Oasis: What's all the fuss about?

Oasis are a band people love to hate. Their success coupled with the simplicity coupled with the caricature of Liam with his ridiculous arrogant swagger and iconic fashions  makes them such easy targets for ridicule and snobbery, but the truth is we wouldn’t have the music industry we have now if it wasn’t for them. 

Just like driving a car while objecting to wars for oil in the middle east, all the infrastructure that more cerebral music acts rely on can be directly traced back to these coked up brothers sporting abundant eyebrows. 

“You don’t know man! You just weren’t there man” 

It’s no secret that I was already into music when britpop hit - grunge!

Nirvana, Pearl Jam Mudhoney - all things SubPop. This genre was huge, but it was a genre for introverts. Boring obsessives like myself sought increasingly inaccessible music to enjoy with smaller and smaller inaccessible audiences. When bands got big, we moved on and found something less mainstream. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.  We bought instruments, but like jazz, the music was focused on arrogance, snobbery and obscurity. It has given me a lifetime of joy and study, but while Pearl Jam and the Foo Fighters continue to fill stadiums the genre’s contribution to local British music economies probably has more to do with the reaction against it. 

Britpop had already started when Oasis came along. There was a long tail from 80’s proto-britpop of The La’s, Stone Roses and Inspiral Carpets. Jingle pop and indie was getting more and more accessible in the form of bands like Suede, Blur, The Verve and [insert band you are angry I missed]. Grunge had created a fervor for new and interesting music and the readership of the NME and the Melody maker was going up. Radio one started the Evening Session. 

None of this was prepared for what happened when Definitely Maybe arrived in working class communities in the UK. Unapologetic laddish wankers in football fashions were what the male working classes who had been born into Thatcherite Britain had been looking for and no one except Alan McGee had noticed it. 

I knew about Oasis before most people. Certainly most people my age. A guy that worked with/for my dad was a drummer and had been to see them early doors. I dunno if it was the legendary king tuts gig but it certainly wasn’t long after it. 

He knew I was into music and had given me various CD’s that he thought I’d like. I think he had previously given me Surfing with the alien by Joe Satriani before that. So his wasn’t a music taste that I particularly respected or valued. As soon as I showed an interest/obsession with music, old men of 25 and above would advise things for me to listen to, but the 13 yr old mind isn’t very good at hearing it. 

Eventually he was harping on about Oasis via my Dad and he even gave me the Supersonic and Shakermaker CD singles. They were fine. Some good old straight forward rock. There was swagger and attitude which was quite cool, but Kurt Cobain’s body was barely cold so I was probably finding the whole thing a bit jolly. 

As the music press started to show interest, my ears were already pricking up when I was hearing about this new band, so when Definitely Maybe was released I was primed and ready and could tell people I’d known about them for ages(a few months) and could play the opening arpeggios to the two songs I knew.

As one of the five or so people who could play guitar in my school my star was in the ascendant. For the next 2 years(cos that’s all it was!!) people knew that in return for nodding and smiling while I tried to talk about Pearl Jam, I would teach people the Oasis song they wanted to know on the guitar - thankfully none of them were very hard! 

Overnight every working class boy had a guitar. A whole generation of youth who suddenly felt represented by what was going on in the music world. 

Music snobs may chuckle at how bad these bands were. True - many were awful  but loads took oasis as just the first rung on the ladder and progressed and grew and got better. Looking back on set lists of my band at the time we were playing their songs only months after Definitely Maybe came out. 

Previously you’d hear stories of Jazz musicians joining 60’s blues bands because they were the only bass player in town. That ended the day Definitely Maybe came out. Ask your local music shop if there is a period they’d rather relive than 95/96. Many of them are only open today because of that period. Entire musical instrument manufacturers built and surviving off this one band.

If you have a wee sweaty music venue in your town pumping out unsigned bands - you probably have to thank Liam and Noel. An inconvenient truth to some of the more cerebral acts out there :)

It was incredibly hard to have seen any big Grunge bands in Scotland by 1994, you either had to have seen them in the last decade as their first single came out or you had to pretend you were more into the bands from lesser cities than Seattle. Through a variety of health problems, drugs problems, suicides and tirades against ticketmaster, Oasis were entering a live event economy where many die-hard music fans hadn’t seen their favourite bands. 

Now Oasis worked hard in 1994, they were building up a buzz and touring up and down the country. They had already played the Barrowlands, and if every story over a pint is believed, there were 50,000 people in attendance and their average age was 13.

Britpop hadn’t quite reached the mainstream. It wasn’t in the tabloids every day and their early telly appearances were on late night things like The Word, which casual viewers would only have seen while they were waiting for Eurotrash to come on.

For the early adopters of Oasis from Ayrshire, a legendary gig went on sale. Oasis in a festival tent on Irvine Beach. An event so unusual at the time that it is advertised as “under canvas”. Now I don’t know how to google this….. it is my memory that they announced the Saturday and it was relatively easy to get tickets cos they hadn’t quite reached critical mass. Then when it sold out they announced the Friday and it sold much faster. I remember being a bit perturbed that the “lesser” fans got to see them first, but I was also in possession of the “golden ticket” of people who knew about them first. 

For historical reasons - here’s how you got a ticket. It was before the internet. You took the Saturday morning off and phoned up the ticket line. For popular gigs(i.e. gigs you’d heard of) you sat and hit redial and listened to an engaged tone over and over again and then eventually you got through. As the 90’s progressed, this was a common occurrence for me. You could also queue up at various places and buy physical tickets(this was usually in Glasgow or Edinburgh and not the easiest thing to do from Ayrshire at 14)

A few months later, the ticket would arrive in the post. They were quite often things of beauty. The SECC wasn’t. It was just a standard printed thing. You coveted this magical ticket and kept on your wall… and then a few months later it was gig time.

I don’t recall ever not getting a ticket using this method. In 1996 I was in transit for a family holiday and couldn't try for Pearl Jam tickets in London. A friend tried instead. He didn't get them. It was the first time we’d tried to get tickets outside Scotland. I don’t know if we ever went as far as working out how we would get there or where we would stay, but we couldn’t get tickets anyway. We tried.

If you didn’t get a ticket you could still go to the gig via a “tout” outside the venue. This was capitalism at it’s extreme. Tickets were worth whatever anyone was willing to pay. I don’t think I ever needed to use this method in Scotland, but a few times I did the negotiations for friends who had come without a ticket. There was a wee guy outside the venue, almost certainly related to Glasgow’s gangland who were almost certainly accessing tickets for popular gigs through nefarious means. You would haggle with him to try and get a good price. At the Barrowlands for the really popular gigs, you gave him cash and then (still without a ticket) you had to go into Bairds Bar (now 226 Gallowgate) and wade through the old men to get to someone at the back who was further up the nefarious tree. He’d make some quip about music being shite since Roy Orbison or the like… and the deal was a good un*.

I never really had a problem with this. It seemed to be supply and demand at it’s most pure. In most cases I reckoned that the people paying over the odds for tickets were suffering for not having had their finger on the pulse or for not having had their finger on the redial button. It could also work in your favour. If there was a band that you weren’t that bothered about seeing who hadn’t sold out but when the gig came along you found yourself at a loose end, you knew the tout would be at the “cut the losses” stage and you could head along and see how low you could get in the gig for. There’s also the concept of “everyone has a price”. Every gig you have ever been to… there is a price someone can offer you to not go to that gig. As you walked along the thoroughfare leading to the gig people would off to buy and sell tickets.

Kenneth and I did this for Stereophonics once. I’d been an early adopter of the Welsh trio. I’d been to see them at the Garage supported by a 16 yr old Sophie Ellis Bextor. I’d convinced Kenneth of their worth and then we had bought tickets for their next gig. By the time the gig finally came long, we’d already seen them at T in the Park. Outside the gig we got offered £200 each for the tickets. At the time, that was probably about a month of expendable cash each which was worth far more to us than the gig. I only recall being on there other side of the equation once, and that’s why I saw Smashing Pumpkins at Shepherds Bush empire while they were still good.

Now it’s all digital…. tickets don’t have artwork and the nefarious stuff is done by multinational companies instead of Roy Orbison fans in Celtic pubs.

Anyway….. back to the Gallaghers. I don’t remember much of the Oasis show. I remember the camaraderie. The energy. The volume. I remember where I was standing. Where Liam was standing.  The cult of personality. I remember embracing friends(and strangers) and jumping up and down and singing along till your throat hurt. 

I’ve seen a lot of bands in a lot of similar tents. Three days previous I had been at Page and Plant with my dad(Yes. I saw Led Zeppelin and Oasis in the same week for about £30) and I remember absolutely loads of that - so take from that what you will. 

I’m pretty sure it was the first time I went to a gig with my mates. It was the first of hundreds, so I don’t remember who went or how we got there. I’m pretty sure Kenneth and various others were there on the Friday. 

I don’t remember what I wore. I’m sure it would have been from top shop. I remember the older kids - some gigging veterans going back as far as The Stone Roses, Carter USM and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin and the like. Many of them still breaking in their new Gallagher-esque walks. 

The support bands on the Saturday were Cast and Ocean Colour Scene(and the Verve on the Friday). Me and my grunge loving muso friends reckoned Ocean Colour Scene were the best band that played. We were particularly impressed by their drummer. We were already making jokes about Oasis’ drummer not being very good. Google tells me that I heard ‘Don’t look back on anger’ before you did if you weren't there. 

I’ve never really had anything against Oasis. Off the back of grunge, I was a 15 yr old veteran who had already been through a music genre. Other people’s obsession was obvious from the get go and it was obvious that I wasn’t going to feel as strongly. It was a great time for music. There were numerous bands. When Oasis weren’t releasing something that week, someone else was. There were telly programmes and radio programmes debuting new cultural content daily which meant so much to so many people and so much of it is the foundation that so much is built on today. Music. Fashion and even politics. 

Music festivals went from 10’s of thousands to hundreds of thousands. Grunge had kicked the door open to make underground the mainstream and Oasis rode the wave and made many things the norm which had previously been niche activities. 

I have no proof of this, but it’s possible that some local football clubs are still around just now because of the culture helmed by Oasis.

You could write a book about the negatives of this laddish culture, but in the early days for teenagers in working class communities it was pretty joyous. A lot of the people that poo poo it don’t know how hard the 80’s had been. Many of the first generation of Oasis fans were the first people in their families to go to University and I think you could argue that a lot of that was about the confidence of being seen and feeling part of something. Those facts don’t suit some Guardian columnists. I bet the same ones didn’t know what to do when it turned out Morrissey was a bit of a right wing nut-job :)  

By 1997/1998 there was a real feeling that Oasis had said all they were going to say. Britpop had lost it’s momentum, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were maybe never cool in the first place and I was getting ready to head off to Uni. Having never owned a bucket hat or a Fred Perry shirt, there wasn’t much to cast off to maintain what I thought would be a cool swagger on arriving at Uni. 

Kenneth was less bothered by how a love of Oasis would affect him at Uni, either cos he was less driven by cool, or Drongan was so working class that it was keeping a hold of a time when Oasis were cool. He’d bring me each new album as it came out and I would give it a listen and make sure there was nothing new happening. Morning Glory was a fantastic album and everything afterwards just felt like it was the caricature of swagger that people had ridiculed rather than genuine swagger. I think the same about the Stones. There was a point where Mick Jagger morphed into the caricature of Mick Jagger.

I think Be Here Now and the painting by numbers of Stand by Me killed it for everyone except the die hards(who numbered in their millions), but my age has a lot to do with that. To maintain my interest(like that was on anyone’s agenda) it needed to be a “difficult third album” Led Zeppelin 3, Vitalogy or OK Computer. Maybe those albums need more than one songwriter in the band. 

I think if Liam and Noel had died in an unfortunate smelting accident** in about 1997 then Oasis would be as mythical as Led Zeppelin or the Beatles and Tony McCarroll and Bonehead would be filling stadiums with a Foo Fighters style band.  

By 1999 it was only Liam and Noel that were left from Definitely Maybe, but they managed to keep swaggering on till 2009. It’s unlikely Kenneth missed a Scottish tour/gig after the Irvine gigs. After 2009, he saw Beady Eye and Noel and Liam numerous times. I think it kept me from having any major disdain for them. Just apathy. Having not listened to them in many a moon they were tinged with a lot of nostalgia when I was choosing songs for his funeral. 

When I started recording young bands - Oasis were and continue to be omnipresent. 90% of the references are to the first two albums and their B-sides. There’s a myth with Oasis that they were snubbed out at the height of their fame, but they ploughed through an extra 5 albums and over a decade of touring. I think it had a lot to do with the rest of the world waking up to Oasis between 1997 and 2009 and them being on an up curve - despite arsehole critics like me thinking they were going through the motions. Maybe it was a working class work ethic.

So 2024 comes along and they are the hottest ticket in town. The cynic in me tells me that it is just about now that fans are getting bored with the nostalgia of going to see Liam and Noel in their solo projects. 

I think it will be joyous for so many people and hopefully they all go out and buy guitars and start bands :) 

I won’t be going…. I went to see Ian Brown in Amsterdam once and that has put me off dipping my toe into Britpop crowds for ever more…. I’m just not into the cocktail of cocaine and testosterone. Maybe if Kenneth had been around to see it he would have convinced me. 

Instead I’ll rely on my weak memories of the first time round :)

*If my description of my role in nefarious gangland activities in the 1990’s implicates any old men or Roy Orbison fans*** in general….assume I said it for comic narrative and made the whole thing up.

**The Austin Powers reference felt less macabre than anything else I could think of 

*** Yes. It was a commitment’s reference

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