044/ Why the Oasis reform is a bad thing

Aug 25, 2024

Oh good, everyone has an opinion on the mooted Oasis reform megatour. Here’s mine. I’ve kept it short-ish.

Obviously, Noel and Liam are fucking annoying. Or hilarious geniuses, dilute to taste. Equally obviously, back in the day, Oasis was a good band with memorable tunes and a compelling lead singer, albeit performing a stodgy, old-fashioned type of rock music. The musical and socio-political output of their afterlives, taking turns in the spotlight as competing rentagobs, solo artists, amusing TV opinionati, for me has been sometimes enjoyable, but mostly opaque and smelly as a Southern Water river outflow.

None of that’s important, really, though. My dear friend Gyp pointed out on Facebook that if it makes a lot of people really happy, why knock it? And he’s right of course: if an Oasis reboot generates the kind of enthusiasm people are suggesting (ten nights at Wembley Stadium, fifteen at Heaton Park) with nowhere near the production costs of a Taylor Swift, or even a Coldplay ‘stadium event’, and crucially sparks loads joy for people, who get to see their heroes sing those songs again after so many years, surely it’s a good thing all around. If you don’t like it, don’t go, right?

I do agree with this sentiment, and admire it. But also, I have a vaguely serious take on why a British industry-in-crisis jizzing over an Oasis reboot is objectively not a Good Thing. I splurged this onto an FB thread, then realised I’d clarified it for myself, well enough to share here.

The UK live music business is throwing everything at these huge super-concerts to save its bottom line. They’re yearning so hard for this Oasis reboot it’s unseemly. But perhaps understandable, when they see how a small handful of (mostly American) superstar acts — and one particular generational outlier (Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour) — have totally out-performed the dipping market trend of a badly struggling industry.

However, in doing this, in focusing all their energy, investment and attention on those handful of mega-shows, the industry ignores and drastically under-invests in the grass-roots live music world, at exactly the moment the grass-roots most needs help. Which is dreadfully self-defeating in the longer term, since, put simply, without the grass-roots, you have no mega gigs.

Even now, they're rapidly running out of artists. The reason Oasis is so important, despite being a 1990s indie band that split many years ago, is because there are so few (almost no) other British bands/artists that can viably tour stadiums now and create that level of economic activity. I don’t think we’ve produced an act in fifteen years who can do it (yet). So focusing on that stuff to prop up the live industry is no more than a short-term sticking plaster. A myopic disaster.

Worse, crucially, it continues to educate punters to purchase just one gig per year or so, spending hundreds on tickets, treating it like an annual family holiday (it's that expensive) instead of working to bring people back around to the concept of enjoying smaller live music shows more regularly.

This is the wrong solution, at the wrong moment.

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Big Thief update —

For what it’s worth, I’m no longer struggling with Big Thief’s changes, I’m in love again. It took I guess a whole further fortnight of live footage and new songs bedding in. Here’s the incredible set closer ‘Incomprehensible’ from Green Man festival.

Greatest song-based guitar band of the twenty-first century, bar none. In the end, I didn’t need to write that nervous essay at all.

I’m afraid of getting older, that’s what I learned to say
Because society has given me the words to think that way
And the message spins and spirals: don’t get saggy don’t get grey
But the soft and lovely silvers are now falling on my shoulder
And my mother and my grandma, my great-grandmother too
They wrinkle like the river and they sweeten like the dew
And they’re silver as the rainbow scales that shimmer purple blue
How can beauty that is living be anything but true?