The Masterplan.

A bit hurried. Forgive the mistakes. We all make them.

I thought I’d let the dust settle so we could all allow ourselves a few moments, to step back and give it some proper consideration. I thought an Oasis reunion would be big but, in the end, the news that the Gallagher brothers have crafted some sort of bridge (a bridge with a shit load of cash sitting on the other side) it’s turned out to be a little bit of an anti-climax. I naively thought the news would turn back tides, flatten mountains and reverse the spinning of the planets, but on the day it was announced it didn’t even make the main headline because, incredibly, someone thought Sir Kier Starmer had something more interesting to say. I forget what it was now. Still, an Oasis reunion, in retrospect, was never going to set the world on fire but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t slightly excited about all the fuss. After all, this is a big band who make big music with big tunes and still just about carry the torch of rock and roll, a torch which was all but snuffed out when we decided to let Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift, Imagine Dragons and Mumford and Sons to pebbledash our lives with their very successful variations on a colour called nothing. Oasis still have that tingle factor and I really can’t wait for them to start doing interviews together again.

As I was writing this earlier today millions of fookin’ Oasis fans were busier than fookin’ normal clogging fookin’ websites to bag their spot at a gig, like they were looking for a Willy fookin’ Wonka Golden fookin’ ticket, d’you know what I mean? There will be some very fookin’ disappointed fans out there, especially all the ones that thought by being diehard Oasis fans, the sort who once met Paul Gallagher (the fat one that isn’t Liam or Noel, in case you don’t love Oasis enough) in a branch of Tandy’s in 2003, they had some sort of God given right to a seat at the table, specifically one right next to all their ‘mates’. Mancunian families and communities, traveller settlements and gangs of pig-thick football fans risk being ripped apart through what many will deem an unfair distribution of luck. Some will never let go and subsequently spend days milling around Heaton Park or Wembley Stadium with pockets full of money they should be spending on a new wheelchair for their quadriplegic daughter, desperately hoping to snag a way in so they can join in on the chorus of Champagne Supernova and make it feel like it did when they broke into the first night at Knebworth. When the future was brighter than the sun. Or should I say sunshiiiiiine?

There is, of course, a chance that these gigs will never happen. All it will take is for Liam to call Noel a fookin’ monkey at a press conference and their larger than life world could implode and explode at exactly the same time. But I doubt that will happen. There is almost a nagging sense that this is what they had planned all along. Their clever little masterplan: make it big, sorry ‘mega’, sell loads of records and then break up for 15 years, knowing that in all that time their biggest fans will be sitting at home, tugging at their tiny nuts, trying to fill the void by listening to their piddly collection of Beady Eye albums in search of a cheap high and, failing that, wearing a parka and singing Wonderwall into the mirror as tears drip off their chin. I expect that both the brothers know there is a sharp streak of cynicism binding this whole operation together. They’ll get on just about well enough to endure the dates they have to offer and then it will all fold away again, until the next time. I doubt they’ll do some huge U2-esque world tour because, to be blunt, they may have played the world but they never cracked it in the way a truly huge band has too. They aren’t planet big, like The Stones or even Coldplay, but rather British big, like Morecambe and Wise, coronation chicken or, er, Greggs.

And yet they are still a great band, though more accurately two hairy brothers and whichever players they choose to re-select. They will sound, in every stadium they play, exactly the same – the studio versions but with extra amps and a polite bit of wigging out at the end, because that’s what they think makes it an extra bit more rock and roll. The crowds will be filled with bucket hats and terrace Adidas, traffic cones and Patsy Kensit masks, confused Happy Monday addicts, Manchester City kits and scatterings of Fred Perry and faded Burberry and in turn every fan, from way back when, will be filled with Stella and marching powder, as much as they can ingest before they get through the turnstiles and have to pay £11.50 for half a pint of someone else’s piss. There will be an edge, for sure, but it will be balanced out by a new generation of Oasis fans who won’t have the faintest idea what good music sounds like, let alone Oasis music. These are the fans who wet themselves at Harry Styles concerts and send assorted members of assorted K-Pop bands pubic clippings and marriage proposals. There will be boys who want to be girls and girls who want to be boys (they would have be better off going to see Blur) and not a single one of them will have ever owned an Oasis album. Which is a pity and a yawning oversight.

Speaking of Blur, I went to see them last year at Wembley Stadium. Sadly, but with limited regret, I left before the encores; not because the music was bad but because I became increasingly aware of being surrounded by drunk Blur fans, every one of them no doubt thinking they were being cocky-cheeky-chappie-charming when in fact they were being marginally more irritating than sitting in bleach, naked. And it is for this reason that, much as I love Oasis, for all their might, for all their chutzpa, for all their flaws, I won’t be going to see them, and I certainly didn’t waste a second this morning applying for tickets. The music will be good and the band will be tight (I’d hope) but the fans, the crowd, the collection of frustration and decline and warped idealism and plain stupidity that such occasions as these gather together will be all too much for me to bear. On a good night they’ll play Gas Panic, Rock and Roll Star, Falling Down and D’you Know What I Mean (to name just a few) and that will be great, but to get caught up in a treacle-sticky singalong for Don’t Look Back In Anger would make me somehow sad inside, as if the world had only moved on in bad ways. As if nostalgia is never as good as you remember. As if everyone had mistaken anthemic for indisputably good and forgotten the bits that Oasis really were ‘mega’ at. And that’s being Oasis. The world won’t stop for them, it never did before, but at least next summer there will some welcome distraction and the old boys can come out to play and show Generation Z how it’s really sort of done. Though we must take note: we may need Liam and Noel for all sorts of reasons, but never forget that they need us too. Hopefully it won’t just be for the money.

G B Burton. 31.08.2024