In the peculiar counterfactual 2019 romcom Yesterday, the Beatles suddenly and mysteriously vanish from history, remembered by just one man. In the interests of a cheap joke, writer Richard Curtis improbably suggests that every band in the world would still exist in the Beatles’ absence, bar one: Oasis.
But what about a world without Oasis? As the Gallaghers themselves would admit, they weren’t innovators like the Beatles, whose every move changed the course of popular music. If Noel had never joined Liam’s band at the end of 1991, Creation Records might well have gone bust, Manchester City would have had less pop cachet, and The Royle Family would have needed a different theme tune, but music wouldn’t have sounded significantly different. Today, new bands are more likely to cite the spiky intelligence of Radiohead or the Smiths than Oasis’s broad strokes, and very few younger than Arctic Monkeys expects to fill stadiums.
