A Better Place To Play

Love, hope and the long shadow of Oasis

There’s a point, in the wake of a loved one’s death, when the white foam appears on the top of the wave as it finally breaks and propels you back to earth. The tributes stop coming in, funeral arrangements no longer need to be made, and the mourning, the grieving, and the outpouring of sympathy peter out and give way to something else - an indefinite expanse of ordinary, everyday life which must be lived in the absence of a person you still love. 

At the time, it feels as though you’re peering into a yawning chasm, where even the trifling, well-rehearsed minutiae of life - a cup of tea, a walk on the beach - need to be completely rebuilt around a hollow core. What I didn’t know, in the wake of my brother’s death, was that any meaningful relationship never really leaves you empty (never really leaves you at all, in fact). Its traces have a knack of resurfacing within you at timely, but unexpected moments - moments which guide you into living life more deeply than you ever thought possible.

I experienced exactly that in 2012, when I received in the post a vinyl copy of Erol Alkan’s “Another Bugged In Selection”. I expected an hour or so of wall-to-wall obscure dancefloor bangers, but listening to it felt more like reading a torn, tear-stained fragment of a love letter. The run-out groove contained a brief, laser-etched tribute to my late brother which, to those who knew, unlocked the record’s true meaning. Tonally, the album felt at different times like an apology, a tribute, a statement of raw defiance, gratitude and despair. The songs, it seemed to me at least, were there because they said all the things that were hitherto left unsaid, either because there wasn’t the time, the space, or the ability, or maybe for the simple reason that no-one expected it to be necessary to do so. It left you drenched in a raw emotion which to the outsider lacked enough precise form to be truly defined, and perhaps that was the point - to give a snapshot of a man’s heart at a particular moment in time, a heart which needed to first be encrypted in order for it to be properly laid bare. 

Perhaps I’m biased by the events of my own life - my brother was many things to me, including a musical guru who ensured my salvation with a copy of (What’s The Story) Morning Glory - but Oasis’ longstanding appeal seems to be tied up in exactly this kind of guarded male tenderness, which found its apotheosis on their 1995 b-side Acquiesce; the sound of two grown men, unblinking as they scream themselves hoarse, stubbornly avoiding eye contact and using planet earth’s last great stadium rock band as the perfect cover to say all the things they’re too scared to say, while retaining the ability to proudly deny they’d ever really said them. 

Oasis were constructed almost entirely from such tensions - tensions that arise from contradictions which are desperate to resolve, and which found their embodiment in the two brothers who stood front and centre (metaphorically, if not literally) as, in the words of a young Pete Doherty, the poet and the town crier.

Sonically, their USP was an effortless coupling of the sneering vocals and battering-ram guitars of the Sex Pistols with the more refined melodic sensibilities of the Beatles, and their mood also occupied two of the farthest reaches of the emotional pendulum. Without doing so, their appeal would have been nowhere near as broad. If all we had was the unadulterated braggadocio of Cigarettes and Alcohol and Rock n’ Roll Star, we would have surely struggled to develop such a deep affection for them - too confrontational, too many hard edges for own egos to bounce off. But they also had Live Forever, Slide Away and Champagne Supernova - aces that made their hand into a rock n’ roll royal flush, namely that the band were relatable enough that we could identify with them, but superior enough that we would worship them. 

There is a deep sense of longing in these last three songs which contains a distant echo of the vipralamba rasa of traditional Vaisnava bhajans, where the lover’s feelings find their deepest expression not in the presence of the beloved, but in their absence. It’s surely this longing for an unknown “other” that is so universal, so deeply woven into the DNA of our individual and collective existence, that guided Noel’s ambition to conquer the world by marrying the ersatz oneness of Haçienda club culture to the lighter-waving anthems and rugged individualism of a traditional rock n’ roll band.

I was 12 when What’s The Story was released, my dad was 74 - and both of us knew exactly who Noel and Liam were, and most of what they were up to. Those of us old enough to remember the last great heyday of pop’s monoculture will also remember how Oasis captured the public imagination, lock stock and barrel. Eight years previously, across the entirety of India, the streets would empty, trains would stop running and businesses would close with uncharacteristic punctuality every time an episode of Mahabharat was televised. The refined spiritual truths that the common man may have struggled to understand in the more sophisticated, scholarly puranas of the Vedic literature were presented here in an easily digestible soap-opera format of the Mahabharata’s romance, intrigue, royal court dramas and - you guessed it - fratricidal war. 

What does the Mahabharat teach us? In its simplest terms, that the dharma - the intrinsic, essential quality - of sugar is sweetness; of water is wetness; and of all living beings is true love. It teaches us that, if life sometimes feels like those aching seventh chords in the intro and opening verses of Don’t Look Back In Anger, then realising this love is the moment that the pain resolves into the sweet release of an eternal, anthemic chorus. But it is a love which is realised only to the degree that we stop trying to protect ourselves from it.

Perhaps you prefer to put different lenses in your Windsor glasses when you look at 90’s pop culture. If so, you might want to consider the Oasis story as a contemporary Greek tragedy, whose agon was the seemingly irreconcilable differences between two men who so clearly needed each other, believed in one another and, above all else, loved each other, but whose destruction was providential, wrought by the fact that they just couldn’t bring themselves to admit it.

Or perhaps we find it too much of a stretch to compare Oasis’ rowdy rabble to something as refined as yogic devotion or classical literature. Well, then Noel and Liam’s constant will-they-won’t-they was a perfect kitchen sink drama, whose soundtrack conjured a euphoria that suggested that it was all leading toward the satisfying denouement of a profound lesson - a lesson in the power of belief, forgiveness, and the ever-present, unflinching possibility of reconciliation. 

The band’s 2009 split followed a run of sub-par albums whose stellar singles struggled to justify keeping our attention on what by now had become a slightly tedious recurring plot line, and as such had an air of long-overdue inevitability about it. It was like standing at the kitchen window, elbow deep in dishwater, and being reminded of a long-finished party by noticing, at the end of the garden, the fizzling out of a damp firecracker that you’d forgotten you’d lit a few hours previously. If it was disappointing at the time, then at least it gave the national backdrop for their recent reunion - a promising but ultimately inept men’s football team, a country “shat upon by Tories and shovelled up by Labour” - an air of divine arrangement, that they might once again give us something to believe in as the twin destinies of redemption and failure hovered in the skies, battling it out for the souls of our two heroes.

I was there in 2008 when The Verve, a decade after their second split, triumphantly headlined Glastonbury for the first time, and a year later I walked into the balmy Pilton night arm in arm with complete strangers, bellowing Graham’s yearning refrain from Tender long after Blur finished playing the same slot on the same stage. Both shows were preceded by press campaigns which gave them detailed context and a feeling of immense purpose - of healed wounds, and bands - people - fulfilling their destiny long after everyone ceased to think it possible.

I can’t have been the only one who saw footage of Oasis’ opening run of reunion shows in Cardiff and felt disappointed. The band sounded fantastic - great walls of snarling guitars, a relentless rhythm section and Liam’s voice a vital, elemental force once again - but there seemed to be something missing. There was no onstage reconciliation, no teary-eyed embrace; only the presence of a handful of prodigiously talented, middle aged men nailing a setlist of immaculate songs for a rightfully adoring audience. The only acknowledgement to any tension was the shaven head, dark glasses and black t-shirt of original guitarist Paul “Bonehead’ Arthurs symbolically occupying the space between Liam and Noel like a nightclub bouncer waiting to separate two rowdy punters. Apart from that it was as if they'd never been away, and it was hard to know what - if anything - had really changed. When Liam dived into the Merc that waited for him backstage to be driven away before the final chord of Champagne Supernova had stopped ringing out, the overall feeling was that the paycheck had softened their pride just enough for them to swallow it, and nothing more.

This tour was billed, in Liam’s customary style, as a seismic, biblical event. Watching the Cardiff footage, the cynic in me felt that, if it is to be so - if his words are destined to be more than just hollow marketing - then it needs to be more than just another chance to see the same people play the same songs while increasing their already formidable wealth at our expense, like the world’s most rapacious jukebox. On the other hand, what do they owe me - or any of us? All they ever promised was that they’d become the world’s biggest band, and they did just that, giving us the soundtrack to our youth in the process. If they want to get back on the tools and go to work again, who are we to begrudge them another payday? 

Then, as the tour rolled into Manchester earlier this month, something seemed to shift. A photo of them smiling at one another, followed by another snapshot of what seemed to be a warm embrace, and video clips of thousands of fans doing the Poznan under cloudless summer skies. Subsequent gigs have all ended with a wholesome hug. What could be more biblical than Kane and Abel in a public display of brotherly love - however small?

I’m probably just greedy, asking two middle aged pop stars to show the same emotional verve now as they did in their 20s, but they set the bar so high, that to go out with any less of a statement than the one they came in with would feel like a kind of failure.

Maybe it’s just too soon. Maybe a dramatic climax as big as this one needs time to properly unfurl, to be teased, to teeter on the brink of annihilation before it fully blossoms. There are still another 24 shows left to play. Maybe this tour is a chance to see it all happen in real time, a penultimate act that sidesteps the cheap deus ex machina of most showbusiness reconciliations. 

Maybe they were planning it like this all along, and they’re just contractually obliged to save the big reveal for next year’s documentary, or maybe I just need to see the beauty in those brief onstage hugs, even if it feels like we’ve been a little short changed. But one thing is definite: I can’t help worrying that, if we don’t end up looking back on this tour as the chrysalis of something truly epic - if the extreme emotions of their public spats can only be tempered rather than transmuted - then the final lesson of the Oasis story might just be something else that they’ve borrowed from the Sex Pistols - that there basically is no future. And who wants to believe in that?