam on “Wonderwall” and “Champagne Supernova,” followed by fireworks.
It was a brilliant, brilliant show. Perhaps one of the best concerts I’ve attended, and I’ve seen two Beatles live. I might have my quibbles with the setlist — I might have preferred Noel to do “Falling Down” instead of “Little by Little” during his set, and I would have liked more post-2000 Oasis — but they did everything that most fans would have wanted to hear after sixteen years.
“I’ve become aware there are fewer days ahead than behind,” said Jean-Luc Picard once upon a time, and I’ve become acutely aware of my own mortality in the years since my blood pressure crisis and COVID. I look in the mirror and see someone much older than I feel inside, I wonder where the years have gone, the dreams unfulfilled. I saw Oasis Sunday night, and I felt more like the person I was in 1996 when I knew someone named Sally.
I felt more like myself again.
MetLife Stadium, you fucking suck. Getting out of the stadium, getting to the parking lot, getting our shuttle bus back to the hotel, all of that was a clusterfuck. I totally understood why people began running for the exits during “Champagne Supernova.”
I want a live CD of this tour, but I especially want a Blu-Ray because the visuals were very much a part of the concert. They were imaginative and very produced. This is something I would want to watch again and again.
The visuals also made me think about the power dynamics within this version of the band. It’s hard to explain, but it felt like this was Noel’s band, that he was surrounded by sidemen (he introduced them all at the beginning of the encore), including Liam. Noel was on the stage the whole two hours, while Liam was not, and there was as much visual focus on Noel’s guitar virtuosity as there was on Liam’s antics. The other players received very little visual focus; Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs showed up from time to time, but Gem Archer and Andy Bell were virtually non-existent.
I did not see this in New Jersey, but there was an Oasis drone show on Saturday night before the first night at MetLife Stadium.
Will there be a new studio album after this? Even a single? A live album from this tour is almost a certainty, I think, but going back in the studio? I have no idea. If they don’t I am more than okay with that. Oasis ended in 2009 in an awkward, unsatisfactory way with a backstage fight, and Oasis in 2025 is a worldshaking triumph. The brothers Gallagher have written a new ending to their legend, and maybe that was all they ever wanted.
Why ruin that? Go out as the “toppermost of the poppermost.”
I saw Oasis. It was epic. It was everything I wanted it to be. I’m happy.
I hope it was everything the woman on the bus wanted, too.