I couldn’t be more equivocal about Oasis reforming, because I am an Oasis agnostic. I’m neither a diehard fan: the kind of Weller-haired, Wallabee-shod “parka monkey”, as Noel Gallagher put it, for whom it’s an article of faith that they were the greatest band of their era and that British rock music has never seen anything remotely as exciting since. Nor am I the kind of implacable naysayer who will tell you, apparently in all seriousness, that their inherent musical conservatism and their penchant for the union jack somehow presaged Brexit. I think Oasis’s first two albums and the accompanying singles and B-sides were fantastic. Indeed, if anything, I think their debut Definitely Maybe sounds more potent now than it did in 1994.
Back then, it felt like a rush of sneering vocals, distorted guitars that were equal parts Slade and the Sex Pistols circa Never Mind the Bollocks and tunes that seemed undeniable and immediately familiar, sometimes because you did actually already know them. Now, I find it weirdly moving. The cocktail of oddly wistful, melancholy lyrics and melodies and the seething, barely contained frustration and aggression in their delivery sounds like a perfect evocation of a desire for escape, for something better than the circumstances in which the songs’ narrators find themselves, undercut by uncertainty: they sound like songs about loudly expressed big plans made by people unsure whether they have the wherewithal to pull them off. I also suspect a certain nostalgia has potentiated my view of (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?’s epic closer Champagne Supernova. Nearly 30 years later, it sounds like the 90s equivalent of the rash of celebratory, elegiac songs that documented the waning of the glam rock era – Mott The Hoople’s Saturday Gigs, T Rex’s Teenage Dream, Slade’s How Does It Feel – which seems pretty exalted company to keep.
