Oh, MARVELLOUS. There’s been so much discourse on Threads about the Oasis reunion—particularly regarding the preposterous ticket costs and the difficulty of actually getting through to Ticketmaster to purchase them—but none of it has been as mighty as this. Just filled me with absolute joy when I saw this. Also, a friend posted this on FB:
Rather more sensibly priced, and I daresay more likely to be better than the real thing. Although would it be an Oasis tribute without “Liam” and “Noel” getting cunted on cocaine and fighting with each other for the whole show?
Oasis are reforming! And people are losing their minds! Or at least they are on Threads, which I have recently started making use of, and where there seems to be a running battle between people loudly proclaiming their lack of interest and other people sniping at those people. I’m kind of more in the former camp in that I’m not terribly excited by this comeback, but I also can’t be bothered dumping on it too much… anyway, the Graun says:
Rock’s biggest will-they-won’t-they finally has an answer: Oasis have announced that they will reunite for a 14-date tour of the UK and Ireland in 2025.
They will not, however, be headlining Glastonbury festival as was rumoured over the weekend, nor playing 10 dates at Wembley and the Etihad Stadium respectively.
Instead, the concerts will take place in July and August, at stadiums in Cardiff, London, Manchester, Edinburgh and Dublin. Tickets go on sale at 9am on 31 August, with prices to be revealed on the day.
A press release billed the dates as the “domestic leg” of the tour and said that “plans are under way” for it to go beyond Europe later in 2025.
Of the famously feuding brothers’ decision to reunite, the release stated: “There has been no great revelatory moment that has ignited the reunion – just the gradual realisation that the time is right.”
The fact that both Liam and Noel have undergone messy and costly divorces in recent years has absolutely nothing to do with said time being right, of course, and the fact that each is expected to personally make about 50 million is also perfectly and entirely beside the point.
Anyway… Oasis. Far from my favourite band of that era, though also far from my least favourite; never owned any of their albums but I liked a fair few of the singles and some of the b-sides and albums, at least up to the Standing on the Gramatically Dubious Misquote of Giants (you know what I mean) era. Just heard “Gas Panic!” for the first time in probably 20-something years the other day and thought it was great. But I think “Half the World Away” was always my favourite Oasis tune, and I have a certain very particular memory associated with it.
It’s March 6th, 2005, me and the folks are out visiting family friends who live in the vicinity of Lurline Bay. I’d been given a digital camera for Xmas, so I took the opportunity to put it to use. This one I got from their balcony…
…and here’s a couple of others I got after I wandered down to Marine Parade. Anyway, it was an eminently fine Sunday afternoon; I remember it being warm without being overly so, obviously untroubled sky, lovely day all round. And from somewhere at a distance there was music. I soon discovered this was coming from someone’s car, whoever owned it was presumably in the are, and they’d left the radio (or tape player, or whatever they had in the car for music) on. And that was where the music was coming from, and as I got closer I could make out the song playing at that moment. And it was “Half the World Away” by Oasis.
And for some reason that I still don’t understand and can’t really explain, everything just felt exactly right. I had this sense that, right there and at that moment, everything in the world was exactly as it should be. This beautiful Sunday afternoon looking out over the ocean, this weather, those people out on the rocks watching container ships on the horizon, that car and that song playing in the slight distance, me being there to observe it all… all of that came together with the feeling that this was completely what should be happening. It was kind of a mystical thing, which is probably why I struggle to put it into words. Sensations of this sort are kind of hard to analyse as such. But everything right there and then was perfect, and I was perfectly attuned to it.
And then the song changed to something else, and the moment passed. I’d never felt anything of the sort before, and I don’t think I’ve felt it since. And nearly 20 years later I still don’t understand it, but those couple of minutes when everything was perfect still remain with me… and Oasis were the background music for it. Which is not how I would ever have envisaged things, but so it was…
…and here’s a couple of others I got after I wandered down to Marine Parade. Anyway, it was an eminently fine Sunday afternoon; I remember it being warm without being overly so, obviously untroubled sky, lovely day all round. And from somewhere at a distance there was music. I soon discovered this was coming from someone’s car, whoever owned it was presumably in the are, and they’d left the radio (or tape player, or whatever they had in the car for music) on. And that was where the music was coming from, and as I got closer I could make out the song playing at that moment. And it was “Half the World Away” by Oasis.
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