Last August, when Oasis announced a reunion for its first tour since 2009, the fractious British band led by the brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher released a statement filled with exactly the sort of full-throated grandeur and bravado that marked its rise in the 1990s: “The guns have fallen silent. The stars have aligned. The great wait is over. Come see. It will not be televised.”
When the band trumpeted the North American leg of the tour a few weeks later, the tone was a bit more passive-aggressive: “America. Oasis is coming. You have one last chance to prove that you loved us all along.”
The distance between those two proclamations says a lot about the trans-Atlantic legacy of this combative band, which performs the first show of its sold-out reunion tour in Cardiff, Wales, on Friday. Oasis will play 17 stadium concerts in the U.K. and Ireland before arriving in North America in late August for a nine-show run; two additional London gigs will follow, then dates in Asia, Australia and South America.
When tickets went on sale for the U.K. shows last August, a reported 14 million people tried to buy them, crashing ticketing websites and angering fans. In October, seats for the gigs in North America went fast too, selling out in an hour. Michael Rapino, the chief executive of Live Nation, later called it “the biggest on-sale in history.”
Reunions generate interest, and the improbability of this one, with the Gallaghers sniping at each other for a decade-plus, almost certainly turbocharged it. The music has also aged well: So much of the band’s seven-album catalog, which stretched from 1994 to 2008, already sounded like classic rock when it first emerged.
“Wonderwall,” in particular, has become an inescapable anthem. On Spotify, it’s the third-most played song from the 1990s, with over 2.3 billion streams. Covers of the track in every imaginable style — rap-rock, country-soul, punk-pop, chillwave, metalcore, big band, lounge-pop, electro-funk, cool jazz, bossa nova, dubstep, mariachi — have tallied hundreds of millions more plays. The wistful singles “Don’t Look Back in Anger” and “Champagne Supernova” are nearly as popular and have proven similarly durable to wide-ranging reinterpretation.
“There isn’t anyone writing stuff like that anymore,” said Maggie Mouzakitis, the band’s tour manager for most of its career. “Not even themselves.”
Removed from the cultural moment of the band’s original ascent and the volatility between its main protagonists, the music built a fan base that crosses generations and borders.
“People that don’t know Oasis know their songs,” said Stu Bergen, who worked at the band’s American record label. “Time’s the ultimate arbiter, and their music has prevailed.” Bergen plans to attend the reunion shows with his own children, who are in their 20s. “There aren’t many bands I’d want to see that my kids would be that excited to see too.”
BY MANY MEASURES, Oasis has enjoyed considerable success in the United States. It’s sold more than seven million albums here, scored a Top 10 hit with “Wonderwall” in 1996, reached No. 2 on the Billboard 200 with its 1997 album “Be Here Now” and sold out Madison Square Garden multiple times. Yet Oasis has never really shaken the perception that it failed to conquer America — even among its own members.
“We nearly got there,” Noel, the band’s guitarist and songwriter, told CNN in 2012. “I don’t even know what cracking America is supposed to be, though. If it’s playing arenas everywhere, 10,000 people a night, we did it.”
In part, the perception is a matter of comparison. In the United Kingdom, the Gallaghers’ testy rivalry and debauched antics — plus, a surfeit of songs that deliver enduring classic-rock riffs with swaggering punk-rock attitude — made Oasis instant stars.
Its first album, “Definitely Maybe,” was the fastest-selling debut in British history. Its second, “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory,” is the nation’s best-selling album of the 1990s. In 1996, Oasis played what were then the country’s largest-ever outdoor concerts. Noel’s public backing of Tony Blair during this era buoyed Blair’s political standing and helped position Oasis at the forefront of a mid-90s movement dubbed Cool Britannia.
In England, Oasis remains a generational icon on par with the Beatles, David Beckham and Harry Potter. In the U.S., it was merely a popular rock band.
Bergen, who rose to vice president of promotion at Epic during the 1990s, pointed out that when Oasis arrived in the U.S. in 1994, the landscape wasn’t particularly inviting for a tuneful British group. “Grunge was dominant,” Bergen said. “Not a single U.K. rock band had broken big in the U.S. since the Police. We had more success with ‘Definitely Maybe’ than any British rock band had in 10 years. That set them up for a great run.”
Despite that, the America-shaped chip on the band’s collective shoulder is real. “I wasn’t bothered whether we made it in the States,” Liam, the band’s singer, said in a book collecting interviews for the documentary “Supersonic.” “We’d give it a good crack, but it would have to be on our terms.”
Oasis’s first major U.S. tour in 1994 went off the rails. After a disastrous gig at the Whisky A-Go-Go in West Hollywood — Liam threw a tambourine at Noel, and the music repeatedly devolved into a cacophonous mess, all fueled by “big lines” of crystal meth, according to Liam in “Supersonic” — a fed-up Noel grabbed his passport and $700 from Mouzakitis, then vanished. When management finally tracked Noel down, he was in San Francisco, holed up with a fan he’d met days earlier. Tim Abbot, managing director at the band’s U.K. label, Creation Records, was dispatched to try to bring him back.
Abbot recalled arriving and finding Noel with “a table full of Jack Daniels and other stuff. The band was over as far as he was concerned.”
The two flew to Las Vegas for what Abbot described as a “three-day bender.” Two weeks of shows were canceled, but Abbot eventually convinced Noel to rejoin his comrades in Texas to record some B-sides, including “Talk Tonight,” a ballad he’d just written about his San Francisco hiatus. The crisis was momentarily averted, but something fundamental had changed.
“From then on, it was the Noel Gallagher show,” Abbot said. “How the band was run became nonnegotiable.”
Noel’s leadership didn’t make Oasis a well-oiled machine. In 1995, its bassist, Paul McGuigan, left the band two months into touring behind “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory,” citing nervous exhaustion. His emergency replacement, Scott McLeod, quit after only a week. Other tour dates were periodically axed throughout the band’s career because Liam’s voice gave out.
“It was always the same reason: Everybody’s partying,” said Iain Robertson, who wrote a book, “Oasis: What’s the Story?,” about his time working security and helping tour manage Oasis in this era. “If you’re a guitar player, you wrap up your instrument, it goes in a box. If you’re the singer, you’re the instrument, and the late-night stuff took its toll. We had a great time, but it was a hard slog because of the partying.”
For a British band in the 1990s, courting American fans could be grueling. The U.S. had dozens of markets, and at each stop, there were radio stations to visit, interviews to do, promotional events to endure.
“Radio and record store stuff always went well, but after the show, there was much less appetite from the band to do that grip-and-grin stuff,” Robertson said. “Very often, those things went south because the band, to their credit, were never really interested in playing the game.”
As Oasis’s stature at home grew, its patience for the machinery of the American music industry waned. When Rolling Stone blocked off eight hours for a cover photo shoot, the band walked after just one. At the 1996 MTV Video Music Awards, the group was made to wait backstage for hours before performing “Champagne Supernova.” Annoyed, Liam taunted the crowd, altered a chorus to “Champagne Supernova up your bum” and slammed down the microphone.
While this sort of behavior might’ve rankled promoters and executives, it was also intrinsic to Oasis’s appeal. “People latched onto that punk-rock attitude,” Mouzakitis said. “At the time, music was a bit safe. It was bad to have to deal with the trashing of this or that, but part of me giggled because at least they were doing something controversial.”
Oasis could be its own worst enemy, though. Starting a 1996 U.S. tour, Liam decided at the last moment to skip the band’s flight to Chicago to go house hunting with his then-fiancée, the actress Patsy Kensit.
“The first gig was a 16,000-seat arena, and the singer’s not turned up,” Noel recalled to The New York Times Magazine in 2011. “That killed us stone dead in America. We never recovered.”
To be fair, Liam missing that Chicago gig wasn’t all that stymied Oasis’s momentum — but it didn’t help. The tour eventually ended prematurely after an altercation between the brothers.
“Four American tours in a row were either never started or never finished,” Noel said in 2012. “We got off on the wrong foot with Americans because they’re extremely professional corporate people and we treated that attitude with contempt.”
The Gallaghers had grown up in Burnage, a gritty area of Manchester, and at times, the disconnect with American audiences was noticeable. “We were subtitled on American television because of our accents,” Noel added. “Basically, people couldn’t understand a word we were saying.”
In the pre-internet 1990s, differences between the U.S. and the U.K. were more pronounced, and Oasis was part of an urban British working-class cultural milieu that had no real American analog. “The whole ’90s, post-rave, Brit lad culture, which was, like, music, football, Adidas cagoules, cut your hair a certain way, it was a thing,” Mouzakitis said. A generation of British kids saw themselves in Oasis. “That sort of feeling didn’t translate in America.”
THE GALLAGHERS SHUFFLED the band’s personnel several times, but it was the friction in their relationship that fueled both Oasis’s creative engine and its undoing. It all collapsed in 2009 in the most Oasis fashion imaginable. Shortly before they were to headline a festival in Paris, Liam and Noel got in a fight, fruit was thrown and Noel quit. In a statement, he said he couldn’t “go on working with Liam a day longer.”
Both brothers continued to tour and release albums separately, but nothing made a fraction of the impact their work together had. Still, based on the steady drumbeat of insults hurled at each other through the press and social media, a reunion seemed unlikely. Once it was announced last summer, the public appetite on both sides of the Atlantic was undeniable.
The live music landscape has transformed dramatically since Oasis last performed. Big tours draw more fans and more money. According to Pollstar, which chronicles the concert industry, Oasis’s average gross per show between 1996 and 2009 was $252,239. By comparison, in 2024, Coldplay averaged $7.8 million.
“Right when Oasis stopped touring was an inflection point,” said Andy Gensler, Pollstar’s editor in chief. “Everything got more global. This is the golden age. So, their timing is exquisite.”
Neither the Gallaghers nor the other band members confirmed for the upcoming shows — the guitarists Gem Archer and Paul Arthurs (known as Bonehead), the bassist Andy Bell or the new drummer Joey Waronker — have spoken publicly about what spurred the reconciliation. Some of those interviewed for this article speculated that Noel’s recent — and, according to British newspapers, costly — divorce made him more amenable. Others posited that it’s a gift to the Gallaghers’ aging mother, who’s been distraught to see her sons at odds. Perhaps growing older has allowed everyone involved to better weigh the endeavor’s merits.
“There’s a lot of vitriol in bands,” Gensler said. “But with the live industry being so lucrative, there’s every incentive for artists to put aside their differences.”
Of course, all this filthy lucre is premised on Noel and Liam tolerating each other long enough to finish the tour. Mouzakitis, their longtime tour manager, is cautiously optimistic.
“I hope it goes smoothly,” she said, then laughed. “But it wouldn’t be Oasis then, would it?”
The post Oasis Ends a 15-Year Pause With a Familiar Goal: Conquering America appeared first on New York Times.
