PK in The National: Oasis revival is a chance to seize cultural zeitgeist for the better

The Gallagher brothers were once working-class heroes - but can they bring back that spirit?

Oasis, 2005, CC BY-SA 2.0, from Wikimedia

This is a fully-research-linked, mildly updated version of my paywalled column for The National, published Saturday, August 31st, 2024

SONIC Youth’s bassist, Kim Gordon, once uttered the ultimate wisdom about a band on stage: “People pay to see others believe in themselves”.

Connect that to the Oasis reunion concerts announced this week, and we may be getting somewhere in our understanding of all the furore. Because there are certainly enough people (okay, rock critics) around who want to take the resurgent Gallaghers down.

For those with their own nostalgia for the NME’s “love-it-or-shove-it” era of rock criticism, track down the late Neil Kulkarni’s epic rant on YouTube, in a clip from the Chart Music podcast (below).

“As soon as I hear even a second of Oasis’s music, I want to vomit”, Kulkarni commences, “I wish these enemies of beauty nothing but misery for the rest of their days. And that extends to all their fans”.

For Neil, Oasis “meant the proper, homophobic, mildly racist lads taking over. It meant the rejection of ‘poofiness’ stylistically, and the reassertion of a kind of ‘English Rock Defence League’, and their tiny-minded ideas about real, proper music … it just sees rock regressing into this pure, soulless pastiche.”

And those are the printable bits. Other pundits have been meticulously itemising the brothers’ history of homophobic statements, their disdain for hip-hop, their anti-left pronouncements, their emblazoning of the Union Jack across their paraphernalia.

It’s as if Oasis was a fever dream in advance of Brexit, Farage, Reform and the riots, now coming back to frame (and make megabucks from) our benighted present. Britpop was really Brexpop, in utero.

Stick the last blistered cherry on top – the fact that Noel Gallagher needs to dig himself out of a recent £20 million divorce settlement – and it’s easy to push this whole sour confection to the side.

That’s too quick, I think.

I find myself in a similar position as when I grappled with the Taylor Swift phenomenon a few months ago; coming to her art with relatively fresh ears, and hearing something impressive and complex. While all around me, voices are saying, “C’mon Pat! She’s terrible!”

I’m hardly fresh to Oasis. But a strong theme of the reaction over the last few days has been the focus on their first two albums, as the best basis for any collective epiphany that might take place in 2025 and beyond. I’m a great believer in LPs as a rounded statement of a band’s sensibility. So let’s tarry there.

For this piece, I’ve had a chat (quotes below) with the Northern-English cultural critic Alex Niven, who wrote a brilliant pamphlet on Oasis’s debut LP, Definitely Maybe. He’s a great starting point on “the case for Oasis”. Before getting onto the political stuff, Niven begins, you have to acknowledge what an “exceptional melodic songwriter” Noel Gallagher was.

“Talking about melody is one of the most difficult and unfashionable things for anyone writing about music to do – how do you ‘explain’ or ‘analyse’ what a melody means? It very quickly gets absurd.”

“But I think you can say that in the case of Oasis those songs transcended the sometimes slightly ragged arrangements to give people these big, expansive, humanist anthems— in the vein of Hey Jude, All the Young Dudes, Cosmic Dancer, Teenage Kicks and so on. “That’s a profound and rare thing”, continues Niven, “and probably far more meaningful than any of the biographical stuff or the cliches about so-called Britpop”.

But what about the Britpop/Brexpop charge? “Oasis were not the originators of either the term or the aesthetic – that was far more Blur and Suede circa 1993”, Alex replied. “As Jon Savage once put it, in its roots Britpop was an outer-suburban, middle-class fantasy of central London streetlife, with exclusively metropolitan models”.

Although they fell victim to the media stereotypes in the end (partly through moving to London and immersing themselves in the worst of celebrity Blairism), Oasis began as a far more punkish, oppositional affair”.

It would be a biographical and cultural mistake, says Niven, to confine Oasis with a Brit-celebrating identity. “They were genuinely working-class, from the North, and the children of Irish immigrants – Noel has talked a lot about how they felt more Irish than British.”

“So people on the so-called fringes of the islands – northern England, Ireland, Scotland – maybe see Oasis as ‘their’ band, whereas for all their good qualities bands like Blur and Radiohead seem like they’re from another country. The line in Live Forever – ‘we see things they’ll never see’ – seems to capture this.”

Niven’s central case is that, before coke, cash and Londinium pulled them into the sell-out zone, the early Oasis represented a kind of supremely class-conscious cultural moment.

He identifies the best early Oasis songs (Rock ‘n’ Roll Star, Cigarettes & Alcohol, Don’t Look Back In Anger, Champagne Supernova) as “channelling the sense of communitarian empowerment that had been embodied in the best working-class pop music of post-60s Britain.”

By this, Alex means “the jukebox idealism of glam rock, the expressive howl of punk, the ‘chase the sun’ euphoria of rave and, yes, the melodic humanism and collective scope of The Beatles.”

In the words of their biographer Paulo Hewitt: “The sound of a council estate singing its heart out.”

A pre-digital council estate, too. We’ve seen images of millions of fans heaving and surging at Oasis’s Knebworth and Wembley gigs.

Oasis at Knebworth from Wikimedia

They are notable for all the arms cast over the shoulders of friends and strangers, rather than held aloft with a twinkling smart-phone in hand.

We seem to be amidst a cultural moment where collective feeling, bodily co-presence, the non-virtual, is something to be yearned for. Whether that’s Kamala Harris, Glastonbury, Taylor Swift’s dominion or these coming wall-to-wall Oasis events.

Indeed, there’s a battle on for the “we” in current affairs more broadly. Political entrepreneurs on the right are trying to foment a near-civilisational level of strife, at the community level.

They’re using every digital strategy of misinformation to demonise out-groups (and confirm in-groups), to rewrite histories and realities, to connect primal fears and rages to folk devils. And to command the streets thereby.

This is where Kulkarni’s objection – that Oasis “homogenised ideas of what counted as working-class” – still has to be answered.

I don’t know who has a line into the Gallaghers’ camp. But I hope someone can get the message through that they have some responsibility, in 2025 and beyond, about the kind of “collective” their revival invokes.

Will Liam and Noel be so locked into their privilege that they send out bad cues about race, sexuality and whatever they regard as “woke” – and as a result, worsen social cohesion?

Or will Oasis take the opportunity, in the spirit of defiant togetherness that marks their early material, to raise up a better vision for angry and stressed communities across these islands?

Social oases are certainly what we seek, in this dry land of perma-austerity, incipient wartime, and under-representative democracy.

It may be doubtful that Noel and Liam – who I would occasionally see slouching around the Hampstead High Street Tesco in London – can unzip their rock ’n’ roll star bubbles and seize the zeitgeist for the better.

“We’ll find a way of chasing the sun”, these mardy lads snarled away on Slide Away. Let’s see if they try. After all, as Kim Gordon once asked: why is it that people pay to see others, again?

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