How Oasis Turned My Teenage Years into a Britpop Obsession

A nostalgic reflection on discovering Oasis, the electrifying chaos of their live shows, and why their music still resonates with fans new and old.

I first heard Oasis in my brother’s car when I was about eleven years old. The song was Married With Children and I liked the fact Liam said the word “shite”. I think because it was funny but also because he sounded like one of us. Not long after I heard Live Forever and everything changed. Suddenly, my Ace Of Base cassette tapes and my Two Unlimited posters seemed a bit embarrassing. I didn’t have time for pop music anymore. I dug out an old guitar from the attic and got my dad to tune it for me. I begged my parents for guitar lessons and they agreed, thinking I’d be bored within a few weeks. I wasn’t. In fact, there was a time in the mid-nineties when I could legitimately make the claim that I’d learnt the lead and rhythm to every Oasis song. My guitar teacher got so sick of Oasis that he once insisted on spending the entirety of one lesson teaching me the A-Team theme. 

I wouldn’t get the chance to see Oasis live until 2000 when they played in Bolton at what used to be called the Reebok Stadium. I saw them again a couple of years later but that doesn’t count because I had the flu and I was so dosed up on Benylin and Red Stripe that I don’t remember any of it. It always kind of irked me that I missed out on being able to say I saw them in the nineties by just one year. But as time has passed, being able to say that I saw Oasis at all has become a monumental proclamation. Today, Oasis have a whole legion of fans who have never had the chance. Terrifyingly (for me at least) some of them weren’t even born when Oasis broke up in 2009. 

In hindsight, 2000 wasn’t a bad time to see them. The nineties were fresh in our memories, we’d all survived the Millennium Bug, there was a Euro Championship to get excited about, they had a new album out and Liam still had his voice (just). I was only sixteen at the time and this was my first gig, sans parents. I went with one of my schoolmates, we got a coach by ourselves, we were smashing the walls of childhood down and swaggering heroically into adulthood, it was all very exciting. Before the gig, we went into a record shop in Bolton and I saw that a band called Coldplay were at number one in the album charts. I’d never heard of them. What a time to be alive. 

The gig itself was amazing and terrifying in equal proportion. Noel once said Oasis fans were nutters and if he wasn’t in the band he wouldn’t dare attend any of their concerts, and I understand why. If you imagine about 20,000 piss-heads down at your local boozer after a free bar has just been declared then you get the idea.  

But despite the constant threat of being duffed up, it was an incredible gig. I remember the exhilarating surge of the crowd during Cigarettes and Alcohol, the rousing din of noise as thousands of people sang along to Acquiesce and most exciting of all, the otherworldly experience of hearing the Live Forever solo and my teenage mind not being able to comprehend that what I was hearing was actually coming from Noel’s own guitar. I also remember a glass bottle sailing over our heads and smashing in front of us, and a girl getting hit in the face by a flying bottle of piss. A shirtless maniac also threatened to kill me if I bumped into him again, which put a bit of a dampener on the encore but in the end none of this mattered. Champagne Supernova was playing, the sun was setting, Liam was singing like his life depended on it and so were we.   

These days it’s hard to explain just how big Oasis were. Others might sell more albums and break more records but Oasis were a cultural phenomenon like nothing I’ve experienced before or since. During Noel’s famed purple patch, it seemed he couldn’t write a bad song even if he tried. Love him or loathe him there’s no denying he knew his way around a big rousing chorus. Bob Dylan once said that no one writes songs, they already exist, you just need to know how to find them and somehow during the nineties, Noel had tapped into a goldmine. They famously opened their 1996 Maine Road gigs with two B-Sides, (Swamp Song and Acquiesce) find me another artist who can make that claim and I’ll eat my bucket hat. The Oasis phenomenon was undeniably huge and was arguably the last time the biggest-selling artist in the world was also the best. And that really meant something, I’m not sure what, but it really did.

The naysayers will bemoan this reunion. You’ll hear the usual prattle about ripping off the Beatles, Liam and Noel being arrogant tossers and Blur being much better. But that’s kind of the point. I always enjoyed the fact Oasis pissed people off, it’s all part of the appeal. Back in 1996, my dad scoffed when he first heard the Lennon-inspired intro to Don’t Look Back in Anger, accusing Noel of not having any original ideas. But I couldn’t have cared less. If you ask me, anyone who picked up a guitar after the sixties ripped off the Beatles in one way or another. The difference is, Oasis wore their influences so brazenly and did it so successfully. Sixteen-year-old me couldn’t help but admire it. They didn’t care if they pissed your mum and dad off, or anyone else for that matter. So, the next time you hear Jeff down at the Frog and Parrot saying that Oasis were just ripping off the Beatles, just ask him, if it’s so easy why he isn’t doing it? We were a generation that had grown sick of hearing how brilliant the sixties were and how shite everything else was. With Oasis, and to a larger extent Britpop, we finally had something that belonged to us and that’s all that mattered. Incidentally, my dad has since told me Don’t Look Back in Anger is his second favourite Oasis song, after Lyla, bizarrely. 

Some might say (see what I did there) that it’s all for money, which to be fair it probably is. But who can blame them? We’d all happily get out of bed for £50 million quid to go and do something we love. At the end of the day, if you get it, you get it and if you don’t, you don’t. And I imagine, come summer next year when the Gallagher brothers finally share a stage again, it’ll be glaringly obvious that there are a fair few people out there, new fans and old, who still absolutely get it.