Key events
Laura Snapes
Cardiff date.” src=”https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/cd2c99a1c990b27b94c23d71e24b73bcf71440d0/0_0_594_428/master/594.jpg?width=465&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none” width=”465″ height=”335.0505050505051″ loading=”lazy” class=”dcr-evn1e9″/>Oasis first played the Welsh capital on the Definitely Maybe tour on 2 June 1994, performing just nine songs in a small room in the university. At least as far as I can tell – there don’t seem to be any surviving reviews online – that show passed without incident. (Their first Welsh gig, however, came a month earlier, on 3 May at TJ’s in Newport.) Both shows preceded the release of their debut album on 29 August – itself exactly a month before the infamous gig at Whisky a Go Go in California, a total shambles in which they allegedly took crystal meth by accident, then Noel quit and disappeared to San Francisco before being tracked down by management and persuaded to rejoin the band. But when you look back at their touring schedule that year, it’s no surprise that the band started coming apart at the seams: they played 143 shows and more or less only took July off.
Ben Beaumont-Thomas
Our writer Marriage Baines – who writes brilliant features for us as well as live reviews across the west and Wales – was out reviewing Slayer for us at Cardiff’s Blackweir Fields last night (lots of simulated blood, still very much got it, four stars). He sends this dispatch:
As I was walking up to the Blackweir a few lads selling bootleg Oasis bucket hats chanced their arms with any Slayer heads who might be pulling double duty – looking around the field later on, it appears there were a few of them – but on the way back the atmosphere was really starting to build. At 10.30-ish there were maybe a dozen tents already arranged opposite the stadium in anticipation of doors, the merch stalls were decked out, and the pubs were doing a decent trade. Outside one bar on Westgate Street a bloke pointed at me, looked me in the eye and quietly said, “Oasis”, before going back to what could have been his 12th pint of the day. There was a big drone display spelling the band’s name out above the venue the other night but this felt like real, granular excitement.
Ben Beaumont-Thomas
First look at the inside of the stadium here, via Spanish-language Oasis podcast Whatever.
And from superfan Chazza_Rkid:
Ben Beaumont-Thomas
In one of those examples of a brand trying to do something fun and lighthearted but really just revealing how much data they have on you – a bit like Spotify Wrapped – we have this from Klarna, who analysed millions of purchases and found some possibly Oasis-buoyed items. Bucket hats: up 79% year on year. Tambourine sales: up 155% in the last three months.
However, Shopify has its own set of bucket hat data, suggesting that in June, sales went up by only 32%. Combine the two studies and we must surmise that the intensity of bucket hat purchases is waning, people are becoming jaded with Oasis before the tour has even begun, and the Gallaghers should probably call the whole thing off.
Laura Snapes
While the Oasis subreddit is overspilling with speculation and excitement about the first gigs of the reunion tour, the Cardiff subreddit has been driven up the wall by banal questions from non-locals about travel logistics. It’s inspired increasingly deranged spoof posts about the so-called Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, that green Oasis® foam used for floral arrangements, the fruity soft drink Oasis and where you can weigh your sister in the city … geddit … oh-weigh-sis.
Ben Beaumont-Thomas
Fans have been soaking up the atmosphere – though I’m not sure that cardboard Liam is too happy about it.
Laura Snapes
I drove up to Cardiff first thing this morning from a trip home to Cornwall, and can report that Oasis fever had reached the outer reaches of the south-west, despite Cardiff being as close as they’re coming. At Rosudgeon car boot on Wednesday morning (a hot ticket – if you know, you know) a lad walked through the car park with a massive framed promo poster for Be Here Now lead single D’You Know What I Mean? And not long after, in Sainsbury’s Penzance, I spotted a chap in a T-shirt depicting Liam and Noel as birds: Crowasis, performing “Don’t Look Beak in Anger”.
As Oasis nuts know, the band have some core Cornish history: Definitely Maybe was partially recorded/salvaged at the Sawmills recording studio on the banks of the Fowey, and – if I remember correctly, though it doesn’t seem to be online anywhere – Liam got in trouble for being photographed walking down railway tracks when they played the Eden Project, just five weeks before the band split.
Ben Beaumont-Thomas
Embedding that video of The Drugs Don’t Work is a reminder that the most tearjerkingly poignant places on the planet are the comment sections under YouTube videos. Oof.
Alexis Petridis on the support acts
Alexis Petridis
Oasis’s reunion gigs are clearly predicated on nostalgia, specifically nostalgia for the 1990s – if the setlist leaked in the press is to be believed, they’re only playing one song that dates from the 21st century. But I’ve noticed something slightly odd about their selection of support acts.
On the one hand, Cast and Richard Ashcroft are obvious choices to maintain the retro mood – both Cast and Ashcroft’s old mob the Verve were Oasis-adjacent bands who enjoyed their commercial peak 30-odd years ago. On the other, they’re directly associated with the waning of what you might call the high 90s.
Cast’s best-known song, Walkaway – 10m more streams than its nearest rival, their breakthrough single Alright – is their best-known song primarily because the BBC used it as the soundtrack to the tear-jerking tournament montage they broadcast after England were knocked out of the Euro 96 semi-finals: it’s the sound of the realisation that, despite loud assurances to the contrary, football definitely wasn’t coming home.
The Verve’s The Drugs Don’t Work, meanwhile, was released on 1 September 1997, the day after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales – the aftermath of which, John Harris’s definitive Britpop history The Last Party suggests, was the final nail in the coffin of any notion that Britain was swinging again. It entered the charts at No 1, becoming ubiquitous on radio because it fitted with broadcasters’ strict instructions to play only music befitting a country in mourning (it was knocked off the top, inevitably, by Elton John’s Candle in the Wind ’97).
Music that evokes Gareth Southgate looking disconsolate after Andreas Köpke’s save and lachrymose national hysteria that seemed to go on and on and on, as if Britain had taken leave of its senses: peculiar things to remind people of at an ostensible celebration of the past. But if nothing else, it inadvertently underlines that – whatever rosy-lens-wearers of a certain age may tell you – the 90s weren’t all sunsheeeiiiii-ine.
First on the bill is Cast, whose frontman John Power couldn’t contain his verbosity when he was quizzed about it earlier this morning on Virgin Radio.
I’m just about now getting excited. I mean, the thing is, the way I live my life and look at things is, I kind of take each day as it comes and not try and look too far ahead. But there’s no doubt about it now that, you know, Friday is upon us, and the first chord of this tour is going to be one I hit. So it’s going to be quite a moment, I think, Cardiff Principality Stadium.
Steady on, John! Don’t add too much coal to the hype furnace!
Ben Beaumont-Thomas
With 15 minutes until the Principality Stadium welcomes a sea of chanting, singing and people keeping on their Stone Island jacket even though it’s really warm out, Laura is right in the mix: “Lots of spontaneous breakouts of song outside the stadium as doors are preparing to open – it’s human soup outside the City Arms.”
We’ve been doing a fair bit of Oasis pre-amble prior to this pre-ambling blog. Not least with the poet laureate, Simon Armitage, writing us an essay on the momentousness of their return, and why the weird psychodrama of the Gallagher brothers keeps hooking us back in.
Also today we’ve had Rachel Aroesti opining on how Oasis created the formula of the gobby contemporary British musician – but how they could never exist in the same form again.
And Dave Simpson spoke to 17 different indie musicians – and Princess Superstar! – about their favourite Oasis song. I know it’s pure clickbait to say it, but you really won’t believe what Johnny Marr picks here.
Ben Beaumont-Thomas
Your set times for tonight:
Welcome to our Oasis liveblog!
Ben Beaumont-Thomas
The bucket hats are on, the pints are flowing and the sun is sheeeeiiiining – Cardiff is getting ready for a gig being closely watched by a truly global cohort of fans: the return of Oasis. The BBC counted up that it’s been 5,795 days since the band were last together, when it all kicked off backstage at a Paris festival set and Oasis broke apart. In that time we’ve had numerous solo albums, new bands and tuber-based insults. But finally, whether it’s down to fraternal love or a number with a lot of zeros on the end of it, the band are back together.
We’ll be documenting the whole of the first night as it happens. I’m sat in the decidedly un-rock’n’roll environs of my bedroom, but deputy music editor Laura Snapes and chief rock and pop critic Alexis Petridis will both be inside the stadium this evening and will be feeding back everything that happens. In the runup we’ll have plenty of analysis, photos and semi-random predictions. Hope you’re mad fer it all.
