‘It’s good to be back,” Liam Gallagher snarls, waggling his tambourine at the massed hordes of Knebworth for the first time in 26 years, and you can well believe it. Five years ago Liam was begging his estranged brother Noel on Twitter to reform the Manchester rock titans as if the bailiffs were coming through the windows. Today he has his fourth No 1 solo album with C’mon You Know and is undoubtedly the bigger name. There was only one place to celebrate: the old Oasis glory grounds of 1996.
In a near identical white outfit to the one he wore last time, piling into an opening run of Hello, Rock’n’Roll Star and Morning Glory pumped with intense determination, Gallagher sells his Knebworth comeback as a recreation of Oasis’s legendary weekend here – the pinnacle of Britpop – and a mark of his solo career as an equivalent cultural phenomenon. But the numbers hardly match up. Too big for anywhere else, Oasis received enough ticket requests to play 16 nights here in 1996, whereas Liam could have comfortably fit tonight’s 80,000 fans into numerous stadia where a mild breeze doesn’t make Some Might Say feel like Ménière’s disease. You could argue we’re foot-fodder in the world’s biggest ever sibling point-scoring exercise.
