For Oasis fans, all the roads they have to walk are winding. Fourteen million people pre-registered for 1.4 million tickets at Oasis concerts in the UK and Ireland in 2025. They sold out in less than two days.
It was a feud for the ages. Spanning 15 years of trash talking, separate careers and an incredibly loyal fan base, the generation-defining Britpop band Oasis is reuniting for a series of concerts up and down the UK and Ireland in the summer of 2025. Seventeen shows are scheduled in London, Cardiff, Manchester, Dublin and Edinburgh. All shows sold out in less than two days.
It seems that brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher are finally not looking back in anger at that Paris dressing room incident in 2009, where Liam threw a plum at Noel (and hit the wall), and the latter walked out one final time on his younger brother and arguably the world’s biggest band of the ‘90s.
If Alanis Morissette captured the zeitgeist of the decade from a woman’s perspective, Liam Gallagher summed up the end of the 1990s from a working lad’s existential questioning: Is it worth the aggravation to find yourself a job when there’s nothing worth working for?
The plum, like the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, was nothing compared to their previous and very public tirades and epic clashes. Liam reportedly once threw a tambourine at Noel in the studio during a heated argument as tensions ran high when they were recording their debut album “Definitely Maybe.” He also threw a chair at Noel while they were touring the US, and pulled out of an MTV Unplugged performance, leaving his brother to sing all their songs while he heckled him from the stands. (That he had the gall to heckle is very funny.)
Noel had always been seen as the calmer brother, but Liam was the more interesting one. While the antics embarrassed Noel, Liam relished them. He wanted to be rock and roll—and 30 years later he is still that guy in a parka, a bucket hat and a funny strut.
“Is rock and roll dead?”
Former One Direction member Louis Tomlinson was asked this question on a radio interview, and he answered: “Not as long as Liam Gallagher is around.”
Tomlinson was born in 1991 and was 18 when Oasis disbanded. He is, for all intents and purposes, the Oasis generation that American content creators on TikTok are rage-baiting with declarations that Oasis was unknown beyond the UK. (Surprisingly—and unlike Swifties—only a few people bit, based on the comments.)
Oasis wasn’t just a band that millennials loved, it also had a massive following from my own generation, Gen X, who were young adults in the 1990s and just starting their careers. We played their music in our cars, in our offices on Discmans with ungainly headphones, and a million karaoke bars had tipsy wannabes swilling low-shelf vodka that our entry-level jobs could afford.
If Alanis Morissette captured the zeitgeist of the decade from a woman’s perspective, Liam Gallagher summed up the end of the 1990s from a working lad’s existential questioning: Is it worth the aggravation to find yourself a job when there’s nothing worth working for?
Did Umberto Eco really say that?
The renowned Italian novelist and philosopher is attributed with the quote “‘Noel Gallagher is a poet and Liam is a town crier.”
To me and many others, that’s a spot-on summation of the brothers’ roles in the band. Noel is the introspective, level-headed songwriter and lead guitarist; Liam is the outspoken, chair-throwing, guitar-smashing, nasal-sounding frontman.
This quote became urban legend via a young Pete Doherty, who would later become frontman of The Libertines. Doherty was interviewed in 1997 outside the record store HMV when Oasis’ album “Be Here Now” came out. An interviewer asked then 18-year-old Doherty what he thought of Oasis and he said, “I subscribe to the Umberto Eco view that Noel Gallagher is a poet and Liam is a town crier.”
Doherty may have “quoted” Eco, but there is actually no direct source—written or video—showing that Eco ever said that. But it’s a fantastic quote!
The “town crier” was especially accurate to describe Liam’s voice—forceful, distinctive and somehow with a working class feel. Every time I hear my fave Oasis song Stop Crying Your Heart Out, I want to do the exact opposite of the lyrics and curl into a ball in a room plunged in darkness, and cry my heart out.
The odds are in our favor
If I was a betting woman, I’d say that despite the hilarious memes and predictions, the Gallagher brothers will actually get on between now and July 2025 to start and finish their scheduled tours. Talks are rife about their adding more concert dates since fans complained about the scalpers getting the lower-priced tickets and selling them for thousands of pounds on the secondary market like Viagogo.
At one point, the online queue on Ticketmaster was half a million slots long. Alas, even superfan Tomlinson wasn’t able to get one, complaining that he was kicked out of the site before he could get a queue number.
Pundits are advising fans to get tickets for the first night of the tour in Cardiff on July 4—because they might start fighting again (God knows what Liam might throw at Noel) and cancel the whole reunion.
Still, I am keeping my faith—even if the brothers had a feud that left fans heartbroken in 2009 but still loving both their solo careers and not taking sides. Like 1975’s Matt Healy said, “Stop marding! There is not one person in the world going to a High Flying Birds (Noel’s band) gig or a Liam Gallagher gig that would not rather be at an Oasis gig. There is not one person.”
Noel Gallagher once called Healy “a slack-jawed fucker.” But he still loves Oasis—as we do. That speaks volumes about their music.
