It only felt truly real when Liam and Noel Gallagher strode out on stage together in Cardiff hand-in-hand, raising them aloft as one to a crowd that had waited 16 years for this moment. “It’s good to be back,” Liam sang a few minutes later, opening a gig many thought would never happen with “Hello.”
Ask people over the last year and they’ll tell you a hundred different reasons why Oasis are back together. “Liam and Noel have finally buried the hatchet!” “The paycheck was just too good to refuse!” “They’re doing it for their mum!” Come out of Cardiff Central train station on this muggy summer night though, and it felt like no other reason could exist above reuniting for the millions upon millions of fans who who built their lives on this band. “Was it worth the £40,000 you paid for the ticket?” Liam said, grinning, halfway through the show, not even waiting around for the affirmative reply.
The show didn’t need any extra hype, but hosting it at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium on a Friday night certainly helped. An outlier in the U.K. stadium circuit, the venue sits slap bang in the middle of the Welsh capital, within a five-minute walk of the train station and with countless pubs and bars along that route.
“Cardiff’s bouncing already!” came a report over 24 hours before the gig, and there were merch pop-ups, murals made entirely from bucket hats and more in the bustling streets around the stadium. It felt more like FA Cup Final day than a gig, such is the jubilant, raucous atmosphere around the city. Once inside, it also helped that the stadium had a retractable roof which, when closed like it was tonight, made this feel more like a comparatively intimate arena show than a stadium gig.
All this led to a thick, fervent energy in the stadium by the time Oasis took the stage just after 8 p.m. and launched into the opening song from (What’s the Story) Morning Glory. Questions around set-lists, the band line-up (poor Zak Starkey isn’t here, on top of being fired multiple times from The Who this year), murky phone recordings of rehearsals in London warehouses and beyond swirled around ahead of the tour opener, but it all melted into insignificance once the ear-splitting singalongs began.
The band sound, to use Liam’s favorite phrase, absolutely biblical. Within half an hour, we’re through “Acquiesce, “Morning Glory,” “Supersonic” and “Cigarettes & Alcohol” at tremendous volume. Oasis’ arsenal of generation-defining hits is hardly a secret, but when confronted with them one after another like this, it was truly overwhelming and didn’t let up for over two hours.
Noel Gallagher
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A mid-set couplet from Noel — “Half the World Away” and “Little By Little” — surprisingly got some of the biggest singalongs of the night, while Liam sang “Slide Away” and “Whatever” with impassioned energy. There was also time for a little poignancy, when the shirt of late Liverpool striker Diogo Jota, killed in a car crash yesterday, came on screen for the final bars of “Live Forever.”
British music’s greatest sitcom took a pause on a particularly apt note in 2009, when Noel left the band in a blaze of glory before a gig at Paris’ Rock en Seine festival. The subsequent 16 years have been a swirl of solo projects, reunion rumors and consistently entertaining mud-slinging between the brothers. Since the tour was actually announced, fans speculated that the press images shared of the pair were actually composites, and that Liam and Noel hadn’t met face-to-face once in the process of agreeing to reunite. When tickets went on sale, it sparked a global conversation about ‘dynamic pricing’ that was investigated by the UK government. So far, so dramatic. Or as Liam put it before closing the show with “Champagne Supernova”: “We’re hard work, I know.”
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Compared to the build-up, the gig itself was largely drama-free. They played the hits superbly, backed by a band on top form, and look suitably nonplussed while doing it. The brothers took up their old roles — Liam was the rabble rouser, asking fans to do the Poznan dance of his beloved Manchester City during “Cigarettes & Alcohol” while Noel was his composed sidekick — as if they never left.
The symbolic arm-raising at the start of the gig was bookended by a truly enormous cheer when the brothers embraced, slightly gingerly, before leaving the stage. Largely though, they let the tunes do the talking, which feels fitting. Through all the scuffles and spats, the High Flying Birds and Beady Eyes, these generation-defining anthems are what have always remained, and will continue to do so long after Cardiff got one of its best nights out in history.
Set List
“Fuckin’ in the Bushes” (tape)
“Hello”
“Acquiesce”
“Morning Glory”
“Some Might Say”
“Bring It on Down”
“Cigarettes & Alcohol”
“Fade Away”
“Supersonic”
“Roll With It”
“Talk Tonight”
“Half the World Away”
“Little By Little”
“D’You Know What I Mean?”
“Stand By Me”
“Cast No Shadow”
“Slide Away”
“Whatever”
“Rock ‘n’ Roll Star”
Encore
“The Masterplan”
“Don’t Look Back In Anger”
“Wonderwall”
“Champagne Supernova”
This story was originally published on Rolling Stone UK