When David Beckham was training under Sir Alex Ferguson at Old Trafford, he was instructed that if you want to be loved as a sportsman, you must learn to enjoy being hated as one, too. Ferguson’s tough old Celtic wisdom was just a simplified, sporting version of Oscar Wilde’s credo, that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about at all.
Somewhere on the other side of Princess Parkway from Beckham’s training ground, the Gallagher brothers, Liam and Noel, were the finest off-pitch example of Ferguson’s 90’s rules for life. This week they dominated all avenues of conversation. “I have nothing to say about the Oasis reunion,” has become a particularly pompous socials announcement, as if true ambivalence doesn’t have any other avenues of expression, like saying nothing. To deliberately misconstrue Oasis is to misconstrue the value of success itself. Instantly readable, showy, crude, wasted and elegant, they defied all that a Manchester education teaches you, revelling in every beat of their triumphs. Nobody loved fame more. Of all the towering achievements Oasis so casually effected during their first cultural ascent, most of which has come tumbling back like a snowstorm of Northern nostalgia confetti, their greatest was to make the regional working classes the envy of everyone. This is the backbone of their story.
