Ahead of my upcoming book about Oasis, the below occurred to me about their continuing importance to the modern music world.

At 11am on 25th May 2017 some four hundred people gathered in St Ann’s Square outside the municipal town hall in Central Manchester. They were there to hold two minutes silence in honour of the twenty-two lives lost that previous Monday 22nd May in a startling and incredulous terrorist attack at the teen pop singer Ariana Grande’s concert at Manchester Arena. After the two minutes of pensive silence had elapsed one loan voice began to the sing. The voice belonged to Lydia Bernsmeier-Rullow, and the song was Don’t Look Back in Anger, the 1996 number 1 single by Manchester band Oasis. Before she had reached the end of the verse others were joining in, someone shouted, “come on, sing up!”, and by the time of the triumphant chorus the whole square was resolute in unison, and footage of the performance was already circulating on the internet. It can be seen there now on You-Tube, a moment that shows the true power of music to pull people together at a time of need, captured forever.

August 2017 and I was sitting in a pub in Camden with the co-author of my book I was Britpopped… Jenny Natasha. We were celebrating. We had just had a phone call with the team at Valley Press, discussing the upcoming publishing plans for our book. The book is an A-Z run through of everything associated with the Britpop scene that swept across the United Kingdom and much of the rest of the world in the mid-nineties. It seemed incredibly fitting then when Don’t Look Back in Anger came on the pub’s jukebox. The song is something of a Britpop anthem and after two long years writing the book it seemed as if fate was looking down on us favourably. After thirty seconds or so the song was skipped over, so I asked the young barmaid, who could not have been more than eighteen (three years younger than the song itself), why she had skipped the track, “Oh God,” she said. “I can’t listen to it anymore, feels like it’s played in here every other song.”