This time around, I wore an electronic sleep-inducing band on my head to monitor the length and quality of my sleep in the days leading up to the show. I took extra vitamins. (If I can mix references here: fitter, happier, more productive, comfortable, not drinking too much.) Having built a family vacation around the Wembley gig, my wife and I planned a lightly scheduled day that would gently bring us northward, where we’d drop our kids off with friends for a sleepover before the final push to the stadium.
One thing that I’m not sure whether to write off as a UK thing or an Oasis thing: Approaching Wembley, the crowd was almost universally attired in official-issue T-shirts, sweaters, track jackets, and bucket hats, the vast majority of which were current, with the slightly more hip crowd proudly displaying their vintage gear from, say, the Knebworth gigs. If there’s any kind of cardinal rule that I hold dear regarding concert dress, it’s that you never, ever wear a band’s T-shirt to that band’s actual show, so instead I wore my T-shirt from the 2011 American tour of Beady Eye, Liam Gallagher’s post-Oasis-breakup band. This prompted a long conversation between the man seated next to me at Wembley and his wife, who didn’t seem to think I could hear them. (I could.) The gist: The man thought it extremely cool that I was wearing a Beady Eye T-shirt, followed by a very long explanation to his wife of what Beady Eye was. The man then turned to me and said, simply, “Love your top.” This constituted our only conversation for hours.
But enough! What about this historical gig?
Well…what is there to say, really? One of the biggest, best, and most legendary bands of the 20th century is back together again, having famously fallen out so long ago. The sheer magnitude of their reunion tour, aside from its cultural import, is mind-boggling to quantify, but to drop just one number: It’s estimated to contribute almost a billion pounds to the UK economy.
The bigness of it all—in virtually every way—was hard for me to take in. Here I was, seeing my favorite band in something like their home stadium. (Oasis is famously from Manchester, which they played in earlier weekends, but they found their stride and their fame in London, where both brothers still live.) Liam’s voice is as urgent, insistent, and gorgeous as it’s ever sounded, and he remains the best rock frontman of his generation and probably beyond; the band (with members from both first- and later-generation lineups) sounds amazing. The songs—written mainly by Noel, with a setlist that doesn’t deviate far from the band’s first two landmark albums, and so far hasn’t varied at all—are the kind of anthems that made all 90,000 people at Wembley jump up and down together, singing every lyric. Many people around me were weeping tears of joy, some of them seemingly throughout the concert; people (men, women, couples, families, strangers) threw their arms around each other. People threw cups of beer and sat up on their friends’ shoulders, got high, screamed, cried some more, shook their heads. My own section was somewhere on the VIP spectrum (a many-layered confection here), and was thus ever-so-vaguely subdued, but it was clear from the get-go that the whole massive sing-along was something to be embraced, not avoided or critiqued.
In the middle of it all, it occurred to me: When have I ever been around 90,000 people having this much fun? Aside from me and my OG generation, there were tens of thousands of Oasis fans at Wembley who never dreamed that they’d get to see their favorite band perform together live, and their ecstasy was apparent. Setting the bar even lower: When have 90,000 people all agreed on something, and done it so raucously and so joyfully?
And, yeah, the tube ride back was—shall we say—shambolic. It was also buoyant, with hundreds of fans singing Oasis songs together. And the weirdest thing: They weren’t even the hits. They were the quiet, serious ones, like “Half the World Away.”
Two days later, waiting for the Eurostar to Paris, I passed one of the hundreds, or thousands, of people around London wearing their Oasis merch loud and proud; this guy and I just happened to have exactly the same Adidas/Oasis sweatshirt on, in different colors. We exchanged glances, nodded, and smiled at each other ear to ear. Nothing needed to be said.
