Two weeks from now, the British band Oasis will begin their long anticipated world tour. The shows have been fifteen years in the making, the group, fronted by brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher, having acrimoniously split in 2009. A generation of nearly 40-somethings, having paid extortionate prices to attend, are hoping to be entertained by a gaggle of jowly-looking individuals approaching their 60s. The catalogue of hits will be played, the stadiums filled with dewey-eyed, bucket-hat-wearing lads and ladettes, bawling out the words in a shared communion of remembrance, harking back to the times when they first heard these anthems, these Beatles pastiches, these Slade-like stomp-alongs, a time when the audience actually knew how to feel.

I saw the original Oasis myself, several times it had to be said. The first at some taping of a minor television show. The second on set for the making of their video for ‘Roll With It’ (I was coincidentally employed as a director at the production company who made the video), at Earls Court shortly after the release of the band’s debut album, and again at Maine Road, by which point Oasis had been embraced by the hordes.

For a brief moment the band had represented something kinetic, a blast of the familiar but delivered with enough energy, attitude, and volume to make it feel worthwhile. Detractors bemoaned the luddite nature of their approach, both the music and their unabashed show of ignorance (they volubly eschewed the reading of books). The band was also mildly homophobic, once declaring they hoped a rival of theirs caught AIDS. It was undoubtably an ugly package, but it did represent a strain of British society that exists and in truth has always existed. What annoyed the band’s critics more was that this grisly behaviour was celebrated, that a yobbish, wilfully un-inquisitive state of mind was seen as more honest, more relatable, and somehow more authentic than the foppish posing of their contemporaries.

There was no doubt it reflected a swathe of British society scared of the unknown and things they didn’t comprehend. Such existential terror continues today, people looking for anyone but themselves to blame for their ills, for their inability to understand what the fuck is going on. Whether that target is immigrants, queers, transsexuals, or people who support a different political point of view, there’s always a target, a receptacle for your bitterness, resentment, and hate.

Not that all Oasis fans should be tarred with this brush. But like Brexit, you didn’t have to be a racist to vote for it, but every single racist most definitely did.

More concerning however in these febrile and complicated times is the rush to nostalgia; an almost pathological need to return to a better and more understandable time where people had a clearer sense of who they were and where they fitted in with society. Current generations have been rendered apart, the older no longer understanding what motivates the young, the young despising the old for their privilege — a long term career, an affordable home. Music, especially here in the UK, has reflected this dynamic. For decades, certainly during my growing years, most people were cognisant of the current ‘number one’, the song that had made it to the top of the charts. Whether a novelty song or something of weight, the fact that people were aware of the song’s identity in some small way brought the country together. Pop groups would appear on a variety of TV shows, and rather than being a mystery to viewers, were recognised, admittedly sometimes only for being ‘that twat in a dress’, or the band with ‘that mad prick who looks off his head’.

Still, there existed a collective sensibility at play. A teenager could take pleasure explaining to her gran that, ‘No, David Bowie is definitely into girls.’ Pop music acted like a thread, the playlists selected by Radio One drawing people together. Everyone knew the tunes, some people knew the words. Music defined the way they were feeling, how they dressed, how they danced, how they presented themselves.

And of course, as we know, all that has changed. Music has disintegrated into a myriad of silos, few of them interacting, leaving everyone to twist in their own self-defined space. The only time these tribes intersect is at the big music festivals where it’s simply uneconomic to focus on only one type of music. But for the rest of the year, everyone retreats into their own carefully curated worlds. There’s as much likelihood of an Alex Warren fan knowing a song by The 1975 as there is a Doechii lover singing along to Wolf Alice. Yet all are top ten artists. Maybe it has always been this way to a degree, but it now feels more acute. Nor would it be a problem if it wasn’t the fact that a need to participate in something ‘unifying’, something bigger than ourselves, a way of being maybe, an attitude that transcends those in our immediate vicinity but instead hovers in the air… something that feels like change… clearly nags away in the back of people’s minds.

So where to go to find this sense of community? Too often it seems in all the wrong places. Extremists on both sides of the political spectrum retreat into their chambers of neanderthal bile. The progressives meanwhile stand on the sidelines and howl, impotent, navel-gazing, their hands nowhere near the levers of power.

The rest are left with Oasis… or Springsteen, or Dylan, or McCartney, the latter trio willing troubadours long past their prime. Listening to all three sing is now a painful experience, the mind flashing back to how they use to sound, how they’re supposed to sound. I expect Liam Gallagher will deliver the same, a feeble rasp and an avoidance of any note that’s challenging. If his performance a few months back at the Joshua versus Dubois heavyweight fight can be seen as a marker, it’ll be a miracle if he manages even that.

The truth of the matter is you can never go back. How hard will the members of the audience, having spunked up a couple of hundred quid on a ticket, plus travel costs, plus the exorbitant beers, try to convince themselves that what they’re experiencing is worth the outlay. How hard will it be to avoid the reality that they’re no longer even a replica of who they once were and nor is the world around them. As they exhaustedly trudge their way back to the station, wearing their souvenir T-shirts and reading their £40 programmes, will they feel consoled by the fact ‘they were there’, and that for a few hours they could pretend to themselves that the confusing universe they were forced to inhabit had pressed pause.

© Simon Fellowes 16/06/2025