It’ll be another seven months before Oasis, the Britpop band led by Liam and Noel Gallagher, puts aside 15 years of sibling rivalry at a stadium in Cardiff, Wales, for a most unlikely reunion.
But it already felt like the comeback was in full swing one recent Saturday at the Flowerpot, a pub in Derby, England, when Jon Boswell sauntered onstage just after 9 p.m. and surveyed a sold-out crowd. The 44-year-old singer was wearing dark shades and a black rain jacket, looking remarkably like Liam Gallagher.
“We’re gonna take the roof off,” Boswell said, with all the swagger of the real Liam. Then, Boswell’s band — Ohasis — launched into “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” an early Oasis hit. Soon, the 250-strong audience was bellowing Boswell’s every word back at him, many lifting pints of lager above their heads as they sung, spilling the contents onto the floor.
In recent years, many fans of blockbuster acts likes Oasis, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift have been priced out of seeing their live shows, with spiking demand pushing the cost of tickets, hotels and travel around the tours sky high. But in the case of Oasis’s reunion, that inflation has produced unexpected beneficiaries: Britain’s many tribute bands.
“It’s been mad,” Boswell said in an interview, noting that after the Gallagher brothers announced their reunion plans in August, promoters had “inundated” Ohasis with gig and festival offers.
“It’s taking us probably the furthest you can go as a tribute,” he said.
Damien Stringer of Fakermaker, another tribute act, said that his band’s bookings had almost doubled since the announcement, and he couldn’t do many more without affecting his job as a science teacher. Damon Cox of Oasis Maybe said that his band had even fielded inquiries about shows in Japan and Germany — although places like Italy, Mexico and Poland have their own Oasis tribute acts.
Some of those now clamoring to see the tributes had failed to get tickets to the real Oasis, Boswell said, along with others who never could have afforded that tour’s prices. In Derby, attendees fell into both camps.
H. Singh-Deol, 27, a joiner, said it would have cost him and his partner more than 1,000 pounds (over $1,250) to see the real Oasis next year, including accommodation and travel. It seemed better to pay £13 each to see Ohasis, Singh-Deol said, especially given the Gallagher brothers’ feuding history meant there was little guarantee that the reunion would last.
Most members of the tribute bands are themselves Oasis fans — well, except Alan Darmody, Ohasis’s drummer, who said he was more into the Smiths — although all insisted that back in the ’90s, they hadn’t expected to end up impersonating the band.
Scott Hardingham, 47, the “Noel” of Ohasis, said he had fallen for the band as a teenager. “People my generation hadn’t seen a band like it,” he said. “It was almost like they grabbed the nation by the neck and went, ‘Listen, we’re going on a journey.’”
After learning guitar, Hardingham played in bands who wrote their own songs. Then, about 15 years ago, a friend invited him to join an Oasis tribute. “It paid better than any originals bands I’d done, so I said, ‘Absolutely,’” he recalled.
Now, with Ohasis, he had played to 17,000 people at one recent festival: “You’re walking onstage going, ‘Jesus, what’s going on?’”
Sometimes, fans even ask for autographs, Hardingham added. “I always say, ‘Why? I’m not Noel.’”
At the Flowerpot, Ohasis’s evening was far from the glamour that the real Oasis can expect on their stadium tour. Backstage, Ohasis’s five members sat chatting in a tiny dressing room with refreshments that amounted to some instant coffee and 10 bottles of beer.
Still, the band members can sometimes find themselves mirroring the real Gallagher brothers. Boswell said Ohasis’s members had occasionally fought, for instance. “We’ve come offstage sometimes and that’s it, two band members are squaring off with each other, like, ‘I’m not playing with him ever again!’” Boswell said.
So far, he added, their disagreements have lasted only a few weeks, though.
Each Oasis tribute boasts special selling points to try and stand out from their rivals. Stringer of Fakermaker said the band’s “Liam” and “Noel” liked to feud onstage to give audiences extra drama.
Ian Armstrong of Oasis Supernova said his group featured a brass section and sometimes played in front of video screens showing Oasis footage.
Ohasis’s Boswell said his band’s selling point was simpler: They sounded and looked like the Oasis of old, and didn’t even need to use wigs. “I don’t mean to blow my own trumpet,” Boswell said, “but anyone who sees us will say we’re the closest you can get.”
At the Flowerpot, the sold-out crowd appeared to agree. After Ohasis played 18 hits, including “Wonderwall,” “Champagne Supernova” and “Live Forever,” a handful of fans waited around for selfies. Others grabbed set lists from the stage.
Jonathan Baker, 35, a BBC employee, said he’d seen many Oasis tributes, and Ohasis had been “fantastic.”
They even looked like the Gallaghers, he added — “if you kind of squinted.”
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