A different kind of Oasis

Nothing intimidates me because I grew up listening to Oasis. I’m not afraid because I saw two brothers unafraid. Liam and Noel Gallagher aren’t scared of anything. I choked up listening to ‘Live Forever’ a month ago, while I was walking down the street one morning. It begins, famously with Liam’s Mancunian snarl: “Maybe, I don’t really wanna know, how your garden grows, cos I just wanna fly.” In other words, I’m not interested in you chatting nothing about the weather and your hydrangeas, I want to live in the moment and soar above the skies. He sings it with the vision of a lad who doesn’t accept a mediocre life; who dares to win, to escape the council estates and the 9-5. When I hear ‘Live Forever’, I hear the teenage Liam. A young geezer desperate to escape. Cloying to make it, and not wind up a plumber or a failed football player.

“We’ll see things they’ll never see” is my favorite Oasis lyric. Top three at least. It speaks to the beauty of the perpetual now; the moments you want to bottle and keep forever; the specialness of the things you only share with a handful of people, or one person, in your world. The little bits everyone witnesses, but to you and yours feel like cinema. Larger than life. Do you know how brave it is to write a line like that? To sing it to millions of people? Coming from nothing, aspiring to everything? To many it’s karaoke. To Liam, it’s scripture. When he sings it, he’s actualizing it for himself, and his brother, and for everyone who witnesses it, and to whom it means its very own thing. It’s brave. I don’t have more words for it than that.

The second time I interviewed Liam he said his favorite line of the Oasis catalogue is “I need to be myself, I can’t be no one else.” (‘Supersonic’). I understand why that’s his choice. That’s the bravey I’m talking about in this piece. The path is laid out for you. It’s unavoidable. You have to embrace it. Oasis were unstoppable. Nothing could have curbed their rise, their impression, their comeback. Nothing. Not even a 20-year stupid argument that only two brothers could hold over one another. No. In the end love wins. Believe it.

I was going to come here today and tell you how my time was at Oasis’s first London stop of this return tour; a moment millions have been waiting for, for decades. Certainly me. I’ve dreamed of it. But I’m not here to tell you what it was like because I didn’t go in the end. I wasn’t supposed to. I had something else to do. Something I want to keep for just me. I have one foot in the present and one in the future. Oasis is the glory of my past. Nostalgia. Joy. All of it. I’d have had a ball. It’s not what I needed today. I will celebrate some other time. Right now, I am respecting the process of time and space. I’m not afraid. I asked myself what Liam would do, and I did that. Cheers to you, our kid.

You don’t manually play ‘Wonderwall’. At least I don’t. I never elect to put that song on the stereo. It’s so in the air, there’s a lifelong guarantee it’ll always come on. However, I was in the middle of absolutely nowhere yesterday, driving through the mountainous backbone of vast America, and I played it intently. I listened to it over and again. If I’m listening to Oasis, I’m listening to Definitely, Maybe. I’m putting on ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’. I’m running and puffing my chest out to ‘D’You Know What I Mean?’ (“I ain’t good looking but I’m someone’s child”). I’m never searching for fucking ‘Wonderwall’ on Spotify. I’m skipping it. No need. I’ll hear that in the shops, on the radio, in the pub. Americans think Ryan Adams did the best version of ‘Wonderwall’. I’ll just say this: Americans deserve some of the regular piss-taking we British people dole out.

“The radio is playing all the usual
And what’s a wonderwall anyway?”

- Travis, ‘Writing To Reach You’

I know what a wonderwall is. I will only ever know one. A wonderwall is the classic hero, with the hero arc. The one the world dared to annihilate but couldn’t. Who has to make their way back in the wilderness, lost, alone, defiant.

“And all the roads that lead you there are winding
And all the lights that light the way are blinding”

A wonderwall is the evolution of Icarus, taking to the skies again, with no fear of the wings burning. A wonderwall is a person possessed of the courage that lies dormant only to be quietly awakened and reborn. A wonderwall is Medusa’s revenge, turning enemies to stone with a power re-tooled from curse to control. A wonderwall is the daredevil, the giant, the god and/or goddess, standing up because they couldn’t be knocked out.

“I don’t believe that anybody feels the way I do about you now.”

The lyrics of Oasis are always ridiculed. Whenever I’ve spoken to Liam or Noel they say the same thing. They mean different things to different people so there’s no need to explain. Nobody serious will try to unpack “slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball” (‘Champagne Supernova’), but the ocean spray coming in at the beginning of that epic ballad, and the reverberating, infinity-reaching guitar solos make the words redundant. As fans say: it’s “biblical”. Ha. I guess there is something religious, something Godlike, to the melodies and the drum rolls you cannot verbalize when the hairs on your arms stand tall. The one on ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ before the chorus’s refrain comes back: “So Sally can wait…” It’s pure romance, and elevated emotion. There’s comedy. There’s heartache. There’s rebirth. There’s war. There’s peace. There’s brotherhood. It’s sensational. It’s the meat of life. No fat. A genius born from bricks and mortar. I don’t think it’s accidental either. Oasis really care more than you could ever imagine. At NME their rhythm guitarist Bonehead would come in and spend hours in the archive closet, pouring over their history. The greatest fan of the band he felt luckier than anything to be in. They care. They’re intentional. They built it from scratch. They’re resurrecting it again this summer so that people can heal and sing songs of past times in unison. We should all embrace it. I am going to try at a date further down the line.

There are a lot of saddos online right now, filling up my mentions with puerile hatred. Especially in this last week, since my music writing resurfaced. They’re like hyenas at a garbage dump. They are so angry that I’m writing about music again. I’m not writing this for you, freaks. I’m doing it for me. You wankers had six years to fill the void. Don’t waste your energy trying to come for me. You won’t kill me. You won’t even scratch me. I’m not afraid of you. I’m not intimidated. I’ll do whatever the fuck I want. Right, Liam? D’you know what I mean?