“The great wait is over!” declares one of dozens of newspaper headlines flashing up on the screen at Oasis’s final UK reunion show. Out come the brothers, arm in arm: Liam and Noel Gallagher in the flesh. Could it be, thinks the 90,000-strong full house at Wembley Stadium, that they are really embracing one another on that stage? That they have held out on feuding for the 39 dates thus far to get here, immediately opening, appropriately, with the chaotic static of “Hello”?
The world went nostalgia-mad for the Oasis reunion when it was announced just over a year ago. In their Nineties heyday, they were almost certainly the most culturally important British band. In retrospect, it’s increasingly charming to think how the Britpop heroes managed to be both sneery and sentimental, arrogant and sincere. But in the years since their 2009 split, the brother-on-brother soap opera – you either knew they would inevitably get back together or believed what they bitterly swore (that the hate ran too deep) – left a Gallagher reconciliation in doubt. After all, only a sibling would understand the truth of Noel’s infamous quote: “I liked my mum until she gave birth to Liam.”
