What’s the price of nostalgia? In the late summer of 2024 it was €440: the amount I paid for one ticket to see Oasis play at Croke Park, in Dublin, next weekend.
Even allowing for the great dynamic-pricing scandal, I can’t quite believe it either.
There are lots of ways to justify the expense. One, obviously, would be to say that you’re a huge fan of the band. This, in my case, would not be strictly true.
I was not a paid-up member of the Oasis fan club as a teenager. I didn’t queue through the night on Patrick Street to get tickets for their Páirc Uí Chaoimh gigs, in 1996. Nor did I spend my guitar-class time learning the chords of She’s Electric or Some Might Say.
RM Block
In fact I was scathing about a band whose frontman spent gigs with his hands clasped behind his back and had a propensity to row with his older brother. I wanted to go to gigs to hear music, not to sit through a sibling soap opera.
That Blur vs Oasis competition for the number-one spot three decades ago this month? I was on Oasis’s side, but only because Country House was a weak single from a talented band. Roll With It was better. But not by much. I didn’t identify with either group.
Yet here we are – and I’m excited about the gig in a way that the 1990s version of me, a fair-weather Oasis fan if ever there was one, could never have foreseen.
My friend who lives abroad will be home for it. Two schoolfriends are coming up from west Cork. The memes are flying with details of how Oasis have got on at the gigs they’ve played so far: debuting in Cardiff, on July 4th, before playing five nights in Manchester, five at Wembley and three in Edinburgh.
We’re planning our wardrobes. We’re days away from bucket hats, zippy tops and singalongs. Like. Favourite. Repost. Flickers of excitement. Prickles of anticipation.
We are remembering how we used to be in the 1990s. I can flash back to exactly where I was when I first picked up the tape of Definitely Maybe to play in my bedroom. I can recall the heat and jostling bodies of the first gig I attended: Suede at Cork City Hall, when Bernard Butler was in the band.
Back then we hadn’t a clue what we were doing at live events. No one did, really. I remember the shock and exhilaration of my first festival – Sunstroke, in Dalymount Park in Dublin – where, when Red Hot Chili Peppers appeared on stage, I drove forward, plunging into the crowd, losing my friends.
These were the days before barriers and proper security – before a young woman died at Smashing Pumpkins at the Point, in 1996, and nine lost their lives at Pearl Jam at Roskilde, in Denmark, in 2000.
I fell, swallowed up by bodies, my palms hitting the ground. I was saved by a man who plucked me from the ground by my scrunchie, pulled me up and dusted me off. I should have felt terrified. I felt exhilarated. All I wanted to do was crowd-surf. I was 15.
I have a theory that, although we try to be objective about music – giving it star ratings, debating the strengths of albums – much of the time the character of the band is what’s important to us. We’ll listen to a lot of dubiously good records if the band’s personalities find an echo in our own. Music divides us into tribes, or so the Arcade Fire line goes, and when you’re young, you spend a lot of time trying to find your tribe.
In the late 1990s I spent a summer in Galway teasing out OK Computer, by Radiohead, because the band meant so much to me. As soft rain fell endlessly, and my housemates groaned, I’d suggest sliding the CD into the kitchen stereo one more time, just to hear the haunting Karma Police and to figure out if repeated plays would make some of the other songs, so spiralling and complicated after the comparative ease of The Bends, make sense. One friend still recalls with a shudder those three months as akin to being the subject of a laboratory experiment.
It was the same in the early 1990s when I came across Pearl Jam and Nirvana. Pearl Jam were an easier listen. But, spiritually, Nirvana were the match. Maybe, partially and paradoxically, it was because they were an intentionally difficult proposition. With their squalls of noise, Nirvana didn’t care to make it easy for you.
Smells Like Teen Spirit and Lithium are classics now, but back then their quiet-loud dynamics were alien and thrilling. The snaking bass guitar by Krist Novoselic that introduces Come as You Are might have drawn ears, but Kurt Cobain’s protest-too-much bridge – the repeated lyric of “No, I don’t have a gun” – takes a scissors to any imagined bond. You don’t know him. And he might be lying: that’s what he’s saying.
Grunge oozed pain. Nirvana sounded oppressed, depressed, angry and sincere – emotions easy to identify with as a teenager in the Cork countryside, lamenting my distance from gigs, record shops and cultural hubs.
Lambs might be gambolling in the fields, the sun shining, but all I craved was a dark venue, some loud guitars and a frontperson who felt authentic.
There were a few Irish bands like that – The Frames and Scheer come to mind – but no scene. And there was so much repression, looking back. The 1990s were an odd time in Ireland: a Mass-going culture, a taken-as-given second-place status for women – and inequality everywhere you looked. A sense of suffocation was standard.
I’d look at MTV videos longingly every day after school and wonder when life was going to begin.
Nirvana were an antidote to the macho, paternalistic culture of the time. While British music magazines were still busying themselves objectifying women musicians and making glib comments about groupies, Cobain was upending convention, wearing skirts, kissing Novoselic on stage, and writing uneasy lyrics that reflected on rape culture.
Feminism was peeking out from the fringes of the scene. Around the same time PJ Harvey was delivering the thrilling Dry, a young Shirley Manson was emerging, and the sprite-like Björk was creating her own realm.
Occasionally women artists were even allowed on the front of a magazine, although usually only if they were together, such as Q’s hedge-your-bets cover of Harvey, Björk and Tori Amos that appeared in the summer of 1994.
The cultural moment felt deeply exciting. What I didn’t know then was that it was the beginning of the end. Even before April 1994, when Cobain died by suicide, the British music press was getting impatient for a home-grown scene, in part because it would make their working lives so much easier.
“It was difficult for British music papers to get access to those bands,” Miranda Sawyer writes in Uncommon People, her excellent book about Britpop. Uneasy with fame, US bands such as Soundgarden, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and Pearl Jam were pulling back from the media machine. How much easier, then, to simply start again and lay the foundations for a new movement.
Of course this had already happened, many times before. Every generation needs to sweep away the one that came before it: its totems, its values, even its style of jean. Music has an inbuilt obsolescence. What is cool for one generation cannot be so for the next. The point is to overthrow.
Nirvana themselves had overthrown what came before. In the early 1990s, hair-metal bands such as Guns N’ Roses and Mötley Crüe got a shock when grunge exploded into the public consciousness in the United States.
Those bands had traded in sleaze. Axl Rose had famously had sex with a woman on the studio floor while recording Appetite for Destruction, their debut album from 1987, embedding her moans into the mix on the song Rocket Queen. Their garishness was incompatible with an early MTV that played music videos 24/7 and was always hunting for the next big thing.
Now, the pop-culture dice were about to be rolled again. From hair-metal to grunge. From grunge to Britpop.
For this grunge fan, the opening salvos of Britpop registered as a rude interruption. Nirvana wanted to talk about pain. Oasis wanted to talk about cigarettes and alcohol.
It felt remarkably superficial in the wake of a movement that had dealt so purely and plainly in anguish. From flannel shirts to the (admittedly brilliant) Union Jack dress Geri Halliwell wore at the Brit Awards in 1997, Britpop was a sideways leap in culture.
From contemplating the meanings behind a Nirvana song named after pennyroyal tea, an abortifacient, I was now reading the views of a man called Bonehead.
This, bear in mind, was the pre-Spotify era, when, in order to hear an album, you first had to read about it, and then make up your mind to buy it, and then acquire the funds, and then find a record shop that stocked it. The music press had immense, unassailable power.
I put on Definitely Maybe, the debut album from Oasis, in late 1994, prepared to hate it. Yet you couldn’t deny the vigour of songs such as Supersonic and Live Forever, the stridency of Liam Gallagher, the swagger of Noel Gallagher or the pile-driving effectiveness of the record as a whole.
Oasis were a band who felt like a gang. “I need to be myself, I can’t be no one else.” Simple and as effective as a hammer blow to a nail.
The Gallagher brothers held Britpop by the scruff of the neck for a large chunk of the 1990s. They were funny, charismatic and (take your pick) either influenced by or derivative of one of the best bands the world has produced: The Beatles.
Oasis wanted to be famous at a time when the press was looking for a group who could take the heat of that elevation.
The term Britpop might have seemed a loose connecting point for the many kinds of bands who became big in Britain between 1993 and 1997, but it drove interest in all of them. The Britpop boulder was pushed up the hill by the music press until it had nowhere to go but down, knocking all in its path. It was a lesson in band economics and how business begets business.
Cumulatively, Britpop bands became a force. Elastica shot to fame in what seemed like seconds, showing everyone, for at least a little while, how it should be done. Manic Street Preachers, suffering the tragic loss of Richey Edwards, became the wise old men of the scene. And Blur kept reinventing themselves, getting more interesting with each record.
Despite myself, I accepted the terms that were offered. For every Shed Seven or Menswear record that was mis-sold to me, there was the surprising joy of that first Elastica record, the lush androgyny of Suede, the weirdness of Tricky, the irreverence of Supergrass and the appealing eccentricities of Pulp.
Eventually I got the memo. My homework diary from 1995, full of glued-together collages from magazines such as Q and Vox, tells its own story. Nirvana get a full two-page illustration on their own, my loyalty never wavering. Britpop in its entirety gets a two-pager, including a cartoon composite of what Madonna and Liam Gallagher’s baby could look like. (Budgets were big back then, and editors had way too much time on their hands.)
I felt reluctant about Britpop. That never changed. I hated the jingoism, the laddishness, the condescension to frontwomen such as Manson, of Garbage, and the blending of music and politics. No one ever needs to think of a pop song and Tony Blair at the same time.
But the great songs of Britpop remain timeless: The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony, Oasis’s Live Forever, Pulp’s Common People, Radiohead’s Creep. These are fantastic tunes, generational high points.
If Oasis in the 1990s was all about declaring fealty to one band over another, Oasis in the 2020s is about being grateful to have made it this far and still have a fist to pump in the air with your mates.
It’s about realising Oasis are embroidered into the fabric of your youth. It’s about knowing that all things must pass, so it’s good to celebrate what you have while you can.
And, of course, the scene would change again, in the blink of an eye. Parkas out, smiley faces in, as culture swerved in the direction of ecstasy-fuelled electronica.
Sometimes I fancy I can pinpoint the exact moment. It’s the summer of 1996, and we’ve all gone to see Radiohead at the Big Day Out in Galway. On the way home a traffic jam brings cars to a standstill as festival attendees line the road. My friend, who’s driving, puts on a song and opens the windows. It’s Born Slippy, by Underworld. Gig-goers dance around the car. “Shouting ‘lager, lager, lager...’”
The scene was morphing again, and this time it was Oasis who would be left out in the cold. Not that they knew it then. “You and I are gonna live forever.” No. But for a moment, as we listen to the song, we can imagine it. And that’s good enough.
Oasis play at Croke Park, in Dublin, on Saturday, August 16th, and Sunday, August 17th
