The countdown continues to Oasis’ first performance in Ireland since 2009, when they play two gigs in Dublin’s Croke Park this weekend as part of their reunion tour.
The band’s front men, brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher, though originally from Manchester have famously strong Irish links – both parents were born in Ireland. When the tickets went on sale last September for the Dublin gigs they sold out within five hours, reflecting the huge fan base the band enjoys here.
The Irish Times asked readers to share their memories of attending previous Oasis concerts.
Hugh McCabe, Declan O’Leary and Peter Clarke saw Oasis’s first ever concert in Dublin at the, now demolished, Tivoli Theatre on Francis Street in Dublin on Saturday, September 3rd, 1994. Tickets cost £6.75 and doors for the gig opened at 11pm.
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The band’s first album, Definitely Maybe, had been released only five days before, on August 29th, 1994, but Hugh McCabe recalled that people, like himself, who “had their ear to the ground and were into music” knew that Oasis were up-and-coming as they had heard the singles the band put out before releasing their first album.
Five months before Oasis’s first concert in Ireland Kurt Cobain had died, and for Declan O’Leary Oasis’s music filled the void that Cobain’s death had left.
“From the moment their first single was released, I knew I had to see them live. I was 20 and went to the concert at the Tivoli with some mates. We were right at the front and the concert was mayhem.”
After the gig O’Leary got into a confrontation with Evan Dando, frontman of the American rock band Lemonheads, who had also attended the concert and was asked by a bouncer to leave the venue. However, that did not deter O’Leary from going to see Oasis again in 1997 at Slane Castle.
McCabe also had a brush with the stars at Oasis’s first concert: “A short while before Oasis took to the stage I spotted this tall guy in a parka making his way through the crowd. He was full of attitude and seemed to exude disdain for all those around him. Twenty minutes later I saw the man again. This time he was up on stage behind the mic.”
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Peter Clarke went to see the band after watching them perform on Top of the Pops a few weeks prior and described the concert at Tivoli Theatre as “a great gig”.
Twenty-four years later he would be out on a run in West London when he accidentally bumped into Noel Gallagher. “I asked him for a selfie and he took one look at me and said no – he couldn’t have been more dismissive if he tried. It was the ultimate Oasis experience.”
Two years later, in March 1996, Niall Holohan had just turned 16 and was desperate to see Oasis. “When money was tight but one of my favourite bands were in town, my dad would drive us over to the venue so we could sit in the car outside and listen to the concert. That evening, however, my dad said he needed the toilet and disappeared for about 20 minutes before returning with a ticket for me.”
Seeing Oasis live, “changed everything” for Holohan, who was so inspired that after the concert he changed his “clothes, hair and walk. I just remember thinking this is my thing”.
Six months later, in August 1996, Karen Hines was glued to her family’s landline phone, continuously pressing redial in a frantic attempt to secure tickets for their concert at Knebworth House in England. “Then I heard my mate’s car driving up the street, she told me she’d got them and we were hugging and screaming.”
Hines and her friend made their way there without a plan, nowhere to stay and no firm idea of how to get there. They ended up sleeping in Hines’s friend’s car, but it was all worth it. It was “unbelievable. The Bootleg Beatles played Hey Jude, which was the Number 1 song when I was born”.
Four days later Oasis performed two gigs in Cork at Pairc Uí Chaoimh. Elaine was 17 and queued up overnight outside HMV on Patrick’s Street in the city. “Later in the night, revellers from some of the local nightclubs gatecrashed the line and added to the party atmosphere. Sustained by a late-night delivery of Jackie Lennox’s famous chips, we persevered, and were duly rewarded early the next morning.”
She remembers Oasis’s first gig at Parc Uí Chaoimh as having a “lovely local feel. All throughout the evening I was bumping into people I knew from school, cousins of mine and others from the local community”.
In August 1996 Gray Meyler was 13 and “absolutely obsessed with the band, I was even trying to grow my hair out like them, which got a lot of slagging at my all-boys school in Wexford”.
Meyler got the bus from Wexford to Cork. Everyone on the bus was clearly headed to Oasis and “holding their breath with excitement”. Oasis’s second gig at Parc Uí Chaoimh lived up to Meyler’s expectations as he recalls it being “incredible. Everyone was standing up on the wooden benches in the stadium jumping up and down the whole way through the set”.
“The day made such an impression on me that I ended up moving to Cork at 17 to attend university, even though everyone from where I grew up went to university in Dublin or Waterford. It’s been a quarter of a century and I’m still there.”
A later concert left a similarly big impression on Adrian Collins when he went to see Oasis perform live at Marlay Park in July 2005. He describes himself as a “massive fan” but didn’t expect it would be too different from the two Oasis gigs he had been to before.
“When Oasis started the drum into their song Live Forever, Liam and Noel stood back and watched the crowd sing almost the entire song with just the drums accompanying them. You could feel an indefinable connection between Oasis and the crowd. It’s a day I’ll never forget.”
Eoin Kelly was at Oasis’s last concert in Ireland at Slane Castle, Co Meath, in July 2009. While in retrospect it was a great concert to have attended, Kelly found the band’s performance to be “formulaic and workmanlike”.
Oasis’s disappointing last performance in Ireland did not put Darren Devereux off getting tickets for one of this weekend’s gigs. His last Oasis concert was in July 2000 at Lansdowne Road (now the Aviva Stadium). He remembers a member of the crowd “scaling the control tower of the old stadium and plonking himself on the canopy to watch the gig. The show had to be stopped and I remember Liam shouting something to encourage him down”.
“It was a brilliant and perfect day in my young life.”
Today Devereux is in his 40s and has three young children but “has never been more excited for anything” in his life than he is about seeing Oasis this weekend. He has already laid out the outfit he plans to wear.
