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.
I was delighted to see Andy Burnham first out of the traps, showing his early support for the reunion on Kay Burley’s Sky News show, looking and sounding full to bursting with territorial Northern pride, all eyebrows and John Smedley knit, looking exactly like a cheerfully discarded old Oasis drummer. Just as quickly, thousands of memes began flooding socials, some tearful, some cruel. Total media lockdown, a comms wipe-out by way of pop music. I love it when things like this happen.
Oasis were less rock band, more a pair of national weighing scales on which we once measured our character, for better and for worse. They built a world for themselves, out of three chords, a bucket hat and industrial quantities of self-belief. The bile spilling from some quarters on their return should be as satisfying to Liam and Noel as the awed worship it spars with. It’s all flipsides of the same coin – inciting reaction, reaffirming them as one of the basic fundaments of British culture, as familiar and communal as Coronation Street, the Grand National, Harry Potter, the Loch Ness monster, Big Ben. In a godless age, their tunes are as immortal and reassuring as Catholic hymns. They are an open bag of salt and vinegar crisps on a decrepit old pub table as the bell rings last orders.
Their existence reshaped conversations. Love and hate. All passion. Their creative ambition was to be as good as the Stone Roses, then multiply that by the success of U2. They matched, then trounced both in two albums flat, turning Knebworth into Spike Island with the correct batteries in. They shoplifted from their chosen strands of alternative noise and made it all as mainstream as Abba.
Their little cultural earthquake seemed to shudder overnight. Soap opera characters were cast to replicate Liam’s beautiful, statuesque Northern stillness. Scripts were adjusted to imitate his guillotine sharp line in smart sarcasm. For two straight schoolyears public schoolboys dressed – even walked – differently. Total class inversion. The Gallagher’s brotherly bond was biblical at its strongest, then Shakespearian in its fallout. They were infuriating, stupendous, idiotic, poetic, driven by a new, radical, impudent fearlessness. Their reunion has something of the miraculous twinge of an old pet being brought back to life.
I had a little moment this week thinking about the man I was at 23, when it all peaked for them; then the man I am now, at 53, while they’re steadying themselves for their Lazarus revival. Whatever stony seriousness Liam and Noel are channelling on the new promotional shots for their forthcoming shows, you cannot help but want to grab both by the cheeks and say “didn’t you do well,” as Peggy Gallagher once did. What a week this must’ve been for her.
Even when they broke Mancunian rock’n’roll lore, moving to London at the first whiff of success to become the toast of Primrose Hill, they remained resolutely Mancunian, absolutely of their origins, still sporting their 6876 rainwear and Clarks desert boots, still a blizzard of indefatigable Northern swag and conquer. Still rejecting the establishment instruction to know your place. The vowels never softened. They let culture come to them. Are they doing this latest round of shows for the money? Who cares. What’s Taylor Swift’s doing hers for? Bingo. Not that you’d begrudge either. When you come from nothing, you inherently understand what it is secretly to believe you deserve everything, so long as you do it the right way, on your own terms, without embarrassing your mum.
