With Blur and Pulp battering stadiums and festivals with Nineties classics and speculation growing more fervid around an Oasis reunion than a Boris Johnson honours list, what’s been dubbed the second summer of Britpop also appears to have reignited the old north/south rock divide.
“Do you feel inferior?” Noel Gallagher asked the “eel-eating c***s” of south London booing his call out for any Mancunians in the Crystal Palace crowd. And all of this, so soon after declaring every London football club “shit” and asking someone in the front row if they’d had their hair cut by two different people.
It was all in the acerbic, deadpan good humour we’ve come to love from Oasis’s elder Gallagher brother. His contribution to Britpop’s 2023 revival, from a stage bedecked with a Beatles-in-Rishikesh amount of flowers, was similarly wry.
As if reflecting on his thirty years of supersonic success, but backwards, he opened with five tracks from new album Council Skies (“I’m sure you’ve all gone out and f***ing streamed it” he quipped). These lacked some of the psych-glam punch of 2017’s excellent Who Built the Moon? but continued the broad-minded artistry and motoric propulsion that has seen his High Flying Birds records outshine later Oasis material, particularly now Noel writes all the songs again.
The album’s title track was the sort of samba pop confection that Super Furry Animals might have produced in their more retro lounge moments. And while Noel insisted that orchestral glam tune Open the Door, See What You Find “is not Supersonic”, its cocky beat and stratospheric hookline had certainly sniffed some Alka-Seltzer in their time.
Next, he ventured “some of the way back” to earlier NGHFB material – the driving rock of AKA… What a Life! and In the Heat of the Moment, stirring ballad Dead in the Water performed semi-solo beneath ocean moon visuals. Next came a crucial question: “anyone here from the Nineties?” He launched into a second half of select Oasis songs, avoiding the Liam-sung big hitters (bar a downplayed acoustic Live Forever, dedicated to Sinead O’Connor), that saw the song’s fragility peek out from behind the bravado.
The Importance of Being Idle was pure fairground carnival panache; Half the World Away a sway-along of rinky-dink charm. Come the encore Gallagher threw his full weight behind a cover of Dylan’s Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn) but stepped back to let the crowd sing large chunks of a majestic Don’t Look Back in Anger. A subtle adjunct to Britpop’s second wind, but well worth the abuse.
