The Dublin Oasis pop-up store opened its doors on August 4th in anticipation of the band’s revival concerts in Croke Park.
Middle-aged fans queued outside the Stephen’s Green venue with more tenacity than a waiting list for the local naíonra.
Inside, the mannequins wore bucket hats and Adidas T-shirts, boot cut jeans and retro sportswear.
There are framed reissues of original posters that were once tacked to teenage bedroom walls, denim jackets, album T-shirts, vinyl editions and an array of uninspired Christmas presents like jigsaws of Noel’s face.
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The only future-facing souvenirs were the yeti cups.
It’s 1995. I’m eleven. What’s the Story (Morning Glory) has just been released. My brother Darragh is 20 and works as a Heineken rep and so my siblings and I are usually dressed in matching promotional T-shirts like The Family Von Trapp.
My brother Ross is 17 and spends his Saturdays playing music on the streets of Kilkenny. When he’s not busking, he jams with other guitar wielding boys in his attic bedroom. With a patience that’s rare in teenage brothers, he sometimes lets me sit in and sing harmonies. They played The Beatles, Leonard Cohen, Counting Crows and Oasis.
I’m not going to the Oasis revival concerts. But I’d give anything to go back to that attic for an afternoon and sing Half the World Away.
And really, isn’t this what the pop-up store promises? Not that you can buy a limited T-shirt or a floppy hat, but that you can buy your way back to a more hopeful, youthful time.
This kind of nostalgia has always been a feature of how we experience music. The historian Jonathan Sterne claims that since the dawn of recorded sound we’ve treated music as a kind of time capsule – a particular sonic texture can bring us back to a moment we’ve otherwise lost.
Even today, adding analogue hiss or crackle to digital tracks isn’t just a retro affectation; it’s an attempt to summon the grain of another time. Combined with what critics like Simon Reynolds have called Retromania and Mark Fisher Hauntology – a cultural condition where future-making feels impossible – what brands like Oasis are selling isn’t nostalgia for its own sake so much as a temporal mood: the promise that you can reinhabit a specific past with your senses, not just your memory.
In 1997, New Labour ended 17 years of Conservative government in the UK, abandoning class struggle for a more PR-friendly centrism. By the time Tony Blair’s government swept to power, Oasis was already the unofficial soundtrack to a resurgent national confidence branded as “Cool Britannia”. (Noel Gallagher famously attended a party at No 10 Downing Street in 1997. Liam refused the invitation.)
As Bridget Jones put it: “It is perfectly obvious that [New] Labour stands for sharing, kindness, gays, single mothers and Nelson Mandela as opposed to braying bossy men having affairs with everyone shag-shag-shag left right and centre”.
It was a hopeful, inclusive politics in other words – but one without much ideological weight.
While the UK economy was slowly recovering from a recession, inequality was still an issue, particularly in post-industrial cities like the band’s native Manchester. Back home, meanwhile, the Celtic Tiger was in full voice, as GDP exceeded 5 per cent and Ireland joined the Eurozone convergence process.
Growth was largely concentrated in Dublin with poorer, rural areas left behind. Social housing declined and house prices soared as the Irish State moved to market-based solutions.
[ Being Irish isn’t what made Oasis great, but being the sons of emigrants helpedOpens in new window ]
The Sunday pub culture and council flats of Oasis music, then, spoke to a class identity that was at once newly visible and left behind by mainstream politics, both here and across the Irish Sea. The Gallaghers’ lyrics walk a fine line between aspiration and resignation: “Is it worth the aggravation / to find yourself a job when there’s nothing worth working for?” “We want more”. But also, “Nothing ever changes”.
If 2024’s Brat Summer was a kind of spectral reanimation of 90s girl power, then the summer of Oasis might be haunted by the ghosts of 90s optimism, where a pair of brothers from working-class Manchester could make it big. In our present, where class mobility is almost impossible and heterosexual masculinity is a mess, maybe this is the time that many fans would like to return to.
We’re not just buying things – we’re buying our way back to a moment in time. Don’t get this T-shirt because it’s vintage; get it and feel like you did when it was new.
[ Oasis kick off reunion tour with triumphant, nostalgic gigOpens in new window ]
This kind of nostalgia as a cultural holding pattern promises to return us to ourselves as we once were. There are relaunched HB ice-creams (although the Golly Bar is definitely best forgotten). McDonald’s, meanwhile, is bringing out an adult Happy Meal on August 12th that revives the familiar figures from our youth – the Hamburglar, Grimace – and features a collectable tin.
As Simon Reynolds put it in Retromania, our cultural moment is defined by “pop culture’s addiction to its own past”. We’re stuck in loops of revivals, reissues, reunion tours, and retro aesthetics.
Is this a symptom of cultural stagnation? Are we nostalgic because the future feels foreclosed, creatively, politically and economically? This might be precisely what makes spaces like the Oasis pop-up feel so alluring – they give us the illusion of time travel when we’ve lost hope in forward momentum.
The Oasis store doesn’t just sell us memories; it offers a slice of the past, promising not only to recall how things were, but how we felt when we believed that good things were yet to come.
